Motivation Extensibility story for unified way to manage getting in and out of Chandler.

Data Stores

Protocol	Data types
IMAP POP SMTP	Personal email Mailing lists SPAM Attachments
Import Export	iCalendar vCards Files
Subscribe Publish	Anything in Chandler
Jabber IRC AIM Yahoo MSN	Discussions Conversations File transfers
RSS XML RPC	Media: Flickr, Podcasts, Delicious, Blogs, News Amazon, eBay Google maps
Skype VoIP SIP	Dicussions Conversations File transfers
Directory Services	Contacts

Use cases (more to come)

• Ted is working on a project with a small group of people. He has been tasked with collecting research for the project. He looks around on the internet and finds a bunch of feeds and mailing lists that he thinks are germane to the project his group is working on. He collects all of these inputs into a single Project collection and then shares it out to his working group.
• Esther publishes office calendar to both Cosmo and .Mac

Workflows: Setting up "Accounts"

• Create new "account" (I say "account" in quotes because RSS and File Import/Export would have accounts as well. An account is any mechanism for getting data in/out of Chandler.)
• Designate "account" type: Mail, Import/Export, Sharing, IM, RSS, Web Services, Voice, Directory Services
• Fill in account settings
• Create new queue (if applicable)

• Perhaps the stuff below can be segregated out and handled elsewhere in the UI
• Define queue (ie. keywords, tags, users)
• Designate destinations in Chandler (Stamping, Collections, Spheres or Mine/Not-mine)
• accounts.png:
  

Workflows: Setting up "Queues"

• Create new input or output queue (A queue is a pipe of in or outbound data. ie. an RSS URL, an IMAP folder. A single account can have multiple queues.)
• Designate "queue" type
• Select account from account list OR
• Define new account
• Define queue (ie. keywords, tags, users)
• Designate destinations in Chandler (Stamping, Collections, Spheres or Mine/Not-mine)
• queues.png:
  

Tabbed version of Dialog

• Sub-divided into different types of data pipes with the ability to see all of them at once as well
• accountswithtabs.png:
  

Workflows: Managing collection inputs

• Select collection
• View "queue" inputs in a separate pane
• View "queue" status (equivalent to sharing status)
• View items from just that "queue"

Workflows: Managing collection outputs

• Publish/Upload data
• Select publish/upload mechanism (ie. sharing, publish to blog, etc)
• Enter email addresses for people you want to ping about the publish
• Define access controls for each person (for sharing access)
• Edit title of publish
• Write note
• Click Publish/Send/Upload
• View "queue" outputs in a separate pane

(Looking at this, it feels like overkill to manager the input/output queues in both the 'Accounts' manager as well as in the main UI. OTOH, it might be nice to be able to organize it by collection AND organize it by account.)

• inputsoutputs.png:
  

Assumptions

• Users can suck data into collections from as many sources as they want (email, RSS, sharing, file import, etc)
• Users can push data out to as many sources as they want (RSS, sharing, file export, etc)
• There will also need to be a separate pane of collection ouputs

Subscribe/Publish dialogs

• Can File import/export be added to this as well? Morgen says yes. Provide a checkbox option to only do it once.
• subscribepublish.png:
  

Set up workflows

• Subscribing and Publishing one "queue" at a time: use subscribe/publish dialogs
• Set up a bunch of queues at once: use the Accounts dialog

Open issues

• How do we deal with menu items? Do we include import/export as a part of subscribe and publish? or do we keep them as separate entities under the File menu, where people are used to them?
• Keep subscribe and publish in the Collections menu?
• Keep Accounts as Accounts