FilteredShares: SImplified proposal

Use cases

1. I want to share just My Team meetings with my co-workers. I go to my Work collection and search for items that contain references to My Team
2. I want to share my Work calendar

User mental model Proposal

• Segment filtered shares.
• Scenario 1 should be modeled as a separate collection
• Scenario 2 should be modeled as sharing the Calendar portion of my Work collection OR sharing my Work calendar.

• Why?
• The user in Scenario 1 understands about queries and rules. Creating a separate rule-based collection to share is not too steep of a learning curve for this user.
• Scenario 2 is such a commonplace use case, beginner users with no understanding of rules will try to do it. We don't want to force users to have to understand and manage a separate rule based collection just to share a Calendar.
• From the implementation standpoint, both scenarios are the same. However, from a user mental model standpoint, they're completely different. Most users won't see the Kind filters as filters. Instead, the Kind filters are physical destinations, collections in their own right. The Work calendar isn't an intersection of Work collection items with the Calendar Kind filter. The Work Calendar is a permanent, entity.
  • In Scenario 1, "Items that contain references to My Team*" modifies Work collection: Show me "Items that contain references to *My Team in my Work collection."
  • In Scenario 2, Work modifies Calendar. The user doesn't think: "Calendar items in my Work collection." They think: "My Work Calendar"

• Implementation
• Under the hood, both scenarios could be modeled in the same way?
• However the user never sees the separate rule-based collection created in Scenario 2.
• [OI^?] What leaky abstraction issues does this cause?

• Filtered_Sharing.gif:
  

Symmetrical v. Asymmetrical Filtered Shares

• Sharing a Kind-filtered collection is asymmetrical
• Kind-filter settings for a shared collection are asymmetric.
• User A can limit their contribution to the share to just calendar items.
• However, user B can share tasks items as well if they choose.
• Each sharer can pick and choose what they want to contribute to the pot.
• Asymmetrical_Kind_filters.gif:
  

• Simpler model: Sharing a Kind-filtered collection is symmetrical
• Kind-filter settings are universal for all sharing participants
• [OI^?] Can Sharees with read / write access change the Kind-filter settings? Or is this a use case for adding an administrative access privilege level?
• Symmetrical_Kind_filters.gif:
  

Discussion of alternative workflows

Use case

Elaine creates two collections Home and Work.

She populates them with rules:

• All messages to my hotmail address go to Home.
• All message to company.com go to Work.

Over time, Elaine gets many tasks and calendar invitations to company.com and she stamps many messages to her hotmail address as calendar invitations and tasks.

Over time, her Home and Work collections fill up with calendar events and tasks.

Elaine would like to share her Home calendar with her husband and her Work calendar with her co-worker, but she doesn't want to share the message and task portions of her Home and Work collections.

Option 1: Elaine creates separate Home and Work calendar collections to share with her husband and co-worker respectively.

Sharing initiation workflow:

1. Click on the Calendar kind filter
2. Select the Work collection
3. Save this filtered, ephemeral collection as a rule-based named collection OR
4. Click Share in the toolbar to auto-save and initiate the Sharing workflow in one gesture

Impact on Organize workflow:

1. Elaine receives a calendar invitation to her company.com email address and the item is automatically filtered into her Work collection
2. As a result of the rule on the Work calendar collection, calendar messages sent to her company.com email address are automatically added to
3. However, the rule is asymmetrical. if Elaine adds a new calendar event manually to her Work calendar collection (which will be tempting to do if it sits as a nother collection in the Sidebar), it will not be automatically added to her Work collection. Her two ways of seeing her Work calendar will get out of sync unless...
   • Elaine adds a rule to her Work collection to add all Work calendar items.
   • [OI^?] There is concern that this extra step is not obvious and that users will get themselves into trouble trying to maintain to separate but similar entities: Work collection filtered by the Calendar kind filter AND the Work calendar collection

Option 2: Elaine can share just the calendar portion of her Home and Work collections

Sharing initiation workflow:

1. Click on the Calendar kind filter
2. Selects the Work collection
3. Clicks Share this in the Toolbar
   • • Calendar is selected as the portion of this collection to be Shared in the collection detail view
     • Elaine can also share the Mailbox, Taskpad and Notepad portions as well
     • Elaine can only share the Work collection or a portion of the Work collection once. She can create separate Shares with different ACLs for each portion of the Work collection.
4. Adds her husband as a subscriber
5. Clicks send to send out an sharing invitation to her husband.
6. Repeat similar workflow to share the Work calendar

Impact on Organize workflow:

1. Elaine receives a calendar invitation to her company.com email address and the item is automatically filtered into her Work collection.
2. Her co-worker automatically gets to see the invite on the shared calendar portion of the Work collection.

Option 3: Extra credit: What if Elaine wants to share both calendar and task portions of her Home and Work collections with her assistant?

1. Elaine can multi-select and initiate shares for all four collections simultaneously from the "same" detail view. (This depends on whether or not we will have this feature for items.)
   • Home calendar
   • Work calendar
   • Home taskpad
   • Work taskpad

Option 4: Compromise workflow

Differentiating between collections created for Sharing v. collections created for Organization.

This is a proposal for how to generally solve the problem of Sharing subsets of collections. Users don't want to maintain these subsets as first-class collections. They were created purely for Sharing purposes, not for their own Organizational.

We also want to get these Sharing collections out of the users face so that they aren't tempted to work with them directly thereby getting themselves into the kind of trouble described in Option 1.

We could treat Kind based sub-collections in the same way. (Or as in Option 2, we can special case them, make them a level of use lower than Sharing collections since they will probably me much more common than generic sub-collections.)

1. Click on Calendar
2. Click on Home collection
3. Click Share in the toolbar

Chandler creates a new collection with a rule attached to it that says: This collection is an intersection of Calendar kind items from the Home collection.

The newly created collection is saved off to the Sharing manager so the user doesn't have to manage it in the Sidebar.

This would put the burden of satisfying the "Need to share just the Calendar portion of my Home collection" use case on the RULE part of the collection. It would also require a Sharing manager. But it might get rid of the need to have some kind of special hybrid part collection / part filter thing.

Users should be able to click Share to initiate this auto-save and share workflow for any ephemeral collection (ie. search result set).

Maintaining an Orthogonal mindset

In Chandler, we want to encourage users to organize their information using orthogonal attributes as much as possible. We'd like to discourage users from making unecessary Kind-based collections that clutter up their sidebar. Instead, we'd like users to think of their information as being organized in 2 ways:

First, as collections, where each collection has a sub-organization based on Kind: Mailbox, Taskpad, Calendar, Notepad.

Second, as Kind destinations, where each kind destination has it's own list of collections.

• Sidebar_Orthogonal.gif: