Lotus Notes is one of best-known groupwares providing effective knowledge management by enhancing communication, collaboration, and coordination among groups of people.
This in the newest issue of Nature: E-mail reveals real leaders
Regarding Outlook as a tool for personal information management: It does allow users to add "New Folders" in the drafts folder (makes sense). I went as far as two levels deep. Basically, after using my drafts folder as a note taking tool for 7 months I had 49 drafts in my folder. They covered everything from links for research papers to recipes for stuffed mushrooms. Now I have 3 folders and perhaps I'll be more organized as a result!
Slashdot pointed me to this fascinating piece by James Grimmelman on LawMeme (which I've never followed before but will watch in the future):
Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet
The article discusses the spread of a personal email by Laurie Garrett, a journalist attending on the January World Economic Forum in Davos. Particularly, iit addresses Garrett's (justifiable?) anger at learned that her "private" email had been forwarded without her permission by someone in her circle of trust and had subsequently been discussed by "techno-liberalists" on lists such as MetaFilter.
All in all, I think that this piece ties together a lot of the themes we've discussed so far in class.
I extracted main ideas of our class readings, in particular, I am interested in suggestions of future work.
E-mail as Habitat: An Exploration of Embedded PIM (Bellotti, V. & Ducheneaut, N.)
"E-mail has been the knowledge workers’ new electronic habitat, because personal information management (PIM) is embedded where it is most needed and accessible, that is, in e-mail."
Limitation of E-mail
Users want immediate access to information, which limits efficiency of folder organization and the depth of a useful filing structure.
Implications and suggestions
"E-mail as a PIM tool should have more flexible organization of folders. Because users mostly work with ephemeral information, a cache of recently accessed items could be useful.
Incorporation of document management features inside the e-mail client would make sense.
Providing a different design, with different e-mail management options, depending on a user’s role could improve user interfaces."
Understanding Sequence and Reply Relationships within Email Conversations:
A Mixed-Model Visualization (Neustaedter, C. & Venolia, G. D.)
Two models in conflict:
· Sequential Model of Conversation
· Tree Model of Conversation
Solution of conflict is a mixed-model, which strongly supports the two models simultaneously with a visualization design.
Suggestions to improve the mixed-model visualization
· "It could be more compact: The actual message content is small compared with the surrounding graphics. A more compact visualization would allow more relationships to be visible at a glance.
· The visualization should not be overkill for simple conversation, which incurs more cost than benefit. "
Taking Email to Task: The Design and Evaluation of a Task Management Centered Email tool (Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M. & Smith, I.)
Glossary:
Threads: Series of topically related messages and replies.
Addressing: Whether each message was individual, multiple or list addressed, implying its likely import in terms of thread tracking.
Interdependent task: Task with obligations that also depend on the to-dos of others. These are characterized by complex threads of email and other communication such as phone calls waiting for responses that enable progress.
The Taskmaster design philosophy is to distinguish Taskmaster from an ordinary mail tool.
Thrasks: Threaded Task-Centric Collections
"Interdependent tasks comprise threads of message files, links and drafts, so taskmaster supports semi-automatic collections of these items, which we call "‘thrask’.
"Taskmaster differs from collation systems that track threads since thrasks go beyond system-defined threads to encompass user-defined task-centric collections. The advantage in Taskmaster is that drafts can be saved within the thrask to which they relate, in the context of the related messages that may need to be accessed in their creation, while classic mail tools put drafts in a separate folder out of context, where they may be easily be forgotten."
Equality for All Content
"The thrask model was made more powerful by elevating documents and links to be first-class citizens, therefore, in Taskmaster, important documents and links are much easier to get at. Taskmaster also saves time wasted opening uninteresting attachments because it displays documents and links in the preview pane."
Limitation of Taskmaster
l Taskmaster has technical limitations (e.g. sensitivity to variations in PC configurations) and missing features (e.g. printing and feedback about address completion, omitted due to limited engineering time resources).
l Taskmaster has only a tiny fraction of the feature enhancements that Outlook provides; therefore, switching back and forth to Outlook to use features of Taskmaster is impractical.
Implications and Suggestions
l Thasks could be blended with folders for archival purposes, because Taskmaster’s thrasks are both reliable at collecting threaded messages, attachments and links and a successful in organizing message content.
l "Taskmaster needs better layout solution, because the layout of the three panes of Taskmaster was fixed and the bottom pane was not large enough. These problems take us back to wasting time on window management. Another proposed refinement is to provide a fully functional application preview pane so that items could be manipulated without ever having to open an application."
l "Taskmaster could affect positively email users by embedding task management resources directly in the inbox, where they are most needed, as well as breaking down the barriers between the various components of contemporary email application. "
Dan Gruen is obviously working on even more new ways to re-invent email. Take a look at some of his publications.
Soon you will be able to talk on the phone (in 5 continents), email, play mp3s, send images, keep to-do lists, AND play action packed games. Nokia and Sega (among others) teamed up to create the ultimate time management / time waster. For the kid in all of us (or at least some) we will finally be able to get in some gaming on the fly without having to toot about a Gameboy.
The device is called N-gage will be available in the fall for a mere (est) $200 - $300.
Check it out: www.n-gage.com
Under this week's "systems" section of the syllabus, the link that currently reads zaplets should be www.zaplet.com.
Zaplet was the first VC funded spinoff of Reactivity, a Palo Alto technology venture accelerator back in early 2001 I believe. They were somewhat consumer based with a free demo anyone could use for a while before going enterprise and b-b. In a nutshell, you could receive one instance of a group email in your inbox and using (i-frames) it would load the current version with each update. The content was usually poll, survey, and/or group decision based.
Here is pic of the original, consumer-oriented ui The current version is described on this version of their website and is described as "app mail".
A link for the School of Information and Systems, Berkeley project to estimate how much information (all media) is produced annually in the world. These people are talking exabytes of information. The link for Internet (including email and usenet) is at http://sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/internet.html You can find an executive summary for the project findings at http://sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/summary.html