Re: [Evolution] Inovative Feature Request

[Dan Hensley <dan hensley home com>]

I think this sounds like a really nice capability to have.  Perhaps the
vFolder concept could be extended to Contacts to provide something like
this.  Ximian?

Dan

On Wed, 2001-10-24 at 08:24, scott carle wrote:
> I used to use a contact manager that was shipped with an early version
> of the Wordperfect office suite before corel bought them. I would still
> be using it if it had only integrated email. I would even be tempted to
> keep my contacts on a windows system still if they had integrated a
> decent email program into it. It had what i consider the most innovative
> interface i have every seen or used. It was addictive to use.
> It allowed you to specify relationships between objects in the database
> and keep track of them in a graphical manner, a very very simple and
> easy to use graphical manner. 
>
> what would happen is that there was a pane in the program that had a few
> basic categories showing by default. it would look something like below
>
> +contacts
> +work
> +school
> +projects
> +scott carle (a basic category in which you were the category
> +etc (basically any group or category you could think of you could
> create.
>
>
> if you clicked on the plus under scott carle it would look like this
>
> -contacts
>       +friends
>       +family
>       +work 
>       +projects
>
> if you then clicked on family it would look something like this
>
> -contacts
>       +friends
>       -family
>               +jill 
>               +john
>               +judy
>       +work 
>       +projects
>
> and if you expanded the information on one of them it would show you
> who/how/what they were related to. this worked for projects, business
> contacts etc.... and if you double clicked on any name it pulled up
> their contact info etc.. like their vcard type information.
>
> with this if i had forgotten someones name i had talked to a few weeks
> ago or a year ago that worked for a particular company i could just
> expand the link for that company and it would have a category for
> employees.. and that person would show up as an employee..... or in
> reverse if i wanted to know what company they worked for i could expand
> their information on one of  categories would be company and it would
> show me name of  company. 
>
> Basically any object such as a person, organization, project, etc..
> could be created and then linked to any other object in the database
> with a relationship which you could specify. and the GUI interface let
> you follow the relationship links rather than having to know those
> already to find someone. if i wanted to know my friends sisters husbands
> brothers name all i had to do is follow the link from him to family
> under which his sister would show up and then under her to family under
> which her husbands name would show up and then under her husbands name
> would be a family link that would show his brothers name. 
>
> a search such as that would take about 3 seconds just clicking with a
> mouse on the + signs next to the names and relationships.
>
> most likely i still have a copy of that program floating around if
> anyone is interested in seeing it. if this type of feature is of
> interest then you probably would want to see it so you could use it as a
> pattern. It is hard to describe verbaly.
> When i first saw it i thought it was the most intuitive and flexible
> system for contact management that i had ever seen. Since corel bought
> out wordperfect from borland it disapeared. they went to the corel
> central product which sucked. and i ended up going to outlook which did
> a good job of basic contact management and email and calandering. Now i
> use Evolution.
>
> I think that if you could add in the ability to view and link
> information in the contact database like this that you would go from a
> killer app that is like outlook..... to a revolutionary product that is
> the next generation of contact management. you wouldn't even need to
> change the outlook like features and interface that you already have.
> just add another window like the summary window that offers the ability
> to follow relationships in it.
>
> Scott Carle
> Carle Enterprises, Inc.
> Carle Computer Consulting
> Cell 843-995-0533
>
> May we live life with open minds open source and open standards!
>
>
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