Jivespace : Popular Threads - Feature Discussion

Feature Request - Collaborative Document Locking

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:37:59 GMT

This feature is pretty straight forward; however, can be implemented a million ways under the sun. Here is an implementation that might stir some thoughts and be feasible for next SBS release?

Currently, under Manage Collaboration, a user can assign other users as collaborators
- However, if the owner changes this option, to just themselves, all other collaborators are lost.
In addition, I'm not 100% sure as I'm going from memory, but I think the collaboration options are only available to the creator of the document, and not all collaborators.

Ideally, a solution to implement simple, yet effective Document locking:

Manage Collaboration available on Binary documents and Collaborative Documents to all Collaborators specified on the document
At any time, any collaborator should be able to come in and "lock" other collaborators from updating the document
1. For Open Documents, this should be anyone in the Container with Write permissions
2. For Collaboration limited documents, any of the defined users should be able to do this
  1. When this happens, the list of original collaborators should be maintained (perhaps an extended property on the document , or a full blown tracking table ), See 3.3
3. This use-case is not applicable when the creator is the only collaborator
Once a document has been locked
1. Previous Open documents, anyone should be able via the Manage Collaborations action and see who has the lock (IM,PrivateMessage access to Lock User)
  1. if the community wants to squelch the lock, perhaps a certain threshold of abuse-like reportings on the lock itself can auto Unlock it without admin intervention
    1. If implemented, threshold should be configurable via container meta-data and not a system setting
      1. For Communities, this could be set via Admin Console, for Social Groups it should be configured somewhere in the "Social Group Details" and/or a new section that controls the various content behaviors in the container. Projects should inherit from their direct parent.
  2. An appropriate Space/Container Admin should be able to remove the lock and return the document to the Previous state
2. Previous Collaboration limited documents, any of the specified collaborators should be able to see who has the lock (IM,PrivateMessage access to Lock User)
  1. Similarly, if all of the collaborators petition the lock on a document, or the "abuse-like" threshold (which ever is smallest), they can auto-Unlock it without Admin intervention
  2. Similarly, use-case 3.1.2, a respective Space Admin should be able to return the document to it's pre-locked state.
3. This use-case is not applicable when the creator is the only collaborator

In short, there are some opportunities here for a clean solution ... I'll let you guys respond with your thoughts on direction. Please file this as a feature request, and we'll dig up more information/details as necessary.

I'd be very interested to hear what the community has to say about this feature? While I am an avid believer in Revision Management and Version Diffing, there are some people who are more comfortable with the Document Lock version of content contribution. If there was an easy way to undo the "just you" setting in Manage Collaboration after a save...and allowing other users to access the controls as well, I think that would be "good enough".

CS Feature Request - Sticky Threads

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:34:05 GMT

Hello, Jivers. We would loooove to see a "sticky" feature built into Clearspace that would enable a Space admin to promote a particular piece of content (a thread, document, etc) so that it would appear on the top, below Announcements but above the other posts.

If this "sticky" thread could somehow be marked with a different color or icon, it would be a very robust feature that would enable us folks to drive users toward particular pieces of content on Clearspace.

Feature Idea: Independent Tagging vs. Combined Edit + Tagging Feature

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:42:24 GMT

Basically, for the users of confluence, a feature that I think is mighty nice is to be able to tag a document without having to edit the document. An inline context of tag editing that is separate from content editing would be preferential for the fly-by content viewer willing to spend a fractional amount of time to add a tag to the document he/she may be viewing.

This of course would also include for all Jive Content Types. Not sure whether or not this would entail a new permission, but the use of browsing and tagging on the fly would be great.

One step further, perhaps on a search result (barring permissions), I could select all documents that meet the query and tag them with a set of tags? This may be a feature for Space Admins, but just thought I'd throw it out there. =)

Feature Discussion: Customized Container Workflows

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:33:38 GMT

Recently had discussions around this feature and wanted to share.

Pretty simple, just as you have ""Environments" setup as a content-type, I think it would be worthwhile for SBS to have Workflows as a Content-Type.

Some basic feature ideas to get it started would be:

As a container admin, I am able to create Workflows that anyone in the container can access
- For example, I want to create a new document and I know I want it to go through a specific workflow, I should be able to do the follow
  - Select the workflow for the document to follow
- Templatized workflow templates to start with, such as multi-stage approvals and rejections
  - Ability to create custom templates/steps to add to the mix as part of a plugin would be a home-run!
- UI should be drag/drop intuitive
- Workflows should allow groupings of people to be assigned
  - Perhaps this is an extension of a Project / Tasks, or the paradigm could be re-used/casted.
    - Projects can be used to create groupings of people in a container....and the workflow creates an anonymous task in that container

Just some thoughts, but would like to see what you guys are thinking about in this field?

Managing uploads / attachments.

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:01:05 GMT

Managing uploads / attachments.

We are looking to have greater control over uploads to CS.

Currently you cannot set caps on how much data a user can upload, (in total, not per upload).

What we would like to do is set each user a quota eg: 1GB (this should be changeable per user if need be)

If a users total upload reaches 1GB he should lose the ability to upload further content (Administrator can increase if necessary).

As a flashy extra they could receive warnings when they reached a certain threshold.

As a work around we could just audit our database pick out the users who have reached 1Gb and through permissions disable them from further uploads but his is not scalable and a serious pain in the @ss!

Is there a way we could build this as a plugin? Track users total uploads with quotas? If you could point us in the right direction that would be great.

Regards,

Stephen

New Translation Features in SBS 4.0?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:34:09 GMT

Talked with a colleague who attended Jive World and they said there was a presentation or mention of new Translation features in SBS? Was wondering if someone could provide insight and/or renounce the claim. I'm anxious to see what sort of OOTB configurations Jive is willing to offer for external translation management...I start working on this plugin, but lost track of time due to family obligations...I can still work on it, but always nice to get a heartbeat on the discussion.

Re: Feature Request - Document Translation Management

Thoughts?

Feature Request: Tabbed DocumentView Widget

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:00:32 GMT

This is pretty straight forward. We've gotten many requests to have better multi-stage widgets for social group / community dashboards....and the most common request is a "tabbed" interface that they can drop into the top center of the dashboard...I figured with the new SBS 4.0 DocumentView Widget, it could "easily" be scaled to support tabs.

Perhaps it supports a max number of tabs (5-7)...and the Widget's properties are strictly the following:

label1
doc1
label2
doc2
label3
doc3
....

Users could add up to the max number of tabs of content (thinking 5 would be ample..3 being the most common case)...if they dont fill in #4 label or doc...then the tabs will stop at 3. It's nasty, but I haven't see a nice Table Widget control yet...so figure that's what we got for the time being.

Once rendered, the Tabs would do AJAX style replacing of the active pane....showing the appropriate labels for each pane.

Thoughts? Perhaps, this can be the same widget, and if only 1 document is selected, with no label the output is as it is today?

Feature Request: Document Template Kick-Off during Doc Create

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:01:50 GMT

Basically, this feature is pretty simple to implement, or something like it...as we will be releasing this concept on our community site this March, but it's the concept of Document Templates. In order to make this work, we had to mildly customize the DocCreateAction, the doc-create.ftl, and add some Extended Properties here and there. The feature set we were looking to provide were the following:

Spring board content contributors into a Template that focuses them on content, and less layout. (more fill in the blank)
Global switch to turn on/off the Document Templates feature
Global definition of Templates available to all containers
Global definition of Default Template selection, this will default the content editor's content.
Container definition of Custom Templates, available only for that container
Container definition of Default Template (same as above)
Auto-Tagging of Documents when template select, helps propogate a standard dimension to slice the community

Basically, our implementation manifests itself as a dropdown about the subject bar, with some JS attached to it to update the TinyMCE editor when a template is changed. On page-load, the template default and default content are already loaded from the server side, as well as the default tagging structure per the default selection. On change of the dropdown, a confirmation box asks the user if they want to apped the template and/or replace all of the content. As such, we check the tags field as well, and attempt to clear out the previous default tag (if that is the only one defined), and replace/add the new corresponding tag. The System and Container Extended Properties we use share the same naming structure, I hve provided an example below:

Global

template.enabled (true/false)
template.default = Tutorial
template.names = Example,Tutorial
template.Example.label = Example Code
template.Example.template = <p>...</p>

Container would defined the following:

template.default = Textbook (overrides global if found)
template.names = Textbook (additive to global when in container)
template.Textbook.template = <p>...</p>

Here is a screen shot of the drop-down discussed above, all Templates defined under "Custom Templates" are container specific, all above are global.

As a side note, we also manifested this template "type" information into a Document Extended Property, and customized the SearchAction and view-documents.ftl to add in filters for these template types. From a separate initiative, we also added in the sorting by columns types.

Here are some of those screen-shots:

Note: The same global + local container filtering applies here...if I were in a different container where textbook was not definied, I wouldn't see it.

Also, note the Sort by functionality. We had to disable it when the "All Documents" were being pulled as that was not constructing a query, instead it pulls from the Recent Content Manager which is cached.

Any ways, I hope this gives you guys some ideas about this feature. As you can see, the UI's aren't great and true Clearspace-y, but the functionality is there. Perhaps a richer plugin for TinyMCE to expose this as a drop-down inside the editor? Anyways, this is a feature that is going to give us a lot of power on our community for styling and content creation and thought I would share with the masses. I am happy to provide details for those that are interested.

Easy way to step through Unread posts

gjankowski@solidworks.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:04:21 GMT

One of our users asked for an easy way to step through the unread discussions.

If you go into the post, the < and > take you only in the same community and don't span all unread messages.

Feature Idea: Bookmarking Interface Hooks

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:20:10 GMT

Was browsing on Oracle's site, and they have an interesting feature for bookmarking a page in the community with various bookmarking sites....

Below is a screenshot snippet...my question to everyone is how useful is this for your customers. I do not use all these servers...just recently started using del.icio.us, and I know they have a Firefox plugin....so these other services, do they have similar functionality? Is this something that a user will have to configure in their Jive profile to specify their usernames for the services they use?

In general, I think it's an interesting concept, but I cannot see the entire picture yet...so I thought I'd throw this out there for people to comment.

Any thoughts appreciated... =)