ODS Improvements and Features Wishlist

This is a page dedicated to sharing my own impression, comments and feature wishlist for OpenLink??'s ODS, as well as to elicit feedback from friends and colleagues.

First impressions:

• powerful, which is good, but users should be able to interact with ODS "where they are" in terms of their technical prowess, yet advanced features should just as easily be availible to more experienced users
• Learning curve for doing simple actions and tasks is way too high, need to innovate more on the UI side
• Most community sites allow you to create (instances of) "documents", but the idea of creating instances of "applications" is pretty revolutionary, it's almost moving all my productivity software needs to my dataspace; but again, the handling of it in the UI needs work
• Transparency and access are right on point!! (WebDAV??, syndication, etc.)
• One thing that will matter alot is consitency. If you think about Microsoft Office, there is always that main menu bar with "File", "Edit" and "View", no matter which app your in (word processing, spread sheet, etc), and they always contain actions which cross-cut any one of these applications: "save, open, copy, etc". This concept seems to be lacking in ODS. You need to try to extract the least common denominator of actions across the applications in my dataspace, then place those somewhere where prominent on the interface
• I want to be able to invite people to my applications spaces, and/or to announce them to folks in my network

• we need a way to email bookmarks and other content types, it needs to be a bookmark, but act like an email message

• when I go in and create a link, how do you determine which field is promienent (wikischema??), in my case, the "name" isn't as important as the "service type" and the description of the site the link points to (which is an example coopetitor, so the site is for market research) yet the current interface will give me a veiw of the links based on "name" and maybe sort by date. user needs fine control over which fields the results list is built (need to research facets)
• filter: should add all selections dynamically to section at bottom, then do a bulk add when box id closed ( already implemented)

Highlight Points

• Why does the popular "edit" button exist for the wiki anyway???, wikis should act like a virtual shared whiteborad, I should be able to stick a cursor anywhere on the wikipage and start editing, why do I have to switch back and forth from view to edit??, that really hampers the creative process, this warrants more investigation into wiki usability, also it should be graphical but without giving the user a "toolbox" of squares, circle and so on, hmmmmmmm, table PC comes to mind
• NO MORE FOLDERS, ONLY CRITERIA, i.e. only smart folders
• The absolute more vauable thing about ODS is that I can now give all my resources both a URI and a URL, now I can share my resources with others as well as access them anywhere (URL), but most importantly, it can use the URL as the resources identifier in the semantic web
• replace "send/receive" of email with "share/access" of open data space

ODS

• need single way to create things, the "new" and page refresh introduce drag
• i want to create a "group" of people to send to, it should show up in my filter list ( already implemented)
• a wiki should work more like a communal white board, or maybe we need a special wiki type for this, but basically I want to go into a person's wiki, and mark up stuff, almost "draw" and "red ink" things almost graphically

Other

• smart folders should be based on "criteria", which now they use trival set of criteria, and we should be allowed to build this criteria up (or at least one of the ways to build it up) through faceted browsing, so picture user clicking facets to narrow a list of results, then a "create smart folder" button that uses the critera to create a smart folder, maybe don't even call it a smart folder, just give user a "save" button and let them name it
• I would be in my smart folder, then display the number in the smart folder index
• naming for EVERYTHING in ODS needs to be examined and re-examined, the names for applications, actions, properties, everything
• ODS has mail as an application type, but EVERYTHING needs to be "mailable", all content should act like email, i.e. lets blur the line between my private content types (blog entry, link/bookmark/ word document, web page) and email message, what happens when you hybrid the two, how would that look and feel??
• Smart Group - we need these also, based again on critera like smart folders (which are really just saved criteria IMO)

• I need to be able to see my content across "content types", like all things related to coopetition for example, irrespective of their types, so I should be able to say "show me all things tagged coopetition", and I should see all links, blog entries, wikipages, email messages that have that tag
• again, do away with email, and make content "email-like"
• following from that, we need a base document type in ODS that supports rich-text editing through the browser, maybe don't even put it under an application, but allow user to create one where ever they are in the system, and store them in maybe my briefcase
• the path in the briefcase needs to be breadcrumb links
• KILL THE NOTION OF THE FOLDER!!!!!! No more hierarchy, only CRITERIA!!!!! This is the exact same as saying NO MORE FOLDERS, ONLY SMART FOLDERS!!! this has huge impact on how the briefcase should work, let's virtualize the folder the same way you guys did with databases, sure use the folder structure underneth the covers, but to the user, all my resources should blend and spread across my "data canvas" organically and fluidly
• Sharing - all sent content should automatically be set to "share" for receipients I think
• Remember, their are only "smart folders", so results that come into the folder can (or should) be able to be shared automatically by sharing that folder
• Sorting - it should keep my last sort info, maybe through cookies
• Sharing/sent to - why can't I sent to groups, bug????
• I see that I can browse a user's dataspace, user should be able to apply advanced templates to customize their dataspace (not that css crap myspace uses)
• need consistent actions across applications, further more, I'd really like to see the lines between application types and content types blurred more, or as much as possible, that's up for debate tho as to if that's really going to be effective
• need to have easily managed levels of access
• priacy issues

• i got sent a great article of evidence for semweb, the problem is that it was sent inline in an email, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, that basically means it doesn't exist to me, i'll never be able to find it again, this is the vision, if something hasn't reached my dataspace, then it synonomous to me not even having it
• let's replace the notion of "send/receive" of email with "share/access" through open data spaces
• we should be albe to embed out tag clouds in other pages on the web using a javascript call, i.e. my tag clouds should be portable

Notes

• how can we capture content (links, messages, etc) being sent over IM and other applications and have it "touch" my dataspace?