Re: [Sum] Contacts Design

On Jul 5, 2007, at 4:57 AM, Mimi Yin wrote:

> On Tuesday, Ed and I took an hour-long whirlwind tour of all issues  
> relating to Contacts in Chandler. Here is the briefest summary I  
> could pull together on what we discussed. I'm not looking for  
> straight out answers to the huge list of questions below. There  
> needs to be a bit more context for each of them to have a  
> productive discussion.
>
> I am thinking that Ed and I need to loop in some brains from  
> development to proceed. Philippe, as Ed's mentor, I'm looking for  
> some assistance on next steps.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mimi
>
> At OSAF we've talked about Contact Management in myriad ways:
>
> 1. A digital rolodex (Outlook, Palm, Apple Address Books) - would  
> probably need to support mobile devices to truly fill this niche.
>
> 2. A lightweight Customer Relationship Manager tool, a la  
> Salesforce. A way to manage relationships, where managing  
> relationships is essentially your job. Each contact entry is really  
> a profile complete with a history/log of your interactions with  
> this person: Calls, IMs, email exchanges, sharing history, mutual  
> contacts, etc.

Could we just call this a relationship management tool?  Very few  
people really know what a CRM system does, and those that do,  
associate them with salesmen and call center workers.   Frankly, I  
think that this is where the long term value of contacts is, but we  
don't support enough information types to make this really plausible.

>
> 3. A way to streamline and improve the PIM workflows we support today:
> + Using people as a handle to look for information, essentially a  
> way to enhance Search.
>
> + A way to manage tasks and events around people:
> - All the stuff I need to talk to so-and-so about, aka David  
> Allen's @Who Agenda list.
> - All the stuff I'm waiting for so-and-so to get back to me about
>
> + An easy way to collect and process contact info you get in the  
> course of your information management workflows
>
> So, which one of these do we tackle first?
>
> Proposal
> For probably pretty obvious reasons, I think it makes most sense to  
> start with Scenario 3: Support the PIM workflows we have today. In  
> doing so, we strengthen what we have already, making Chandler more  
> compelling as a PIM. I also have a feeling that we'll manage to  
> satisfy lightweight rolodex and CRM scenarios for some set limited  
> set of users, even if we remain focused on PIM workflows.
>
> What would this entail?
> Answering some hard modeling questions we've deferred until now :)
>
> 1. Are contact items like other content items. Can they be triaged  
> and stamped?
> In talking with Ed, we agreed that some contact-stamping scenarios  
> make more / less sense than others and many users will simply be  
> confused by the idea of managing Contact items as first-class  
> information items like Notes, Messages, Tasks and Events.
>
> However, I think there some compelling scenarios that are worth  
> experimenting with:
> + Note-->Contact You jot down a note with directions to a  
> restaurant you're going to tonight and then you decide to stamp it  
> as a contact for future reference and keep it around in the NOW  
> section until after your dinner date.
> + Email-->Contact You receive an email from your friend who's just  
> moved to Mexico. You want to make sure you keep track of that info  
> so you can send her, her birthday gift. You might stamp the message  
> as a Contact and add a Tickler to it to pop into NOW 3 weeks before  
> her birthday so that it pops up with her contact info just in time  
> for you to mail her your gift.
> + Addressing a Contact This is simply another 'single-item' sharing  
> scenario. Send contacts to others. Edit and Update them if necessary.

Does stamping as contact imply auto-filling out of all the attributes  
of a Contact item?

>
> + Contact <--> Task / Calendar It might be handy to use Contacts as  
> a way to keep track of David Allen-style @People agenda lists, in  
> which case you might want the Contact to show up on your Task list  
> and Calendar as a recurring 1:1 event, especially if the Contact  
> also has pointers to every item that references the Contact. This  
> scenarios will be less obvious to people though, but it's maybe  
> worth leaving them out there for now and see what people do with them.

I would definitely use this.

>
> + Triaging Contacts If you understand the triage statuses to be a  
> way of deciding whether or not you're doing, deferring or done with  
> processing an item of information, then assigning triage status to  
> Contacts makes sense.  However, if you think of Contacts simply as  
> archival information, triage status is understandably confusing.  
> Would it make sense to add a 4th triage status for something along  
> the lines of Archive?
>
> 2. Edit/Update and Contacts
> Contacts should probably work just like other Items when it comes  
> to edit/update. The scenarios are pretty much the same.
>
> 3. Referencing Contacts,
> + Do items point to contacts or bits of contact info: email  
> addresses, nicknames, full names, IM buddy names.
> + Are contacts embedded in items as sub-items or is it just a  
> reference?
> + Do contacts point back to all the items that point to them? This  
> last feature would certainly enhance search workflows but would  
> also start us down the path of becoming a lightweight CRM tool.

It struck me as a sign of how far we've come that this is even a  
question.  Not that long ago, everything was supposed to be connected  
by bi-directional references/collections.   Is it bad for us to start  
down the path of becoming a lightweight relationship management tool?

>
> 4. Sharing and Contacts
> Morgen, Sheila and I have already spent a lot of time agonizing  
> over the many complicated sharing issues that come up as soon as we  
> have Contacts. Here is a poor-man's summary of them. I don't think  
> we need to have answers to all of these right away, but depending  
> on what other functionality we want to have and what use cases we  
> want to support, some of these will be more pressing than others.
> + If A and B share an item that points to a contact: C, do they  
> share that contact as well? Or just whatever portion of contact  
> information appears in that item.
> + If A and B each have their own contact for C, can we reconcile that?
> + What happens if A eventually shares contact C with B?
>
> 5. Contacts in the Faceted Sidebar
> + Are Contacts an application area? They currently show up simply  
> as a collection in the sidebar.
> + Do Contacts show up in the triage table along with everything else?
> + Do Contacts show up in the All application area or are they  
> cordoned off in some way? In a separate pane? In a floating palette?
> + Can Contacts be added to any old collection in the sidebar?

If one use of a collection is a project, then I can see some value in  
associating (somehow) Contacts with that project.

>
> 6. What set of attributes do we need / want for Contacts?
> If we don't have all the possible vCard options, how do we display  
> vCard attributes?

There's also the problem of user create attributes.

>
> These are the issues I think we need to discuss in the short-term  
> if not come up with fully-baked stories for. Below is a laundry  
> list of issues I think we can defer because they are more relevant  
> to the rolodex and CRM scenarios and less immediately relevant to  
> PIM workflows.
>
> 1. What are the different kinds of Contact?
> Traditional 'Contacts as an Address Book' Model
> + A Person?
> + A Business / Organization?
>
> More generic 'Contacts as a Profile Directory' Model
> + Location
> + Country
> + Model (as super-model)
> + Customer / Client
> + Product
> + Anything that you need to keep a 'Profile' record for.
>
> 2. There has always been a lot of controversy around what it means  
> to be a Group in Chandler as well:
> + Are Groups simply a short-cut for addressing emails or tagging  
> items?
>
> + Do Groups define teams and organizational structure (ie.  
> Marketing team, Murdoch Family, Sierra Club members)
> - Do individual contacts have different roles in different groups?  
> (ie. Director of Marketing, Dad, Treasurer)
>
> + Are groups the same as collections?
> + Can groups be defined around rules?
> + Can groups have inclusions and exclusions like Chandler collections?
> + Does each collection have a corresponding Contacts Group? Is that  
> Group gathered dynamically? (ie. All the people referenced by items  
> in this collection.) Or is it defined explicitly?)
>
> 3. Access Privileges
> + Are there ways to share parts of Contacts? Work info, but not  
> Personal info?
> + Can you share different parts with different people?
> + Do you / can you share all the things that are are part of the  
> contact log? ie. All the emails you've sent/received. All the tasks  
> you've assigned/received

Multiply the difficulty of 2/3 because it intersects the security  
model for the server as well.

Ted

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