Planet Tine 2.0

roles and rights management

the new role based rights management is now working and will replace the old user/group based rights management. i added a new dialog to the admin application where the administrator can define new roles, add members (users and groups) and define the rights for the roles.

the setup creates two roles: the user role (which has only the right to run all applications except the Admin application) and the admin role (has all rights).

more rights will be added to the applications soon.

Cornelius Weiss

Usability Of The Country Picker UI Element

While working on the country picker widget for Tine 2.0 I got remembered on a long discussion with a customer about the country picker in the traditional web application address book they where running.

The country selection user interface element there was a normal combo-box with 238 countries in it. If you want to select a country you have to search this alphabetical sorted list yourself. This is a quite annoying task for people working the whole day with the address book.

So they thought, it would be a tremendous amendment to make the country field a normal text field where the user just types in the country e.g. ‘Germany’. In normal operation most users only deal with only a few countries and do not need to have counties like ‘Saint Vincent and the Grenadines’.

This approach has two problems. First, If the country is a free text field, you will have typos in the data e.g. ‘Gremany’. You will miss such entries when you filter you addresses by the country ‘Germany’. Secondly, this only works if the company operates in one language, cause French employees would write ‘Allemagne’ in the field.

The worse situation is caused by limitations of an old fashioned web application. It could be solved nowadays by using up to date web techniques. Below is the current country selection we use in Tine 2.0. It’s a combination of a text field, a combo-box and a search field:

You could only select well defined values
You can perform a live search / type ahead
You can use it like a traditional combo-box
You can use the ENTER key to select, no mice input needed (please notice the fluent work flow: after pressing ENTER you can directly perform a new search)
You can use the COURSER keys to navigate in the results

BTW: After we noticed, that the old web address book (guess which) stores localised country names in the database, we switched the country selection to a text field as the data are messed up in any case.

Cornelius Weiss

Gleanings Of The PHPUnconference In Hamburg

Last weekend I attended the PHPUnconference in Hamburg.

The concept of an unconference was new to me. One the one hand I found the approach relaxing, the amount of free time between the sessions was really great to come in contact with the other attendes. One the other hand the selforganisation costed plenty of time and also brought some confusions. This seems to be the natural drawback of an unconference.

In Particular the talks about software-quality from Sebastian Bergmann and Manuel Pichler where pretty interesting to me. A complete list of sessions and notes of them could be found in the PHPUnconferences wiki.

Here are my impressions I got from the various conversations there:

The php web application world goes javascript for the user-interfaces. Although it was a PHP converence, you could talk with allmost anyone about the exciting world of javascript. Many people, who started with conservertive aproches and replaced server generated HTML on the client, are now in the process to switch to real javascript clients.
The php web application world goes to mission critical places. Where in the beginning of the php area it had the smack of a hobbyist sphere of activity, php applications do more and more mission critical computing in various business areas.
Php web application is not a synonym for open source code. In fact as a ambassador of a high quality mission critical open source web application, I felt like a bit of an exception there. The majority of attendees is into closed sourced ‘commercial only’ projects.
A lot of java coders switch to php. As php is not in the academic scope yet, many newcomers in the web-scene start coding in java. After their first contact with php they love the language due to it’s flexibility. Even in the open source world, one might find this tendency according to ohloh.

Finaly many thanks to the orga team for the great unconference and the extraordinary catering.

Markus Dölle

More news from our secondary personas

A new message from another persona just arrived us and we don´t want to hide it from you:

Hello,

my name is Paul Wulf, I´m a project manager at Tine Publications Ltd. I don´t have much time to introduce myself but the people working on our new collaboration application already interviewed me about my job and what we really need here for our everyday work. I can´t really wait until the first release is finished to start enjoying the smart and promising looking interface of Tine 2.0.

Yours faithfully,
Paul Wulf

Paul Wulf and his sales manager colleague James McBlack are the last two secondary personas we use to discuss in the Tine-Wiki and concentrate on in the user centered development of Tine 2.0.

Björn Balazs

Why we do Usability.

Imagine a typical production meeting: Product management, Technical engineers, marketing people and creative designers sit together and discuss what would be best to do. For whom? For the only one not involved: The user.

It is a little bit like it was back then when mum cleaned up the room and afterwards you could not find anything anymore.

We at Apliki want to change this and Metaways wants to change this too. This is why we created the OpenSource Usability Labs and why we do Usability.

They ensure the development of Tine 2.0 follows the way ISO 13407 describes the “Human-centred design processes for interactive systems”. At Tine 2.0 you and I - we - the users are integrated right into all production meetings. I believe this is a world premiere for commercially driven OpenSource production.

This is why Tine 2.0 will be the kick-ass groupware solution of the future. And take a look at the demo - isn’t it promising?

Philipp Schüle

Application rights management

another crucial function has been implemented in tine 2.0: the application rights management. you can set these rights in the admin/application dialog by double clicking on an application or pressing the 'settings' button. in this dialog, you can search for groups and users and add or change their rights for this application.

at the moment we just have the 'admin' and 'run' rights, but more rights (for example the right to create shared folders) will follow soon.

if you update an existing installation you have to create new database tables and rerun the setup.php. but dont't despair, we'll add an update function for the setup very soon.

Setup - Update

Hello Susan, hello John,

there are several new goodies for your administrators

To setup TINE 2.0, you have to run setup.php - easy.

If you update your TINE 2.0 via SVN, just run setup.php again.

The updates files are placed like this

./[ApplicationName]/Setup/Update/[MainReleaseNumber]/[ReleaseNumber].php

Within these files, the update processes evaluates the former version
and runs the right processes as you can see in the example ./Tinebase/Setup/Update/0/4.php

After that - your TINE 2.0 is ready to work and up to date!

Enjoy!

Markus Dölle

Secondary Persona No. 1

We would like to forward you this message from our first secondary persona - Susan:

Hi, my name is Susan Clever,

I am a secretary working at Tine Publications Ltd. in Brighton. My work is related to teams like the one in which John Smith is doing his job. I coordinate team meetings, write mails, answer calls and take notes for others and connect customers to the right people at Tine Publications. Therefore I strongly depend on the continous and careful use of our groupware solution.

I hope with Tine 2.0 we will get an efficient and satysfying product to fullfill our needs. If you have any questions concerning my tasks and need some feedback, feel free to ask.

All the best,
Susan

More information about Susan and her job can be found in the Tine 2.0-Wiki. There are two more secondary personas we will present soon.

Photo © Konstantin Gastmann / Pixelio

Lars Kneschke

Asterisk integration

Over the weekend we updated our Asterisk installation here at Metaways. This allows us to push the Asterisk integration of Tine 2.0 forward.

Asterisk makes it manager interface available over HTTP. They call it AJAM. Using AJAM we can get the response of the commands as XML formatted response. I combined AJAM with Zend_Http_Client. After only 3 hours of work, I was able to initiate a call from our webserver over the AJAM interface. Droping active calls and executing CLI commands was working too.

I bundled the functionality in separate class. You can have a look at the source code at https://officespot-cs.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/officespot-cs/trunk/ajam_client.

Next step is to write a GUI to make click to dial working from contacts.

Lars Kneschke

updated the online demo at http://www.tine20.org/demo

Yesterday we updated the online demo to our latest version from svn. From the user perspective the changes are not that big, as we mainly worked behind the scenes.

Here is a list of user visible changes:

you can assign permissions to groups now

you can export contacts and leads as pdf now

the ok, cancel and apply buttons are located at the bottom now

improved account selection dialogue

You can not see that:

you can manage groups now in the admin module

we have implemented self registration

the CRM module can send notifications to the right people now

the initial installation of Tine 2.0 is very easy now. Just have a look at http://www.tine20.org/wiki/index.php/Install_tine20

Lars Kneschke

minor changes, big effect in usability

Today some user complained in the german user forum, that the group management does not work correctly. Despite one real bug we were able to fix quickly, he complained that he can't add users to a group, because the "add account" button is disabled.
From the technical point of view, it is totally clear why the button is disabled. As no row of the user search result was selected, also the "add account" button was disabled. As soon as you select one account, also the "add account" button gets activated.

But this user was thinking different. He was thinking as an user and not as a software developer.

To solve the problem we needed to change the logic of the account search dialogue only a little bit. If you search for some accounts and the result gets displayed, we automaticly select the first account displayed, This will also activate the "add account" button. And this will also allow you to use the cursor to scroll up and down in the list of found accounts. And you can now simply press "Enter" to add the currently selected account to right list of group members.That's really cool! We improved the usability for normal users and improved the userinterface for powerusers too.

I really love ExtJS!

Almost finished ...

Today, I proudly present Typo3 connecting to TINE2.0 via AJAX.
You can simply add the resource TINE2.0 via your extensions manager.
There is no need to have a Zend framework installed, the classes which will be needed come along with the plugin.
In the next step I'll install an autoloader, but never change a running system

The plugins are based on well proven plugins.

One plugin called user_kontakt2tine feeds the addressbook with new contact data - the other one user_tine2typo reads contacts from addressbook which are preselected and related to the given user.

A short instruction for use of user_kontakt2tine:
You install and insert the plugin in a normal way. Now you can select whether you want your new contact from your website via email or directly into your TINE 2.0 addressbook.
Of course, this might not be the right place, maybe the CRM should be a better recipient- work in progress... But this is a case study for getting things into.

A short introduction to user_tine2typo:
After you typed in your server and user data (and click save), the flexform on the right hand side will be filled up.
Now you can keep you company's website presenting employees simply up-to-date, just in case anyone get married or just another position or telephone number.

You can check both out via svn.

Philipp Schüle

groups management

i extended the admin application with some new functions. it is now possible to create and edit groups. i also added javascript controls for adding and removing users to a group in the group edit dialog. that was another step for our accounts and groups management.

while implementing these new features i learned the basics of the mighty extjs framework and gained some more experience programming javascript.

i think we'll publish a new demo version soon. then you can at last try out the new features of tine 2.0 we have been talking about in the tine blog for the last few weeks.

Robert Lischke

Introducing … John Smith

I’m new to the usability team of Tine 2.0 and I like to introduce you to our primary persona, which we will use to discuss features and usability issues.

John Smith

Hi there,

my name is John Smith and I’m one of the photographers at Tine Puclications, Ltd. I just got an email telling me that we’ll be using Tine 2.0 in our company. I can’t say I’m overly glad with this decision, because I just started to work efficiently with Outlook Express — but well, Tine 2.0 looks promising and I will take this as a challenge.

I hope all of your programmers will bear in mind what I need to do with this application. I’m sure, that by telling you a bit about me, you can greatly improve this software. I hope I won’t need to worry about coordinating my appointments that much and have more time to take wonderful pictures.

All the best,

John

Read more about John and let us know what you think of our approach!

Landed on the planet TINE 2.0

My father reached his 70. birthday several years ago without going green, but nevertheless I'm now in charge of a slightly different webfrontend for TINE 2.0 .
Haven't you notice - there is no connection between the first part of the sentence and the second part?
Indeed, it is the same sentence. How can they be connected?

That is my mission - connect the core of TINE 2.0 to a different frontend. Even if the standard frontend is quite nifty and even eye-candy, there are some circumstances in which you will not present your data in this way.
You may think that javascript is not enabled on every client - that could have been the case in 1999 - or you already hosting a website in TYPO3.
Now you can easily connect your TINE 2.0 stored data to your TYPO3 webfrontend.
In the backend of TYPO3 you will define which part of which record(s) you will present.
No Statement has to be handwritten. You can pick records from different TINE 2.0 installations on different (DBM) systems and of different users and so on.

Also you are able to insert new contacts via a form directly into your addressbook or CRM.
Validation and the right model is defined in the plugin.

The plugins are "standalone" plugins and brings their own zend framework and TINE 2.0 classes. You just need PHP 5. (Which you should already have choosen for security purposes.)

At this moment, I can't say "Mission accomplished". It still needs a bit of tuning to make it very easy for you.

« previous page (Page 1 of 6, totaling 78 entries) next page »

roles and rights management

Usability Of The Country Picker UI Element

Gleanings Of The PHPUnconference In Hamburg

More news from our secondary personas

Why we do Usability.

Application rights management

Setup - Update

Secondary Persona No. 1

Asterisk integration

updated the online demo at http://www.tine20.org/demo

minor changes, big effect in usability

Almost finished ...

groups management

Introducing … John Smith

Landed on the planet TINE 2.0

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