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.
|
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. 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:
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:
Finaly many thanks to the orga team for the great unconference and the extraordinary catering. A new message from another persona just arrived us and we don´t want to hide it from you:
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. 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?
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.
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! We would like to forward you this message from our first secondary persona - 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
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.
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 not see that:
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!
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.
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. 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.
Read more about John and let us know what you think of our approach! Photo © Sascha Sambale / Pixelio
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. |
Quicksearch |
