Requirements
Further development of the mailtool will happen in two main stages:
- Group Awareness (2.4 release)
- The Mailtool currently allows users to send messages to targeted roles within a site, but there is a strong user expectation for being able to target site groups as well.
- Configuration (2.3 release) DONE; see http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/MAILTOOL/Latest+Release
- Mailtool Classic required manual (admin) configuration of its properties to identify the host site, the appropriate realms, the mail archive channel, etc. The net result is that the mailtool could only effectively be added to a worksite as an admin action. Current work aims to eliminate this need through what we can call "auto-configuration"
- Some of the configuration details can and should be handled by site maintainers, and so in addition to auto-configuration a new screen will be available for site maintainers to override default config properties.
Current development is focused on the Configuration issues mentioned above.
Design, 2.4 Release
A group-aware, section-aware version of the Mailtool will allow the user, when composing a message, to select groups or sections as message recipients.
This maps most readily onto the Users-by Role (Users by category?) view, for the same reason that it was once called "Tree."
Proposed screens, 1-2-07, follow.
Users-by Role (Users by category?) view:
Users-by Role (Users by category?) view, expanded:
Users-by Role (Users by category?) view, expanded again:
Scrolling list:
Could expand to include
Or
Making it do both would probably complicate the interface beyond what is reasonable.
Groups and sections do not map well onto the other three selection views developed for roles, because their membership overlaps with roles and nest in a way that roles do not.