Ralf, all,
I have an idea for improving the long term usability for egroupware.
Specifically for addressbook entries for closed files or old clients, etc…
After using egw for a number of years, I’ve noticed the addressbook 'ages’
and the usefulness of the information, for lack of better words, becomes
stale. With hundreds of contacts collected over the years, it becomes
increasingly difficult to wade through the addresses to find what you need.
(especially when browsing for a name you can’t recall to search for)
For example, of the 689 addresses I have in addressbook, roughly 70% are
from closed files. The addresses are still good, but I have no need to see
them every time I open addressbook or have them sync’ed to mobile clients.
Projects, infologs, etc… can be ‘done’ and no longer appear in the current
list, but at least for me, I haven’t found a way to do that with addressbook.
What I would propose is that there be a way to add an ‘Old’ or 'Inactive’
group to assign the addressbook entries to on the ‘General’ tab of the
addressbook entry dialog where you currently have the choice of:
Addressbook: [Group Default; Personal]
Then you would need to set a query in the ribbon to choose (‘All - Not
Inactive’ or just ‘Active’), where you currently have the choice for:
Addressbook: [All, Personal, Group Default, Accounts, …]
or maybe a better way would simply be to add a checkbox on the ribbon that said:
[ ] Hide Inactive
That way it could work with whatever was already set in the ribbon.
This would accomplish 2 goals - (1) keep the relevant current information
in front of the user in the egroupware interface and (2) provide a group to
sync to mobile/apple devices that only sync’ed the ‘active’ contacts. (i.e.
you can leave the ‘Inactive’ group unchecked in Preferences -> GroupDAV to
prevent sync)
What say the Masters? Worth a feature request? (if I can still find my
login 
I think it is a really good way to keep the egroupware information
current and relevant for both interface users and mobile clients.
It follows along the same reasoning we discussed earlier with Global
Categories that go ‘Inactive’ due to an change in staff/partners/whatever.
Where you currently have to run a manual query to assign the global category
to a personal one by setting cat_owner to the account_id of the user.
It all goes to keeping the dataset current and relevant to the users by
finding some way to ‘hide’ or ‘archive’ inactive contacts and categories
without losing the information. It’s still good information, its just not
current and not relevant to day-to-day operations.
There are probably several more areas like this that would benefit from
this type of feature, but the ones I’ve really noticed are addressbook entries
and old categories.
Food for thought – let me know if you want me to open a feature request.
Keep up the great work. Thanks.
–
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable.
Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security
threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes
sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
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