<div class="gmail_quote"><div>I added some notes from the perspective of the target group.</div><div><br></div><div>Be forewarned: it's definitely in the realms of a wishlist.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote">
<div vlink="purple" link="blue" lang="EN-US"><div><p class="MsoNormal">Engineering Group Web Site Standard Features</p><p class="MsoNormal">===================================================</p><p class="MsoNormal"><b>Electronic Logbook(s)</b> – Used to record time based events occurring in conjunction with some ongoing activity. Normally, logs are not modified after they’re written, or, if they are, the original entry is also preserved.</p>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>We would strongly prefer to be able to attach pictures to logbook entries. I know some groups would consider it critical, especially in terms of attaching screenshots of running experiments and equipment.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Another concern is about organization of logbook entries, things like whether users can easily create new logbooks when they begin new projects and shift between logbooks throughout the day. We are always working on multiple independent projects at any given time, and there's also nesting of projects to take into account.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Off the top of my head I'm reminded of the blogging platform serendipity (<a href="http://www.s9y.org">www.s9y.org</a>) which uses both categories and tagging of entries. It would make sense for our workflow that we'd make a category for each hall and tag entries by project, relevant pieces of equipment, etc.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Also, while it's not a big deal to us, I know some groups would like an "email this entry to ___" button.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote">
<div vlink="purple" link="blue" lang="EN-US"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><b>Online Notebook(s)</b> – For keeping track of laboratory, technical or experimental notes. Can be individual or group based. Must be able to accommodate various attachments.</p>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Is the difference between notebooks and logbooks that significant? It seems like they could be basically the same thing, just with more likelihood of people wanting to re-edit entries. Features that would be good for one (attachments, full text search, organizational tools, retrieval tools) would at worst be a little overkill for the other.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote"><div vlink="purple" link="blue" lang="EN-US"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><b>Image Gallery</b> – The need for this varies greatly, but it’s always a collection of some kind of media files – audio, video, photographic, etc. maintaining, managing, viewing, presenting these is usually important to these groups.</p>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This is a huge need for us, though we only need pictures.</div><div><br></div><div>One consideration is that we already have hundreds of pictures organized and sitting on our group drive, and our members are happy enough with the process of dragging and dropping to the group disk. Perhaps the gallery can access the pictures from the group drive so we can keep the existing process instead of going through a web-based uploader?</div>
<div><br></div><div>We have similar organizational needs for the image gallery as we have for the logbook with tasks and subtasks. It would be nice to grant specific non-members permission to view/edit collections of pictures on a collection by collection basis.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote"><div vlink="purple" link="blue" lang="EN-US"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><b>Event Calendar</b> – This is a common need, either for tracking upcoming events like conferences, or for scheduling things like shifts for group members.</p>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Colorized categorization of events on a calendar would be nice.</div><div><br></div><div>Come to think of it, it would be pretty nice if the lab's experimental schedule was publicly published as a subscribe-able calendar like an .ics file that we could then include in our group calendar to see it all in one place.</div>
<div><br></div><div>~Chris</div></div><br>