I've started to work on the feature to allow site members to send private messages to other site members, but in addition to the typical implementations I've seen for forums that allow this, I've decided to be a bit more ambitious. I really want mojoPortal to evolve to something you can run a business on so I'm envisioning site mail as just the first feature of a more elaborate SiteOffice feature.

All registered users will be able to use the SiteMail element of SiteOffice to send messages to other site members but in addition to that I will have roles that allow users to also access external email accounts, send and recieve mail from those accounts, maintain personal contacts separate from site member contacts etc.
Later I plan to add a role to alow users to store files, eventually we will hopefully see open source editors for OpenDocument format and ultimately the whole office experience can be had in the browser. You can see how this could progress with nice calendaring for users and groups and other typical office like features.

So far I've just stubbed out some UI using jsObjects TaskBar and TreeView with some MagicAjax Panels. Registered users who login can get a sneek peek at the UI using this link http://www.mojoportal.com/SiteOffice/Default.aspx and I invite your feedback whether you think this is a good direction to go. Its pretty similar to older versions of Outlook. I've experimented some trying to make a UI more like newer versions of Outlook using the Rico Accordian panel and some of the dojo layout widgets. dojo has an accordian but it seems broken in IE. The idea would be to have the treeview inside the accordian panel which would be more similar to the newer versions of Outlook and you can see my experiment here http://www.mojoportal.com/SiteOffice/Office.aspx. I'm just not sure yet if I can get a hook in to handle client side clicks to the accordian that I need to show and hide things like I am using the dsObjects stuff. I got a good chunk of work done already using jsObjects so not sure if its worth the effort to pursue the accordian thing and this is what I'm asking feedback about. I'm at apoint where I see clearly how to implement things with jsObjects whereas the other stuff is going to require more digging and experimenting. I'm kind of leaning toward sticking with the jsObjects approach and maybe trying to integrate the dojo feature that allows re-sizing the layout elements. The only problem so far I've had with the jsObjects is in Firefox the height of the taskbar seems to want to go a little longer than the page height no matter what I try though their sample page doesn't have this problem. I'm thinking it might be all the hidden Ajax panels are somehow taking up space in Firefox even when they are hidden.

Some of the things I plan to use for the external email functionality are DotNetOpenMail, sharpmimetools, and the mono.net.POP3 classes. I also found sharpwebmail which has the POP3 functionality but I can't use it because it is licensed under the GPL. Luckily I remembered reading Zac Bowling's blog that he had contribute some POP3 feauteres to the Mono project and I can use that.

Nothing is functional yet but you can see by clicking some of the buttons how the Ajax partial postback is nicer than normal postback.

So login, have a peek and let me know your opinion.

Thanks,

Joe