As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm back to focusing my efforts on a set of features that will fall under an umbrella concept called Site Office.

Those of you who are registered on this site can have a look at the UI protype by clicking the SiteOffice link at the top of the page (after logging in). I think the UI is looking pretty cool. Using dojo and Rico, I've got an Outlook like accordian navigation section as well as window resizing by dragging the divider. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Some of the features I plan under this umbrella are:

External email access

you will be able to check any pop3 mail accounts including Yahoo and Google. It could also work with your company email system if it exposes a pop3 entry point.

One of the things I'm thinking about with this external email feature is that I don't wan't to store any messages on the web server database since they are already stored in the mail server and since this would be huge amounts of data. But I do want to be able to keep messages available to the user without having to go get them again for every request. So this seems like an excellent opportunity to use google gears. The messages can be retained in a client side SQLite database. It should also even be possible for users to read messages that have already been retrieved even when offline.

Contacts

which I would like to store on the server and also using google gears to make them available offline to support travelling workers.

Site Mail

which will look and feel like email but just be for communication with users in the site.

More...

Personal File Storage
Email Newsletters and Campaigns
Project Management/Issue Tracking/Time Tracking

Most of these features are Intranet type features that I envision only making available to certain roles.