As we begin content management research, it is important to have an open mind so that we don't project our beliefs on users. However, in order to help us put some scope on the work we have hypothesized some potential results that we'll continually check against as do this work.
As mentioned on the content management research main page we expect our findings to drive us toward 2 different kinds of solutions:
- A longterm vision for the UI architecture (Sakai only?)
- The repository piece of resources is mostly hidden from users.
- My Workspace' becomes the file management hub for users.
- Content management happens throughout Sakai tools in the context of the work users engage in (ex. upload and organize images in the Image Gallery, permissions for a file become dependent on the context -- announcement, assignment, in progress or creation, etc.)
- A new navigation structure is defined based on user activities rather than tools and functions.
- Candidate components and/or design patterns identified to support content management interactions. We expect many of these components to be appropriate across the products: Sakai, uPortal, Moodle & Kuali, perhaps with slightly different implementations. Some potential ideas are:
- Uploader
- Organizer
- File Picker (link, attach)
- Metadata (properties) editor
- Content previewer
- Timed release
- Tagging
- File manager (ex. replace, copy, organize, duplicate, version, upload)
- File merge (and or lock)
- Collaboration tracker
- Annotator
- What's new?
- Bookmarker
- Notifier (availability, changes)
- Workflow manager
- AggregatorNotice the titles imply varying degrees of granularity. We expect this to be the case for appropriate components. Much of this will depend on the degree of functionality and workflow that is appropriate for consistency across applications and the tools within those applications.