Categories in grids and other suggestions

[crcowan]

Hello, I'm a new registered user and have a few suggestions and a question. Suggestions first:

1) You could provide a very powerful addition by taking advantage of what I will term "categories" in the related items grids. By categories I refer to the hierarchy of links and assignments in the data explorer. By assigning a link you are in effect categorizing an info item. You would need to be able to show multiple items in a cell of the grid (an info item can be assigned via multiple links). You should have the ability to choose what is shown in the grid cell based on a "category" as a header. For example, if an info item is linked to a child of the category which is a header you might show the name of the particular child, or a "yes/no" indication to show it was assigned to any particular child of that category. The model I am thinking has best been implemented in an old Lotus product called Agenda. See this page for more information and the ability to download and experiment with Agenda: http://home.neo.rr.com/pim/alinks.htm . You have many of the beginnings of what you need (and it is one of the reasons I registered) and adding some of the other capabilties of Agenda could rock the marketplace. Everything from hierarchical inheritance to autoassign are things you could do with your model. Some of these things, of course, would show up in the attributes pane as well.

2) The grids should be able to show all of the children of a particular parent (not just the direct descendants).

3) I'd like to be able to have a rich text page that I can place information into for stored files. It is rather stark with just the "click here" line(s). I can imagine pasting an image of the title slide of a powerpoint deck, or the first page of a word document . You could probably just use your rich editor and add a button to the top to launch the document rather than the click here line. (of course, automatically extracting the first page (or so) of a document as it is being stored (with the ability to replace or delete it) and placing it in the rich field would be even better)

4) XML (preferable) or other import/export for items including rich text, attributes, etc as a connected whole.

5) I second requests for user defined "forms" like the contact form (with each field reflected as attributes).

6) Automatic creation of attributes. You could extract some level of information from many types of files when they are imported (eg: document author from Word, exposure settings from digital pictures). I suggest a plug-in architecture for which you publish the API. Let others create plugins the return to you a blob (or blobs) for the document and associated attributes.

7) Please don't turn this into a standard calendar/contact type of PIM, major in information management.

Question: (or perhaps really a request for more documentation) What does the attribute "Original Parent" mean?

Thanks for a remarkable first release. I appreciate the opportunity to make suggestions, and I wish you the best!