I work in a small organisation. There's only two full-time employees year-round, one part-time, and some seasonal staff. We produce yearly events, film-festivals. The way we work is project based. We store files on the server within a project. We attempt to do the same for email. The problem is that mail is stored in individual identity databases. Once an event is finished it would be great to be able to store the mail within the project folder in a way that anyone can read it, search it and navigate it easily. Currently there is no easy way to do it. Of course there are some crude ways of doing it, some involve other software, like FileMaker, but then this means there is another interface someone has to learn. When you have new staff for each event, that is going to slow people down. Another would be to store the whole identity. That requires you to copy it to your Documents folder and then change your identity. This has problems of having multiple copies on different peoples computers, as well as the possibility of not realising your in another identity.
I would like to suggest a solution, for a future version of Entourage. I was wondering what the members of this mailing list think of it. I propose a file format which can store mail and folders, separate to the user's identity folder and database. These files could be stored and created anywhere on the file system. An Entourage user could create or open one. An icon and name would appear in the left pane of the Entourage main window. The user could also close it. It would then be removed from the window. The file could also be dragged from the Finder to the pane, to make it appear there. There would also be a way to opening the file as read-only, or just allowing it to be opened if the permissions only allow it to be read. It should be possible for multiple users to concurrently open a read-only file. This file, as listed in the pane, would work like a mail account. It would have a folder structure which the user could navigate. Clicking on a folder would display a list of the messages contained in it in the right pane of the window. The user can also use Entourage's search functions to locate mail in the file. Of course, there should be full AppleScript access to the file, as well as opening, closing and creating the files. I don't believe you should be able use it in rules. The file may not be 'mounted', which would break the rule. I think this would satisfy my needs. I could then store in the project folder files for each person who worked on an event. Anyone working later would be able to read the correspondence from previous events. I think it would also satisfy the needs of others who want to archive mail out of their main database. I am interested in hearing what others think of this solution. -- Matthew Smith -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
