On Mar 10, 2008, at 5:01 PM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
[snip]
> * A way of sending emails to XWiki so they can be stored, archived and
> referenced from a wiki page.
Yep, I remember some talking about this.
BTW I wonder if XWiki Watch could be used for this? We'd just need to
hook a mailbox + a POP module (or a mailing list archive reader) and
it should work just fine I think.
I'm not sure this is the most relevant way to do it.
I don't agree. What you have in mind is a simple email storage/search facility. However leverage watch we get much more:
* The ability to tag/filter interesting mails. Since the problem with mails is that the information is scattered a bit everywhere, I think it's useful to be able to say that such email is flagged as containing interesting information for example.
* The ability to reuse an existing interface with all its niceness
* Emails are just a source of information. I recall Ludovic saying that Watch was designed to allow different input sources. For example for AFP we had discussed using Watch to read their existing documents and presenting them in Watch.
* The Watch Email plugin would be easily plugged onto a mailing list (by having a watch user subscribed to the list for example). Another plugin would be one that plugs on the email list manager (and thus can request past emails, etc).
* When Watch gets new features added our email feature also gets features added automatically.
* Watch can be seen as a generic tool for managing information source feeds.
There's another option. Create a forum application to manage mails in the same as Jive is doing it with their forum:
They also support plugging in their forum onto an existing mailing list which is great.
IMO going the Watch route would be a good thing to try as a POC or as a GSOC since it shouldn't be too hard to do.
The email is converted into a wiki page with an unique identifier based on its subject, sender, date etc.
This is true with Watch too.
The page metadata uses the email info to fill in the author & creation date. A check would probably be needed for protected page (add the email only if the sender's email adresses matches the one of an user who has rights on that page).
An index page lists all the email and allows filtering & searching them.
A macro allows to quote a mail in a page (could be done with #includeTopic(MailArchive.UniqueEmailIdentifier) actually)
Anyway more discussions would be needed to decide whether that application would be worth making it into XE 1.4 (though I'd be glad to have it).
[snip]