Activities in Connections 2.0

David A Brooks  March 1 2008 12:02:35 PM

In Connections 2.0 we have taken great lengths to re-focus on enabling Activity Centric Collaboration.  What does that mean?  The high level goal is to organize work around the activities people do rather than the tools they use.  Think how you get your work done.  Lets say you receive an email about an opening in your department.  You read through this email and initiate a instant message conversation with your Director.  You and your co-worker each begin drafting a posting that describes the position.  When finished, you post the document and start getting emails from job candidates.  These applicants send you emails with links to websites, resumes, and so-on.  As a team, you collaboratively review the applicants and make hiring recommendations.

Activities enables line of business workers to plan their tasks and create high level structure in the collaborative nature of an Activity while still using all your existing tools (email, instant messaging, word processing, spreadsheets, etc.).  Activity templates allow your business to captures best practices and repeated tasks for easy discovery.

In Activities 1.0, line of business users could create and manage individual activities and their participating members.  These activities had integrated tasks, discussion threads, bookmarks, files (documents, spreadsheets, pictures, etc.), and surfaced with all your familiar applications (email, instant messaging, etc.). This enables in-context collaboration while organizing and sharing via a higher level Activity.

Activities 2.0 brings this a step forward by introducing the concept of flexible entry types.  Activities is no longer restricted to adding a predefined entry types (such as a file or a bookmark or a message) to an Activity.  While creating an entry you can choose the characteristics of an entry that correlate to the task at hand.  Returning to the job candidate example, you want to list all applicants in an Activity.  An applicant has a name, contact info, a resume, a date of availability, and a link to an his or her external website or blog.  In the new flexible entry types of Activities, the freedom is yours.

Creating an entry now provides any number of options in addition to the basic meta-data:



I have filled in an applicant's name and will click "Attach File" to add his resume.  Not only can I attache a file, I can give the field name a unique value for this entry type.  In this case it is a "Resume".  Doing this is as simple as clicking on the field name and re-labeling:



Next I want to add additional field attributes. As you can see I have added a homepage link, a phone number, and I am about to add a space for the applicant's date of availability.  I will chose a custom property type for dates which will provide a date picker on this field.



Once I am done creating an entry, I can go ahead and save.  Now that I have one applicant in the Activity.  I want to create more.  Under more actions, I can save the entry type I just created for re-use:



You are next presented with a simple dialog where you can give the entry type a name and an icon.  Instead of choosing an existing Icon, I have selected to upload my own.  Next I review the field names and click save.


You'll note now that the entry within the Activity not only has the custom fields, but also has an associated entry type icon:



Most importantly, you and the other authors and owners of this activity can create new entries like this entry from the "Add Entry" button:



Next we want to create some structure around our Activity and I will use the new Sections feature to accomplish this.  By Clicking "Add Section", I am presented with a simple dialog to give the section a title and can hit save.  I will create a section for job applicants, for interview questions, and the interview schedule and move the Frank Adams applicant entry into the Applicants section:


In the screen shot above, we have three sections with the interview schedule section open.  In this section I have a task assigned to interview Frank on March 20th and Suzanne has replied with a comment for me to add my interview questions into the Activity.    Suzanne and I are now able to collaboratively plan the process of hiring a new employee and when finished, we can use the power of Activity templates to share the overall structure (sections and new entry types) for others who are interested in hiring a new employee.

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