Dmitry Jemerov's Weblog

Feature spotlight: Workspaces

One of the innovative features of OmniaMea is its support for workspaces. A workspace is a global filter that restricts the information displayed in all views of the program to the resources related to a certain project or activity.

Workspaces are a more high-level information grouping than, for example, e-mail folders. If I create a workspace for the OmniaMea project, I can add to it some contacts (members of my team), some Ooutlook folders (build logs, tracker notifications), some newsgroups (local and public), some RSS feeds (blogs of OmniaMea users) and so on. Then, when the workspace is active, the Outlook folders tree will show only the folders in the workspace, the Correspondents pane will show only the contacts in the workspace, and so on.

Besides information containers (folders or newsgroups), I can also add individual information items (emails or newsgroup posts) to a workspace. Besides that, workspaces can also be divided by the e-mail account through which the e-mail was received. This allows one to keep personal and work-related communication separate and yet handle both from the same program.

Workspaces are also much easier to set up than, for example, custom views. All that is needed to add a resource to a workspace is to drop it on the workspace button or select it in the workspace configuration dialog. You don't need to bother with selecting search criteria, specifying their parameters and so on.

Another purpose of workspaces is notification. The workspace buttons show the count of unread items for each workspace, grouped by resource type. Thus, when a new item arrives, you can quickly see whether it came into your main workspace (and needs to be investigated urgently) or if it's just something that you can read when you have spare time.

The attached screenshot shows an example of an OmniaMea screen with one workspace defined.