Real-time Contact Information
Oct 22nd, 2007 by Aswath
Yesterday’s post describing how EnThinnai handles Availability information and future plans on enhancing it got favorable reviews from a handful of thought leaders. Today I will describe how EnThinnai makes available to your buddies your contact information that is relevant to them and appropriate at the time the query was made.
EnThinnai allows a user to store all sorts of contact information like various telephone number, email addresses, geographical addresses, IM ids and so on. In addition to this, for each piece of contact information, the user can identify which subset of buddies can access that information. The process by which a user can specify the access control list is made simple: when a user adds a new buddy, a pop-up guides the user to specify which contact information the new buddy is allowed to access; for a buddy who is already in the Buddy list, the user can drag and drop the buddy’s name into an icon next to the desired contact information. It is also simple for a buddy to access the contact information of the user: if the user is in the Buddy list of the buddy, then the buddy will just drag and drop the user’s name into the Address Book tab. The system will retrieve all contact information that the user has allowed this buddy to access. Since the user can populate the fields with the current contact information and also can dynamically change the access control list, EnThinnai makes the most up-to-date contact information available to the buddies.
A future release will make this feature more powerful when third party applications will be allowed to both populate the contact information and also add/delete buddies from the access control list. For example, consider the case where the user has scheduled an important conference call with a client. Then the Calendar application can instruct EnThinnai so that all other buddies (except for this client) will not be able to access phone contact information; even this client will be given only the phone number that the user is planning to use for that call.
Wait a minute! You mean to say that buddies need only one information – how to access the user’s EnThinnai. This becomes the user’s “number for life”?
Exactly. But that is for another post.
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