After our preview release last year we heard quite a bit of feedback related to the sharing workflows in the Chandler Web UI. Many people seemed to immediately grasp how useful it is to be able to send links to friends and collaborators that can be plugged into Chandler Desktop or directly into a web browser for instant view-only or view-and-edit access to the contents of a collection. Unfortunately, until Chandler Server 0.15, released in May of this year, actually getting at these links was pretty difficult.

The solution to this problem, the collection sharing dialog you can find on Chandler Hub today, solves this problem and more. Any time you’d like to share your Chandler Hub data with other people or even just other applications you use, this starting point will make everything else easier.

Today we’ll two follow users, Adam and Zed, as they run through a sharing worflow we think you’ll find useful.

Invite Collaborators

Adam and Zed are coaching their sons’ soccer team, the Beagles. Adam has been using Chandler at work, and creates a new collection to help with the mountain of organization that will need to take place. He has published this collection to http://hub.chandlerproject.org and would like Zed to give him some feedback on a proposed practice schedule.

After logging into the Hub Web UI, Adam clicks on the pulldown arrow next to “Soccer” to bring up the collection sharing dialog.

He then clicks on the “invite” button to generate two sharing links.

Finally, he right clicks on the “View and Edit” sharing link and selects Send link…. He could also just copy the link location and paste it manually into the email or instant message program of his choice.

When Zed gets the link he can paste it into his favorite web browser and instantly review and edit Adam’s practice schedule. What’s more, if he wants to start using the Chandler Desktop client, he can use this link to subscribe to this collection there.

Collaborate with iCal

Zed’s not ready to take the Chandler Desktop plunge. It’s not that he doesn’t like Chandler, but he’s been a die-hard Apple iCal fan for years. Fortunately, iCal and Chandler work great together. Once Zed pastes the link he received from Adam into his web browser, he’s excited to see a big green button on the left side of the screen labeled “Apple iCal, Google.” He clicks it and follows the instructions in the dialog that appears to add this collection to iCal. Unfortunately, due to underlying technical restrictions he won’t be able to edit the collection or add new events from iCal. Fortunately, Zed has bookmarked the link Adam sent him, and can do all the editing he needs there.

Sky’s the Limit

Hub interoperability doesn’t end with support for Apple iCal. Several other clients, including the Lightning Calendaring Extension for Mozilla Thunderbird, have built in support for CalDAV, a calendar sharing standard. Hundreds of feed readers, usually used for keeping track of blogs and news, can subscribe to the Atom based collection feeds provided by Chandler Hub. Instructions for each of these methods can be found in the collection sharing dialog and the Chandler Project wiki.