Documents (viewing, printing, records, ...)

User group: Visitor, Staff, Project Group, Repairman, Fireman

Location: Office, Meeting/Conference Room, Shared Laboratory, Library, Printer/Photocopier/FAX Room

Scenario

You're standing at the copier copying a paper when you notice an announcement: "Turn in your timesheets today" hanging on the wall. You don't have any timesheets left in your office, so you use the PALplate to print one out from the list of public documents.
While you're there, you also access your private dicuments and print out the file where you've been keeping track of your hours online. It takes you almost no time to find this file because the document browser automatically brings up documents which have been modified recently, and you add to your hours every day.
You need to print out some slides. Rather than putting slides in the printer tray, running back to your office to start the print job, and hoping that someone else hasn't started a job and printed on your transparancies, you simply access your private slides document from the PALplate in the printer room, put your transparancies in the printer tray, and print.
You need to figure out how many hours of vacation you've earned so far this year, so you bring up your timesheet on a PALplate and check.
There's a talk in the meeting room today at 11:00 and you want to find out what it's about. You walk over to the meeting room PALplate and bring up the blurb.

Interface

You can view both public and private documents. Documents accessible by you once you are authenticated include documents owned by you or any group you are a part of. Documents can be viewed, printed, or, if they are form-based, modified (eg timesheets). Documents are filed with properties (used, eg, in the Directory for searching) such as "fax machine" "lounge" "coke machine #2" "meeting room" or "Jen Mankoff". Documents are "chosen" to show up in a list box based on combinations of properties. For example, documents with the "fax" property would show up in any room containing a fax machine. Documents with the "96F Fax" property would only show up in rooms containing that specific type of fax machine. Documents with the "Jen Mankoff" and "Lounge" property would only show up when Jen Mankoff was authenticated at a PALplate in a lounge.

The interface to the public list of documents is relatively simple -- one listbox, or possible several sorted by topic. The interface to private documents is a bit more complicated: In that case, you may need to provide a way to browse the user's raw file system. We haven't tested this, but we think that in general, documents which have been edited recently (or printed recently) are more likely to be viewed/printed. Thus, the initial interface presented when the user authenticates him/herself is a list of documents that fit into that category. From there, the user can browse their file system if the document they are looking for isn't present.

Issues

Privacy

The system needs to notice when the user has walked away and time out. It should probably start making noise or flashing after a very small amount of idle time.

Hardware

???

Software

There needs to be software support for browsing a file system with a touchscreen computer. The user needs to be able to easily and accurately select one file from a list or hierarchy.

How do you deal with, eg, Word files, which need special software to view/print? Or is this a problem ... talk to someone who might know.

Network

The kiosk needs to be able to speak to the printer and to the user's home file system.