As part of the next generation discussion project Steve Castledine, Peter Presnell and I have started to prototype a couple of ideas for the next version of the discussion template.

Over time we obviously want to add new features but at this point we're thinking about how to improve the basic user experience, esp. the navigation model. For both the web as well as the rich client user interfaces we want to allow users to better find the topics they are interested in. Additionally our goal is to improve the navigation within one topic thread. For example while writing a new response it needs to be possible to easily see other documents of this thread.

We're thinking about allowing you to use these prototypes live but we may only do this after we'll have open sourced the template (Notes 8.5.1). In order to get some feedback earlier we want to create some short videos like this one.

In this video I demonstrate one new possible user interface for the rich client. I call it the 'wide screen' prototype since it uses a new column to display the thread and a document preview. The goal is to minimize switching between different tabs. The goal was not to provide new features and one thing that will change in later iterations is the dated green style.

Please provide feedback as response to this document in the project area.

Here is the demo:



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