Handling of private/confidential groupware objects

[Bernhard Reiter]

Am Mittwoch, 7. Dezember 2005 03:54 schrieb Helge Hess:
> On 6. Dez 2005, at 16:30 Uhr, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> > I agree on the general point that there are marking and access
> > control.
> >
> >> The intention is to make the information consumer aware of the
> >> sensitivity of the data. Eg a secretary won't open a file marked "top
> >> secret" but rather pass it on to her general (but she stil has
> >> access).
> >
> > For this I would say that technology
> > should prevent the secretary having access.
>
> No offense but I don't think that you understood the general point
> (probably my mail was too confusing).
> With marking the secretary _is_ allowed to see the data, it (mostly)
> says how he/she is supposed to deal with it wrt _other_ people.

I think I have understood this. [ Second example below deleted 
for this reason.]
I wanted to point out
that users might miss the concept, 
because technology now is different
and you try to enforce what you want to enforce.

> If you do not want to have the secretary see the item, just remove
> the permissions via access control. Which, as explained, happens
> automatically in Outlook but not in Kontact.

It only happens with Outlook/Exchange, 
not with Outlook/Kolab Connector/Kolab Server.


> >> Or to give another anology: you might tell your friend your personal
> >> income but explicitly tag the information as "private". So he will
> >> know that he must not tell other people or get kicked.
> >
> > Your friend has the information in this case, though.
>
> Err. Which is intentional, did you actually read the sentence you
> quoted? :-)

Yes I did read it.
Again my point is: This is not easy to understand for the user,
as private (sensitivity) does not mean private (access) in this case.

> IMHO the real bug is that the Kontact UI does not make the user aware
> of the fact that this is "just" a marker (only affects the iCalendar
> CLASS property, no ACL settings).
> In contrary, it explicitly labels the checkbox as "Access:" which is
> just wrong. Should be "Sensitivity:".

Yes, "sensitivity" would be a lot better.
I have created bug report 1019 for it.


> > In Martin's example, one extra calendar would be enough,
> > as this is only access control to one person (the user).
> > Because all users have calendar folder, one named private
> > for each of them is enough.
>
> Sorry, when I think about groupware I tend to think about multiuser
> systems, which means shared folders ;-) And in a shared folder the
> private (ACL, not marker) flag  must be per user.

Good point!
I did not think about this at first.
This is another reason against proposal 3).

Thanks,
	Bernhard