Klees, Richard [rklees], 2025-05-12:

Dear Michael and Oliver,

I really like that proposal. One question: Did you consider moving that substructure below "Communication > Mail"? If so, could you iterate the reasons why it should go into the "Tools" instead?

I wondered why we would want to have that indirection. Take for the example the case where I would want to write a new Mail. With that option in the "Tools" I would need to click "Communication", then "Mail", then page would be reloaded. Then I would (probably...) need to click "Tools" and then "New Mail". With the substructure located in the normal main bar substructure, I would need to click "Communcation", then "Mail", then "New Mail" and would directly drop in the according form.

Kind regards!

Samoila, Oliver [oliver.samoila], 2025-05-12:

Thanks Richard for your comment.
I'm a bit confused as to which ‘element’ is in which and then interacts with the others and how. (Maybe just a language thing on my side. ;) Sorry.)
I would suggest that we discuss this at the JourFixe meeting.

What I had also considered – and this brings us to the pending (Project) Splitting-up Tools – is to have the mail as »the one tool« in use.
This would lead to the following structure – see MockUp. To clarify: there is no second tool in the context of Mail.

(I didn't want to open 'Pandora's box', but I think it would be great if we could make an impulse and first step in real in the direction of (Project) Splitting-up Tools).

What I don't think I would do is to always use a Drilldown to the ‚Mail' in the main menu entry ‘Communication’ and then display all the entries (‘New Mail’ ... ‘Inbox’ ... ‘Mail Options’).
This feels wrong in terms of the depth structure. It is somehow too much for a main menu entry.
And I also don't know what it does to the loading of the contents of user folders in context of main menu.

Samoila, Oliver [oliver.samoila], 24 OCT 2025: DevIssue for the JourFixe meeting on 27 OCT 2025:

Dear JourFixe,
As part of user testing and further review of the implementation, we would like to decide against a variant in which all mail functions are integrated directly into “Communication” and then form a kind of substructure there.
Why? The user testing is inconclusive – neither Yvonne Seiler nor I were able to identify clear preferences.

In addition, we have to note that with this form of integration, queries would have to be made on potentially every page to check both the existence of “Scheduled Mails” and the existence of possible deep structures in “User Folders.” We do not consider this desirable for performance reasons.
This means that we would like to continue working with a ‘Mail’ tool.
 

With this DevIssue in JourFixe, we would also like to address a second finding:

Contrary to what was originally proposed, we cannot work with the planned combinations of ‘Combined Slate’ with ‘Bulky Buttons’ and other ‘Combined Slates’ in it in the Tool Slate. What the mock-up showed for the initial discussion requires a complex slate for the user folder – this does not exist in Tools.

We would like to suggest using a drilldown in the 'Mail' tool slate.
This drilldown shows all relevant entries from 'New Mail' to 'Trash', as well as others. Above all, it supports the not entirely trivial use case of user folders, where you can also dive into manually created folder structures if you have them. In the initial state, there is exactly one User Folder. If you want to go further, these are subsumed together under an entry ‘User Folders’ and then made accessible one level deeper via drilldown. We would like to point out that User Folders can have a maximum depth of »1« anyway.

The screenshots will certainly help you understand. However, I can also briefly show the current development in JourFixe.

Additional note: When using the drilldown, we have noticed that it can no longer be delivered without the corresponding filter. We are familiar with this from the 'Add New Item' dialog and the 'Administration' entry in the main menu. I am sure that we wanted this filter to be optional in the UI component at the time, but I did not pursue or check this further once it was integrated. My bad.

If we do not have any underlying 'User Folders' in the ‘Mail' tool slate, then the drilldown is 'flat'. This is foreseeably the most common case. A filter for viewing a flat list is a little much oversized. We would therefore like to be able to hide it.

In our opinion, there are good reasons for wanting to use a drilldown, but perhaps without the filter. This is also evidenced by the ‘Tree(Multi)Select’ UI component, which also hides the filter. A new custom UI component can do this, but our usage of the drilldown cannot do it in a clean way. We have therefore already created a PR for this and, if it is accepted, would like to incorporate this UI usability fix in the beta phase. Due to the short lead time, we did not think it is appropriate to pass our time problem to the UI coordinators, but we would like to resolve it afterwards. We hope you can understand. The PR is #10287.