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Originally Posted by Janice
Other than doing something convoluted (in my opinion), like creating 10 different contexts that include the needed resource tool at the top of the chain, e.g. Phone : Agenda : Jane, Email : Agenda : Jane or Meeting : Agenda : Jane, what's your recommendation to capture status and context simultaneously?
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OK, I see what you're getting at. Like dansays, I guess I've been considering the needed resource to be simply Jane and not Calls or Email or Meeting, so I just put it all in Agenda:Jane. In general, I try to keep my contexts as simple as possible, which sometimes means I see things I can't really do but means that it's less likely that I'll miss something I could be doing. (So while I do have a general Phone context, I reserve that for things like making an appointment with the dentist, and not for agenda items with team members.)
But I'm not trying to foist my particular structure on everyone else using OmniFocus: I understand what you're trying to do and it seems reasonable enough.
One of the items we're planning for 1.0 is limited metadata support, similar to what we currently have in OmniPlan. This means that you will be able to add your own arbitrary attributes to all objects in OmniFocus (actions, contexts, projects, and folders) and to access those later. For example, you could use metadata to add tags or people to your actions.
What I mean by limited support is that we're trying to just provide the basic metadata capture and retrieval in an inspector in 1.0 (because we want to finish what we've already started and ship!), so we'll be missing a big piece of the puzzle: building arbitrary queries (possibly as smart folders) which can reference different pieces of metadata. (Leopard provides a*nice query-building interface in Leopard which we'd like to leverage for this in 2.0.) You will be able to access the metadata from AppleScript and do some smart logic that way, but that's not really an accessible feature for most of our target audience.
Looking ahead to OmniFocus 2.0, we're planning integration with OmniPlan, so that you can build a project plan (with complex dependencies) in OmniPlan, delegate actions from that plan to team members who are using OmniFocus, and have them update their own status in the plan as they work through their action lists. But, again, we want to ship what we've already started first!