Re: [SAGE] Pointers for developing needs assessment for enterprisemessaging?

[Trey Harris <trey@usenix.org>]

In a message dated Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Dustin Puryear writes:
> Why doesn't this service exist in the UNIX space? There are web 
> applications to do this, but I will be the first to say it's nice to have 
> all of your contacts and calendars integrated into one piece of software. 
> We have IMAP which gives us server-side storage, but where is the shared 
> calendar component? Has there been any work on this? It seems that with 
> this one component there would be a real competitor to Exchange/Outlook in 
> terms of information management for the desktop.

My feeling on this is that the loss of Netscape as a major player really
hurt here.  Netscape was reasonably committed to building
open-standards-based products, and they were at the forefront of the IETF
calendaring projects.  But to this day, only one RFC (regarding the
scheduling object format) has appeared, and it's now three years old.  
(This was the part that Lotus and Microsoft agreed to cooperate on, and
Netscape was happy to get out of the way, since it would give them an
obvious way to migrate people from those other two PIMs to Netscape's.)  

I receded from the IETF groupware arena at about the same time, so I can't
say for sure, but it seems to me to be moribund.  It's sad, really; if the
IETF calendaring and other groupware had the results that IMAP4rev1 did, I
think we'd be in very good shape.  Maybe I'm just tooting my own horn,
since I was on the IMAP4 WG, but I think IMAP4rev1 was excellent work.

-- 
Trey Harris
Secretary and Executive
SAGE -- The System Administrators Guild (www.sage.org)
Opinions above are not necessarily those of SAGE.