[Desktop_architects] Most wanted Application: Email

Bryce Harrington bryce at osdl.org
Wed Dec 21 17:15:26 PST 2005


On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 05:35:31PM -0500, Mike Shaver wrote:
> On 21-Dec-05, at 4:58 PM, Timothy D. Witham wrote:
> >    2) Group calendaring including meeting scheduling.	
> >		i..e.  I want to check if Tom, Bill, Linus and Buddy the 
> >		wonder
> >		       dog are available at 10:00 PM.
> >	      This includes a laptop resyncing when it gets back to a
> >               connected state and the last know schedule being
> >              available on a server.
> 
> That's not email, but OK, I definitely believe that it's a barrier to  
> adoption.  Evo has that capability with Exchange now, though -- what  
> are the cases in which that breaks down?

> >   This seems to be the problem as folks keep doing new clients  
> >when the
> >issues is the server side stuff.
> 
> I don't understand -- Linux desktop deployment is gated by there not  
> being open source servers on Linux for mail and calendaring?  Why are  
> those related?  The Linux desktop could deploy against Exchange/ 
> GroupWise/Notes/etc., no?
> 
> Thanks for the list, though -- what's the source of those pain  
> points?  From the comments in the survey?

We've heard this from several sources over the years.  I also did an
evaluation of calendar/email systems a few years back.  I know there's
been a good deal of work in this area, so this report is fairly dated,
but I don't think it's considered a solved problem quite yet...

    http://www.osdl.org/projects/cmptblclndrng/results/

I should add that we've considered starting a project to help address
the remaining issues, but our take is that the remaining issues are
_quite hard_ to solve, and at the time it wasn't clear which of the
existing calendaring efforts were worth focusing on.

We ended up going with a non-OSS calendaring server called Synchronize.
We didn't want to go with Exchange/GroupWise/Notes due to cost, Linux
compatibility, and other reasons, however I'd imagine other
organizations wouldn't be quite as gated by the desire for all-OSS
solutions and might find their cost acceptable.

Bryce



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