Your friend should speak to src, who has been thinking about the same thing with respect to a non-spammy Evite over SMTP and POP.

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The "Oh fuck. He's right" part is funny, when viewed from a position of 'not my project'. Which is most people.

Quality essay. I just re-read all of gruntle, thanks for something new.

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i would argue that a lot of reasonable people working in large(r) companies do want the sort of thing it sounds like he's working on. i've been listening to a lot of grumblings lately about how although nobody really likes MS exchange, it does a lot of things in one place that really SHOULD be done in one place that there isn't a good alternative for. i am obviously not a managing asshole type, but i'd really like to see a good "free groupware system." it could make stupid problems at work go away, which would mean i could get home sooner, which would give me more time to get back to the more serious business of getting laid.

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Novell's HQ is now in no flyover state but... Massachusetts, bluest of the Blue States (that's blue as in "sad", "the state of denial", etc.).

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Thank you. Lots of good points to ponder for me to ponder as I try to streamline the homegrown E-Learning and intranet system at the school where I work.

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But we love wscullin anyway.

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Do you ever miss working on this sort of thing full time?

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Ok, I feel like a tard because I have no fucking clue was groupware is.

Also, I drive up 101 every now and then and get to wonder what the fuck "middleware" is.

In my universe "middleware" would be a waistcoat or something.

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Dude. It is possible to get some laid by creating a really really really really really really useful software product. Take single sign-on for example.

It takes many man hours to configure a server to do single sign-on just right, and by "just right" I mean "linked into AD and Exchange". If there were an open-source project that bridged 20 million different gaps and let you do something so incredibly weird as be productive, for instance in a way that Microsoft paid-for products could not allow you to be, you could immediately switch ignorant users to a new platform just for the fact that they could work easier. And that my friend will get you laid at any geek convention.

Unfortunately, single sign-on is a myth. You simply can't tie together every competing product in the market and have a true seamlessly working environment, or there wouldn't be any competition anymore really ("who gives a shit about Product B, Product A will interoperate if someone else is using Product B so might as well go with the one that works [A]."). What's my point? I wish I knew... I guess it's that you don't need to only code for the ignorant masses in order to get praise, much less like what you're doing. If it's new and innovative (to the person) they'll hack away at it as long as it takes.

Asterisk is the perfect example. Did that fucker Mark have hundreds of girls humping his leg when he was developing Asterisk? Nope. Were there thousands of soccer moms begging to get ahold of his src? Nope. However, if I didn't suck ass at C I would have tried to help him out with development when the project wasn't quite popular yet. Even when I didn't have an FXO card I thought it was a cool idea and wanted to try it out. Now he's the king of Voipland, and dozens of hackers and coders want to use his product.

Now, it is difficult to encourage people to work on Groupware suites, mostly because you already know it's a very large task and nobody wants to work on a large task alone. That doesn't mean you couldn't go about it in the right way as to entice 22 year old virgins to get the ground under the project's feet. For instance, if you could develop an app that was not only as intuitive and powerful as Outlook but was prettier and more fun to use and you knew you could switch every single moronic manager to it just by looking at it, that would be one heck of a project to be a developer on. It's like the distros; if there's a sweetass idea people will flock to it in droves. Gentoo has probably accumulated developers faster than any other distro that has lived. (they also probably have much less stringent requirements on their developers, as you pretty much only need to know bash and a little python to modify something, but you get the point)

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ramble:

there is no good group open source group calendaring thing right now. at ye olde EFF we use a real life wallhanging calendar to schedule conference rooms, because there's no awesome open source solution for us. i would leap for joy if nat et al could create something i'd want to use for scheduling meetings n' crap like that.

OSAF is apparently working on something which might help though:
http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_Compelling_Vision.htm

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What's all this nonsense about designing software for the user? Don't you know there's no money in that? You gotta aim for the Corporations and the Managers with Big Budgets and Little Brains. I'd think your time at Netscape would've taught you something about that...

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You are spot on. If someone could create a open protocol web-enabled version of Microsoft Outlook's enterprise calendaring I would be one giant step closer to nirvana. I have my hopes on Mozilla's Sunbird but right now they're just hopes. Sunbird's calendar sharing is possible but not trivially easy.


P.S. Ever consider touring the country speaking at universities or large (Fortune 100) companies (paid or otherwise)?

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You are right... I thought "everyone" had acknowledged how lame ALL calendaring software is, and how especially lame non-Exchange/Outlook calendaring software is.

The trick is, I bet the actual useful "spirit" of groupware will arise from a simple, good, useful app like they are (now) describing with Hula. If people are able to easily publish their schedule and organize events, and this is done with a good focus on the user and usability, then this will be a great way to organize a team as a side effect. And by taking that approach, you toss out all the silty garbage that usually gets tossed into groupware.

I'm glad you talked some sense into him/them...

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Nat spends far too much time talking to middle managers.

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When I had first read about Hula, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth that I could not understand even has a I got excited about what I could do with it. Now I know. "Groupware", for me, has always been software that was beareaucrat-laden, bloated software that never did what I wanted it to do (at least not easily) and always tried to stick me into using its Magic Format^(tm). As I read more about Hula, the dark shadows of poor prior experiences flickered in the back of my head.

As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes I have looked at software from the "will this get me (a 20 year old male college student)?" viewpoint. Hula stands as a piece of software that I would like to incorporate into a nice little server for my large, extended family to communicate and another little set up for close friends. Getting laid isn't high up on the list of possible "direct results" but, indirectly, I might just be getting lucky. *rimshot*

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So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

This is the single best, or at the very least the most entertainingly succinct, summation I've seen recently of why so much software sucks so badly. I've always said that software should fundamentally improve a persons life in some measurable way (good calendars and good photo management sofware do this), but your way is much funnier.

'Cause otherwise software just drives me to drink. Oh wait, being a lush improves my life. Never mind.

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Very good. My only quibble (as other's have alluded) is that real, honest to god, 22-year olds in cubilcs just want to book a fucking meeting room already and not have to get there and find someone else in it and dick around all afternoon trying to have the damn meeting when they could just be getting laid (or at least thinking about/planning it).

That's the only _real_ killer feature in Outlook for most real people. But it's a doozy. Hopefully we don't need to bring in all the other crap to get it.

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Here's the thing, you're so right. Those are all great ideas. As much as I hate to say it though, I'd love to able to use something better than Lotus Notes. Maybe I could use something that didn't eat a sack of dicks?

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Having my published .ics files parsed into an html calendar on my website hasn't gotten me laid (any more than I would have otherwise).

Maybe I should pimp my evite clone more (needs a better name than 'Invitotron' tho).

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The funny part is that people that develop groupware read your blog as well... like me. Crap alpha groupware mind you.

Now you've made me go back to scratch and rewrite the requirements, damn you.

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LMAO! id say the real challenge to the world is for someone to produce software that a solicitor can use. of the 30 lawyers i work with in a medium sized government division, theres probably half a dozen who can find the on/off switch. most of them use paper diaries and think groupware is a single unisex powersuit assigned to the division. please someone create a program that, when i send an urgent email to a lawyer, pops up on their screen in hot pink letters, doesnt let them do anything else until theyve read it, and possibly emits an electric shock through the keyboard if they dont!

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"The first thing you want to do is make it trivially easy for someone to publish their calendar,.... Right now people can do that by publishing .ics files, ... If it's not HTML hanging off our friend's home page that can be viewed in any browser on a public terminal in a library, the bar to entry is too high and it's useless."

I should point out, phpicalendar was a project which created PHP scripts which allowed you to plop little .ics files in a folder and magically have them appear as themed HTML anywhere on your personal site. There was a one-time setup you had to do, but it mainly involved little things like the URL, and if the week started on Monday or Sunday.

For some reason, the actual phpicalendar site say it's "... willingly offline until further notice.," but you can still get copies of the source.

I find it very handy to be able to sync my Palm to KDE, then export that to a website. I just wish there was an automation to keep note fields private (not exported), and have the calendar auto-exported on sync (rather than me generating an ics file every time). I suspect there is a Mac sync tool that does this, and that I could write a KDE sync plugin for it...

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To do this, they bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. They bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. Somehow, Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape: it was like Netscape had gotten acquired instead of the other way around.

For whatever reason, this seems to be a recurring theme: the bought company ends up borging and managing the buying one. It's happened at all too many places I've worked.

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Dude,
I hear your old Netscape story, feel your pain (I used to work with some of the Collabra people at GO), and think you can write a great story. But ...
I've just spent the last month looking for a decent OS *lightweight* groupware product to replace MS Exchange + MS Project.

There is a real demand for a decent product like that -- look at how BaseCamp is doing. Might not get you laid, but will get you paid + cred.

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Wouldn't it have been equally as funny to see the Hula team jump through all the same hoops that you did?

Funny in a thank goodness it isn't me, way.

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