On Dec 2, 2005, at 9:03 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Mimi Yin wrote:
Well I guess the question is, do we believe anyone uses iCal on OS
X? Does iCal provide enough features for calendar use on Mac?
Given that, would it be safe to assume that Chandler, being cross-
platform and providing read-write sharing would be just as if not
more useful?
*Anecdotal evidence 1:* I've a friend who's working with his
daughter's school trying to come up with a solution for the
teachers to edit and publish calendars. Those teachers are on Mac
and use iCal. The sharing feature is not good enough for them
because lots of students have PCs. Why don't they use a web
calendar? I suspect an offline story (the teacher updating the
calendar on her Mac laptop while not necessarily being connected)
but I can't confirm that. Anyway, he was very interested by
Chandler and the possibility of using Cosmo to share. The fact that
it's still "experimental" is however an issue for him.
*Take away:* People are using iCal but bumping into its single
platform limitation real fast. What's preventing me right now to
advertise Chandler more widely though and recommend it to such
people is our lack of schema evolution. This is going to be a show
stopper for most people. Ted already mentioned this as a hindrance
to "Get more users".
I think everyone acknowledges this is extremely important which is
why it's on the list of projects for 0.7.
*Anecdotal evidence 2:* I'd like to share why I feel supporting
"free-busy" and "invite" is so important. I've been working in
places where Outlook/Exchange was heavily used. I was not a heavy
calendar user before but, once in these organizations, I maintained
a full calendar. Most of it was actually filled up automatically:
I'd accept/reject invites and things would get magically updated.
Free-busy made the time scheduling process easy compared to the old
hit and miss game. Honestly, it's hard to get back to no free-busy
and no invite. It's a little as if I was without e-mail, condemned
to use only News and old fashioned BBS. My calendar is an island if
it's not connected with others and it's only marginally useful
frankly. Not that everything was rosy with Outlook Calendar. Far
from it! Because free busy was buried in the invite mechanism, I
couldn't see when my coworkers were around easily. I resorted to
create temp invite that I would erased once I got the info...
Resource scheduling was similarly bad with no way to see all the
conf rooms at once. Expiring recurring events would throw even
senior staff meeting in lala land. Absurd "organizer" status meant
that the burden of exchanging info between the participants was
solely on the organizer shoulders. Not to mentioned that if the
organizer was changed or simply sick, changing the meeting was
impossible...
*Take away:* Having calendars all connected is what makes calendars
useful. Integrated communication is what makes them manageable.
"free-busy" can take other forms than Outlook incarnation which is
far from perfect. Having shared calendars is actually better than
digging in fictituous invites. If we could support a special "time
outline" sharing option, one could have a form of free busy in
Chandler right now and I think it could actually be better than
"free busy" (Mimi, Alec and others already threw ideas along those
lines). "invite" also does not mean full e-mail support (Alec
proposed something already). That could also be done in sticking
event proposals somewhere in a shared calendar and have the sharees
notified that something new has been posted. The Notes field could
log the ensuing time negotiation and meeting prep (complete with
attached docs if possible...). Could be as good as e-mail. At least
it would avoid cut and paste. One thing would make everything
easier with sharing: if a whole group could use one single Cosmo
URL for all instead of having to share independent calendars
location on an individual basis. That would make integrating new
people in a group really easy.
This is very much in line with the designs that have been floating
around for quite some time. I can see combining another flavor of
shared calendars (free-busy info with time slots and no details) as
well as some kind of notification being really useful and a good
first step.
I will let Lisa and/or Morgen comment on the single URL issue.
- Philippe
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