I wanted to pass along my best-available docs of "what works and what
doesn't" in the whole Chandler Ecosystem; details are here:
http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/InteropOverview#Interop%20details
Please note, I expect there are some errors in here, maybe some silly
ones. I sorely could use edits from people who use these
applications, or know additional bits/caveats/bug-numbers/etc to add
to the list. There's more institutional knowledge in our emails,
bugzilla, irc, etc than has been transcribed here, but if people could
point out the holes and errors, that'd be very helpful.
I can imagine better formats, but this section is an abbreviated view
of as many of the "interop pairs" as I've categorized so far. These
are little pairs of apps or protocols, with an implied "From -> To"
relationship. Each has a few words about what works and what doesn't,
to the best of my knowledge.
We inherently care about some of these pairs ("Chandler Desktop ->
Exchange") more than others ("Chandler Hub -> Yahoo calendar"), so
I've attempted to roughly sort the list with the most interesting bits
at top.
There have been a couple of "ahas" for me in compiling this list. Top
of mind:
- None of the interop apps really have any way to add/delete
collections on their own; that function seems likely to stay a
Chandler Desktop/Hub-only feature. Note: some clients do try to use
the open CalDAV standards to create a new collection, but in like iCal
3's case, trying to do so corrupts the iCal app and puts into into a
bad state.
- Two big interop features, "subscribe to an offsite *.ics URL or
CalDAV collection and overlay" and "import ICS file", are things that
many clients can do now but aren't likely to be available to the
"standalone Hub user" for quite a while.
- No client really interops all that well with Chandler Hub. Outlook,
iCal 3, Lightning, Evo all have significant issues. All the read-only
workflows work much better than the writable workflow.
- The Hub can "value-add" a web UI on top of any collection that gets
published to it, which could be an interesting marketing point.
Upcoming next steps are a blog post with user-facing language
describing what's "interop-possible" right now with Outlook, iCal 3,
and Lightning/Sunbird. I also have a lot of fact-checking to do, to
ensure instructions are good.
One other comment: as part of Cosmo releases, the cosmo devs (Travis
in this case), updated/enhanced the interop instructions for various
clients:
http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/SubscribeToChandlerServer
Thanks! I hope this info is helpful.
-- Jared
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