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Perhaps I should have said: calendaring uses CalDAV, and the address book uses CardDAV — whether or not there are Outlook connectors / addons for these, I don't know, but there appear to be at least some Windows-based clients for each (Cal, Card). Although whether your userbase would want to use these rather than Outlook is perhaps more questionable.

Perhaps I should have said: calendaring uses CalDAV, and the address book uses CardDAV — whether or not there are Outlook connectors / addons for these, I don't know, but there appear to be at least some Windows-based clients for each (Cal, Card). Although whether your userbase would want to use these rather than Outlook is perhaps more questionable.

While the state of calendaring has gotten better, partly due to these guys, there's still plenty of distance to go. You can't do calendaring without thinking about it, like you can with e-mail. You can't write an app that _easily_ provides a button for "schedule a haircut with my favorite hair-cutter". If you're talking about mobilizing a community for changing the world, let's solve the calendar stuff.

Apple's iCal Server is Open Source PHP (with Twisted Framework) and based on the new CalDAV open standard. Everyone (with the possible exception of Microsoft) is moving to CalDAV as the open standard. Many big companies (Oracle, IBM, Google) are involved with the committee and hopefully the holy grail of inter-operable calendaring systems - including free/busy, invitations etc - is finally on the horizon.

The server just officially went gold with Leopard but has actually been done for a while now. Apple's iCal Server and (closed source) Client are currently the most polished products but now that there is a solid CalDAV server I expect that the various clients with gain alot of polish and other CalDAV servers should start to roll out as well.

Check out the CALCONNECT standards body for more information: http://www.calconnect.org/

=tkk

PS Microsoft is finally a member but their commitment level is not that of the other partners.

... as soon as Leopard comes out they'll lose all their customers:

From the article, it says that Apple's introducing an iCal Server, based on interoperability standards from the CalConnect Consortium. From that website, it shows that Google also joined the consortium a couple weeks ago. Leopard's iCal will, no doubt, be a much more groupware-capable client all on its own -- it's not hard to conclude that before long things will be working together quite nicely without the need for third-party syncing tools.

With all these tech companies supposedly "selling" Linux solutions, the time has never been better to offer an Evolution client for Linux, Windows, and Mac that works with a feature-rich server on the order of Exchange Server. Yet there has been (to my knowledge) no real effort to improve the groupware solutions beyound straight-up LDAP, SMTP, IMAP, and NNTP. Those are great technologies, but they're not particularly good at providing a cohesive groupware solution. At least, not without some sort of design for how they could be used to provide the missing functionality. (Calendaring is perhaps the least addressed of the missing features.)

I wonder if this guy is upset because his particular subset of Yahoo! didn't get all of the budget that he thought they should? I hear the people that say Yahoo! should focus on something "great" - but you know what, a lot of people who say that really mean "do something that makes the stock price go up, so I can unload and make a killing rather than the profit I would currently make, which I feel is meager". Yahoo does a lot of things that are "good enough". Yes, they could use improvements, but on the other hand most of them "just work" and their target market is not the Slashdot crowd of technological bleeding-edge early adopters, but closer to Grandpa and Grandma who want to use "that Internet thing".. and for them, Yahoo works pretty well (so did AOL for that matter I guess). They also do some other things that may be of more long-term benefit to everyone, things like being a member of the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium, a group trying to help solve the calendar interoperability problems which still plague us all. That might not be of immediate benefit, but sometime in the relatively near future you'll be able to schedule time with someone no matter what calendar tool they user - and that will be a major deal.