OT: An Open Call to Developers
I'm one of seven Technical Support staff persons at a private
university. My team supports the staff and faculty on campus. Another
branch of my department serves the students, and is composed of
students. We are separate from the server administrators and
programmers, and have little influence over the final decision of what
campus-wide apps (email system, database, etc) get implemented.
Up until five years or so ago the campus officially supported Netscape
only as the campus standard web browser. Gradually, with me
stiff-necking it all the way, Internet Explorer became the dominant
browser used and supported. Now with Netscape development essentially
being dropped by AOL, and with the bosses not understanding that Mozilla
_is_ Netscape, there's rumblings of IE becoming the only browser on campus.
Also over the years, Eudora has been the only supported email client.
We've had pressure to support Outlook for email, but again, with
resistance by me and some of my co-workers, we've avoided allowing that
as a supported email client. Now the tide has turned and we've been
tasked with support for Outlook also, but only with the client; no
Exchange back-end.
Also over the years, Schedule+ has been the only supported calendar
application. From a user's standpoint, it's quite adequate, but it's
gotten harder and harder to keep running since Microsoft has been using
various tactics to get people to switch to Outlook/Exchange calendaring.
This past summer the campus switched to Sun One Calendar Express
(formerly iPlanet) as our calendaring solution. It's web-based, and
works fairly well. But since it doesn't have pop-up reminders of
appointments, the staff/faculty are clamoring for a front-end that
provides an easier interface and pop-up reminders. We thought about
putting Palm Desktop in place for everyone, which in conjunction with a
tool from Sun will synchronize with the back-end calendar, but after
reading the license we can only do that for people who have a Palm
device. So we've started using Outlook as the front-end. It also can
synch with the back-end by using a tool from Sun. Both Palm Desktop and
Outlook must be manually synched, which is going to wind up causing
missed appointments. Neither app allows Jane Secretary to see her
calendar and Joe Boss's calendar at the same time, since these two apps
are inherently single calendar user only. (Outlook's calendar sharing
requires Exchange or something equivalent on the back-end.) Jane
Secretary must use the web interface to work with multiple calendars at
once.
I've found a "Development Plan" document on the web pages of the Mozilla
Calendar project. If I understand properly, Moz Calendar will at some
day be able to be a front-end for Sun One Calendar Express, and with the
subscription feature, could very well provide Jane Secretary with the
ability to open multiple calendars at once. This would be a
_tremendously_ wonderful thing on campus.
If the Jane Secretarys of the campus suddenly found Mozilla Calendar to
be more useful than the web calendar or Outlook or Palm Desktop, they'd
immediately start using it. From there, it'd be a cinch to get them to
use Moz as a web browser, and probably as an email client (IMAP mode).
My life would get sweet. Our server admins and programmers would start
having to code our web site and tools and server backends (Banner
database system is the big one, with a native Windows client, a Java
client, and a web client) to be friendly toward not just Internet
Explorer, but also Moz, and perhaps by extension other non-IE browsers,
such as Safari. The domination by Microsoft of both the internet and the
desktop would be chipped away a little bit by my corner of the world. My
corner of the world would be that much closer to a smooth and easy
transition away from Microsoft Windows, preferably to Linux, although
I'd be happy with OS/X at this point.
But, the only way all these wonderful things are going to happen is if
the Mozilla Calendar project can deliver the goods. I can't code a
"Hello, World!" program without an example right in front of me, so I'm
not able to add any programming help to the project. But I figure there
are developers on this list that are just itching to make a difference
in the world. If that's the case, I'd like to encourage you to look into
helping out with the Moz Calendar project. I'm assuming the project lead
people could use help; I may just be making noise; they may not want any
outside help. But you developers know better how to go about learning
what's needed than I do, so I'm making my appeal here, amongst some of
the highest quality computer literate folk I know of.
Thanks for letting me make this appeal.
--
Kent
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