Connecting to Thunderbird and/or Exchange certainly sounds
like very good ideas! A Chandler plugin for Thunderbird with some of the
suggested features would be a straightforward way to leverage
lots of existing email functionality, for those who need that.
It's always dangerous to extrapolate too much from one's own
experience - but the lack of these two things has been keeping
at least me from using Chandler as a primary PIM. I manage a variety of
POP3 and IMAP email acconts with Thunderbird. And for professional
reasons - and because it gives me decent mobile syncing - my calendar,
tasks etc live on an Exchange server.
I believe many (perhaps the majority of?) future Chandler users would
prefer not having to abandon existing email/calendar solutions, but
rather integrate in different ways. And I think this is especially true
for those who need Exchange/Outlook data at work.
For Exchange, I agree that short term the Python/COM route via Outlook
is probably the quickest alternative. Having done similar things with
both SQL Server and Excel in the past, let me just note that error
handling and performance tuning can take far more development time than
the basic functionality for demanding use cases.
To developers who prefer Mac and Linux (like many of us) a serverside
Exchange solution has obvious appeal. But is the option to integrate
with Echange from other platforms a big attraction to many potential
users or irrelevant to most of them? I have no idea. By the way, does
anyone have download statistics for various platforms so far?
Jonas
There are a number of aspects of Open Change that I think
makes it not an ideal project to tackle right now.
First. it has a GPL license which makes it incompatible with
Chandler's Apache license. There are certainly ways to work
around that however, the major draw back of using Open Change
for Exchange connectivity is its huge dependance on Samba.
Open Change is really intended to provide Exchange connectivity
to the Unix platforms. The proof of concept project that Open Change
is working on is an Exchange plug-in for the Linux Mail Client Evolution.
I believe not being able to provide support for Windows users who
are the ones mostly using Exchange in a corporate environment
is less than ideal.
One option is to create an Exchange to Chandler Proxy Server
that could handle data transformation between Exchange MAPI and
Chandler CalDAV / EIMML.
Again it would be limited in terms of the platforms it can deploy on
due to the Samba dependency.
Either way, the investment costs to implement the Exchange
connectivity via Open Change will be high and probably not worth
it at this stage of the Chandler project.
I do have another suggestion which although still not ideal can deliver
a credible Microsoft Outlook / Exchange story in a much shorter development
window using tools already available in the Python community.
It would be pretty straight forward to leverage Python the Win32 bindings
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/) to connect via COM to the
Outlook Application Object and via MAPI retrieve Calendar / Scheduling /
and
Tasks from an Exchange server.
The SpamBayes project already has a successful Outlook Plugin written
in Python for Spam Classification so we can leverage the general
principles they
employ.
The specifics of what operations would be performed when connecting to
Outlook / Exchange as well as whether the functionality would be an Outlook
or Chandler Plugin are still open to debate.
But in a fairly fast development window Chandler could in this scenario
provide a means for Outlook / Exchange users to bring data in to Chandler.
In fact, the Outlook Plugin and the Thunderbird plugin could provide the
same
feature sets.
The limitations of leveraging COM to connect to Exchange are:
1. It's Windows Only
2. The User has to Have Outlook Installed on the System
Thoughts / comments / alternative suggestions about Exchange next steps?
-Brian
Brian Kirsch
Internationalization Architect / Mail Service Engineer
Open Source Applications Foundation
543 Howard Street 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
http://www.osafoundation.org
On Dec 7, 2007, at 1:30 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Brian Kirsch and I met briefly today to brainstorm re: email/SMS
integration ideas we can pursue in the short and mid-term. The goal is
to find ways to improve getting data in and out of Chandler to mobile
devices and other mail applications, in particular Thunderbird.
Here's the beginning of our list of ideas. Please add your own!
Mimi
Sync messages in IMAP Drafts/Sent folders with Chandler Drafts/Sent
messages.
Use SMS / Email to:
+ Add items to a collection(s) on Hub Service
+ Pull items from Hub Service
- Today or Some day's events
- Today or Some day's tickled items
- NOW items in a particular collection
- Particular item in a collection
Ideas for Thunderbird Plug-in:
+ Stamp a message and add it to a list of collection(s)
+ Assign Triage status to message items
+ Map individual IMAP folders to collections
Receive notifications from Hub Service in T-bird or via Email/SMS
+ # New / Edited items in which collections
+ Who last updated an item/collection
+ Stuff that's tickled into NOW
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