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".
*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.
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