Lack of AJ/OOogw progress

[Charles Goodwin <ch...@xwt.org>]

I've just finished reading through a discussion on
dev@groupware.openoffice.org on Apache James as a potential groupware
server.

Despite a promising consensus being seemingly reached, there has been no
progress in the 2 months since the discussions appear to have concluded. 
At least, there's been nothing on the AJ dev lists and nothing on the
websites or wikis of either AJ or OOogw.

This saddens me because whilst reading the rather upbeat discussion on how
AJ might evolve for v3, I was contemplating recommendations that my
company hire a Java programmer to help so that we could (eventually)
utilise an AJ/OOo setup.  I can't advocate hiring somebody to *be* the
initiative.

Groupware is the biggest stumbling block with regards to OSS and the most
underrated asset that Microsoft has - probably the reason they do not hype
it too much is they do not want to see competitors.  We and many others
can't switch away from Exchange and there's no point in us switching to
OOo if we can't move away from Outlook.  Microsoft truly have a monopoly
on groupware and it's the groupware that companies *need*.  I am trying to
draft up a proposal to switch my office slowly from NT4 to GNU/Linux and
FreeBSD but there is no decent way for me to offer shared calendering and
that kills any proposal stone dead.

The only functioning non-web (I'm sorry, html interfaces will never cut
it) iCalender server I could find is this and even it is (1) UW Calendar,
and even then it's an incomplete implementation.

(1) http://www.washington.edu/ucal/

I hope this situation changes.  I implore somebody to get stuck into the
AJ project and help shift the direction of v3, even if it's only editting
the wiki and posting to the mail list.

<Controversial opinion:>
An OOogw/AJ collaboration will define both projects in the corporate world
and give them presence.  Otherwise, they'll just remain funky OSS niche
software used by organisations and occasionally pedalled by OSS
enthusiasts into an SME.

- Charlie

The future of webapps - www.xwt.org

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