OpenGroupware? -- year-old UF study on iCalendar solutions for a 1K client install ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Wed, 2003-10-15 at 22:13, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> A server cannot solve the problem of a client that is
> non-standards-based.  At least not without a massive reverse engineering
> effort (e.g., Samba), or licensing.

U of Florida's Open Systems Group did an excellent study a year ago on
evaluating various solutions for a massive (1,000 client)
iCalendar-compatible solution.  You can find it here:  
  http://open-systems.ufl.edu/projects/calendar/  

One of my favorite quotes is on Outlook:  

"One thing I found about Outlook compatibility in calendar products is
that there is generally no clean solution. Outlook can be configured to
point to an IMAP server, which it expects to provide calendaring service
as well as email. In other words, one cannot configure Outlook to point
to an IMAP server for email, and a separate iCalendar server for
calendaring. 

This is in line with Microsoft's Exchange environment, where calendaring
and email are tied together on the same server. Furthermore, Outlook and
Exchange communicate via Microsoft's MAPI protocol, making third party
interoperability even more difficult. Some companies, such as Oracle and
Bynari, tackle this problem by providing client-side plugins to
intercept and translate Outlook's MAPI calls. This presents another
problem, in that supporting/upgrading thousands of client machine
plugins can be a headache."



-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I.  mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://thebs.org