Why is calendaring still such a pain in the ass? There’s been nothing but a proliferation of propriety solutions, web apps that store their data locally and do not share it, servers that speak antiquated versions of dodgy protocols, and clients that are continually being rebuilt from the ground up instead of evolved to be more useful over time.
Killing Exchange is still the killer application. We can’t think past that because, much as we’d like to, we still have to work with our sales, marketing, executive, and other non-technical staffs that Just Won’t Use Anything Else (TM). Or will they? Is the big problem here that everyone is so accustomed to Outlook that they cannot switch, or that organizations think this way and therefore attempt to deploy Exchange-compatible services to cater to a perceived need for Outlook clients?
Is anybody actually running Mozilla Sunbird in a real office environment?
Off in my project world, I was just thinking to myself, “Hmm, maybe I should build a WebDAV server into DBMail. The storage model is all key-value, so I could fake the whole thing as email headers.” Then I found this DAV-IMAP proxy. I’m not actually sure if it speaks DAV or just the subset required for Mozilla Sunbird. But whatever - the point is, it’s a calendar in a mailbox. On a non-calendar-aware client, you could just read through your Calendar mailbox to see an ugly-but-workable view of your calendar events. On a calendar-aware client, you get the full awesomeness of a calendar. And shared calendars? That might just come for free if your mail server implements shared folders, as DBMail indeed does.