Choice forms the hallmark of the Linux experience, and
recent developments in personal information managing programs have made
this choice better.
The Mozilla Foundation
continues work on a calendar
add-on for its
Thunderbird e-mail application. Since Thunderbird already stores
contact information in an address book, this forms a natural addition.
But this effort is far from complete. In lieu of a Thunderbird calendar
module, most Linux users have turned to Kontact or Evolution.
The
KDE desktop provides applications to support personal contacts, e-mail
and scheduling. In KDE, these applications are separated, with a
combined application called Kontact. Kontact merges
the capabilities of the KDE applications KMail, KOrganizer, and
KAddressBook into one application, along with news-reading capability.
Kontact also provides additional
features.
Evolution, part of the GNOME desktop, appears
similar to Microsoft's Outlook. Evolution can even communicate with
Microsoft's Exchange server using a plug-in connector. Evolution can
also communicate with Novell GroupWise.
But Evolution doesn't
offer much that's new or innovative to managing your e-mail, schedule,
and tasks. While this is good for users migrating from Outlook and
Windows, it still puts Linux in the position of playing catch-up to
Windows.
Chandler
provides a new type of application with a new type of architecture on a
new type of platform. Chandler, written in the Python scripting
language, is the new architecture in Chandler targets info-centric
users. These are users who collaborate and communicate a lot. These
users send and receive a lot of e-mail (not just spam), meet with
others, and generally perform more work on the computer than most users.
Such users need better ways to manage all the information they create
and acquire.
That's where Chandler comes in, providing innovative
features such as the ability to interact with scheduled items as objects
you can stretch, mold, and reform in ways not supported by other
calendar clients.
At version 0.6.1, Chandler has been a long time
in coming. The 0.6.1 version provides an experimental calendar component
and not much else. Future versions will add e-mail, contacts, and
support for other personal information application features.
All
the new architecture and features in Chandler takes time to develop,
years in this case. That's unfortunate, because Chandler shows a lot of
promise, even in its early stages of development. The ability to
classify meetings under a number of categories at the same time, and to
manipulate appointments really makes Chandler stand
out.
Furthermore, the Chandler developers realize their new tool
won't take over the world overnight. To communicate with other tools,
Chandler supports, or plans to support, all the common standards such as
IMAP and POP for e-mail. Chandler also supports up-and-coming standards
such as CalDAV . CalDAV acts as an extension to WebDAV, a Web-based method
for managing and versioning files. WebDAV and CalDAV both run as
extensions to HTTP, the protocol used by the World Wide Web. This means
that CalDAV will run through most company's network firewalls, which is
very important for most desktop computer users.
Hula is a
server-based Web groupware solution from Novell. Hula provides e-mail
and calendar support. Based on the older commercial NetMail product,
Hula is built from a base that supports scaling up to massive numbers of
users.
Hula includes a Web interface. Or, users can run their
existing clients such as Outlook or Evolution, to communicate with the
Hula server.
With all these choices, Linux continues to improve
for business users --Eric Foster-Johnson
