Collaber

Hi,

To make a long story short, I just discovered collaboration platforms (first Groove, then Collaber). No one should ever send a project related email anymore !

All this to say that the feature I'm asking is not biaised by any other product experience, but merely by first glance and thoughts. So I might be totally wrong.

It seems to me that the calendar is the absolute main application (along with a central point for project related files). I noticed that someone asked for a meeting minutes application that could be tied to tasks/calendar ...etc. YES !

I'm afraid it's a large task and it would need some thoughts. But out of the blue, I'd think of :

• Ability to define a list of mandatory/invited persons for a calendar event (to set up meetings which may or may not include all of a project's members). Or, in the case of a project event (deadline, planning ...etc), a list of persons who are tied to the event (for notifications ...etc).
• Direct consequence : Each participant should be able to accept or deny the meeting
• This also means that you should be able to handle free/busy schedules
• Very important : a central calendar for a user, summarizing all or part of the tasks of all or part of the projects he is involved in. This would render the first point very important if a user does not want to have a calendar filled with tons of overlapping and often non interesting events (the first point would be some kind of filter in this matter).
• This next point would be a feature, but maybe also at first a much more simple way to integrate all this : If Collaber was able to sync with a calendar server (iCal/ics, via ical4j http://ical4j.sourceforge.net/ which should work with Google Calendar and Apple's iCal server for example), it might be much faster to integrate all these features. Each user would declare his calendar connections (private/rw and public/read-only); The read-only part would be synchronized with other users, providing free-busy info. The write part would be handled by the user's Collaber client if he accepts the meeting/event. Unfortunately, this may not be easy with Outlook and/or Exchange.
• There would be two consequences to the previous point :

1. You would not need to develop a central calendar as it would be handled by the calendar server and viewable with any already installed app (iCal, Sunbird ...etc).
2. You would de-facto provide a very simple way to synchronize calendar events with PDAs as most of these services already address this need (iSync, ActiveSync ...etc.).

If Ical integration is not an easy path, then Collaber might at least be able to send chosen events in iCalendar format via SMTP to the user's own email address so that his email client integrates it in his day-to-day agenda.

The second feature would be the ability to add contacts to a project by directly selecting one or many Outlook or Thunderbird contacts (I'm sure Mac users would love Mail.app too). I think it's very useful to share contacts relating to a specific project with all project members (who might also be external to the structure). So each participant should be able to select a subset of his contacts to share with all project members. This would allow a direct online/offline access to a project's related address book. Which is basically what your software is all about : organizing data in a much more efficient manner !

Of course, the other way might also be nice (adding a contact someone else provided to your own address book), but it might be more complex and the first part would already be a tremendous add-on.

It should be quite easy to access TB's address book (even if it's coded in this stupid mork format). There is at least one Java API (read-only) : http://www.smartwerkz.com/projects/jmork/

And as to Outlook and Exchange, apart from very expensive connectors, there is the simple COM+ wrapping method which only demands that Outlook be launched. I found one guy who has already done the job and published it : http://www.toanthang.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5

Finally, there's also the LDAP way which might interest some people and could be a very simple way of accessing Exchange's GAB (Global Address Book), providing that the IT department opens the right channel (most probably LDAPS with auth).

Sorry for this long email. I understand you are understaffed and working hard. I hope you'll find these suggestions useful.

Regards.