I found "Groupware Bad" by Jamie Zawinski today off of Joel on Software. Its an impressive write-up in a couple respects. First of all, it addresses why groupware is so horrid. His language is crude, but his overall point is correct, groupware is overly managed. No one actually wants this except managers. To the extend you are a user, this sort of thing will be a pain in the neck. How many people really think "Oh, I just finished a task, let me go check that off on my todo list in this other application over here." Most of us are better at writing lists than scratching things off them, even when we do accomplish things we have listed. Secondly, he is right about the developer interest. Groupware is about... groups, surprisingly enough. And how does your average developer work in groups? Well, he works semi-independently and rather anarchically with some people many of whom he has never met and certainly is not on the same network with. He associates with his friends every day, but he is not on the same network with them either. And he really doesn't think about his or plan his free time in the same way that you would schedule a meeting in the office. Rather, its more like "hey, you all want to get together this weekend?" "Sure, when and where should we meet?" "Oh, about 7:30 my place" and then people show up from 7:15 to 8:00, with lots of cell phone calling involved to see who is actually coming and so forth. The infrequent party is planned somewhat more, and things like Evite come in and work okay but not great. So the end result is that the calendaring application He describes is actually rather cool. I'm not sure how it would work, it would need some web space certainly, and to work it would have to be developed along the install of blosxom which can be dropped in where ever you have access to web space with cgi capabilities. Blosxom is something I discovered yesterday by accident, it needs a post of its own. Anyway, back to calendaring, it would need a combination of email and web space, with some sort of user authentication since you do not want to go the "you must be using this mail client" route. Though you might be able to set it up such that "if you are using this mail client you don't have to click that link over there and go fill out some form on a web page" which would make it more business friendly. But that's fluff (from my point of interest). So I'm not quite sure how it would work. Most blog things allowing comments seem to go the sql route. That would certainly work, but would create a higher entry bar, you would need a web space with sql capabilities. So I am not sure how possible this is, but it would be cool. :-)
