Mozilla's Lightning to strike Outlook? (News.com) [LWN.net]

Mozilla's Lightning to strike Outlook? (News.com)

Posted Dec 24, 2004 16:42 UTC (Fri) by dneto (guest, #4954) [Link]

That attitude is not helpful. You aren't involved in many meetings, are you?

I've been using Linux since kernel 1.0.8, and I love free software. But Outlook solves some key problems at work. Yes, I have to go to a fair number of meetings. The last thing I need is for a meeting to be unproductive because people are late or missing.

Would I be happy to use something else? Yes, as long as it's interoperable. But I do have to pick my battles.

Oh, and Merry Christmas. :-)

david

P.S. Thanks again to the LWN team for all your great work. I've been a reader for about 7yrs or so, and I'm a proud subscriber.

Meetings are always unproductive... :-)

Posted Dec 26, 2004 9:52 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

Really, the only productive things I had with more than one person were:

1. joint coding sessions;
2. training sessions;
3. q-and-a "tell me your story" sessions.

None of those is really a meeting IMHO (I tend to view all #3 as a
special case of #1 where the others aren't coders). In the last big
development I was involved we had weekly 3-hour "state of the project"
meetings that were probably good for the PHB but for us just made the
work week 3 hours smaller.

I, for one, would have preferred a q-and-a e-mail session with all the
team CCed, but hey, that's me.

Merry Xmas -- or happy holidays -- and a nice New Year.

Massa

Laptops and wireless or conference in from your desk

Posted Dec 27, 2004 17:30 UTC (Mon) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

I've been on projects where the most productive members of the team
brought in their wireless equiped laptops or conferenced in from their
desks. They listened to the meeting with one ear while coding and/or
looking up salient details.

They were the same ones who also used IRC or IM almost continuously
during their work (and mostly with their colleagues).

One of them was Tridge (principle creator of Samba, rsync, and other
packages).

Mozilla's Lightning to strike Outlook? (News.com)

Posted Dec 27, 2004 8:06 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

The last thing I need is for a meeting to be unproductive because people are late or missing.

Then Outlook is not the answer, and neither is any open-source clone of it. At my workplace Outlook is used, but still I have often forgotten about meetings because the calendar is on the Outlook server and contacting it requires a Windows PC with network and Outlook configured just right... What would be much better is a calendar and reservation system in something easily portable which can establish contact without a full-blown LAN, like something based on cell phones.

Mozilla's Lightning to strike Outlook? (News.com)

Posted Dec 28, 2004 18:10 UTC (Tue) by jcabbott (guest, #20409) [Link]

HERE HERE!! And if really pressed they might just pick up the phone!