Calendaring and companies

Calendaring and companies

I agree that mail clients shouldn't be overloaded with calendaring.

But here's the thing -- open source lacks a compelling corporate calendaring system. There's no end of programs aimed at personal calendaring, but if you want to do something as essential as book a meeting and reserve the meeting room you are stuffed.

Microsoft Outlook is a poor calendaring system. It doesn't even produce time use reports. But it does do the simple tasks like arranging meetings.

Calendaring is one of those few applications which has meaning to executives. Us workers at the bottom of the pile spend little time arranging and attending meetings. Those lucky few at the top of the pile spend almost all of their time arranging and attending meetings.

Furthermore, those lucky few spend a lot of time travelling. So the calendaring system had better work seemlessly with PDAs and phones.

In short, if you recommend to a large company an e-mail system that does not have a calendaring solution (be it integrated or not) the result is unlikely to gain approval, since it won't please those people with the ultimate approval authority.