A calendar is needed

[david]

I'd love to see a calendar in the next release.

Collanos is a great piece of software but for us it's useless without a calendar.

[Franco Dal Molin]

Thanks, David. Calendar functionality is certainly an important area we are working on. We will deliver this gradually. While a full-fledged P2P group calendar is a powerful killer application, it also raises additional quite complex issues, such as integration into your "other standard calendar appplications", such as Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. We can not (yet) deliver all possible integration plug-in's into every propular calendar app available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

For the next major release, you can expect more features around "Tasks", including alarms/notifications. The current Task object will evolve and become smarter. You will be able to get notified of due tasks and alarmed if a Task you had assigned to somebody else is overdue. Also, we will provide better overviews to manage all your Tasks across all your workspaces, e.g. "all my due tasks" type of global overviews.

David, would Task features as described above be enough for you? If not, what specific Calendaring functions would be the most important for you? What specific use scenarios would you like to support with it?

Thanks and best regards,
Franco
Collanos Software

[foverton]

My preference regarding calendars would be as follows:
1. Share an standard XML calendar file in a folder (i.e. Mozilla iCalendar)

2. Make use of all the "application work" going into Calendar sharing using the client/server model (CalDav, SyncML, Chandler etc.)

3. Focus your efforts on the P2P file sharing infrastructure as well as synchronizing XML files internally. (i.e. http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~harmony/ )

Finally, I would very much like to install and run the backend of your software as a service so that when I access the shared information throught the front end or through another application it is all ready up-to-date. Similarly, I don't wouldn't have to launch your application simply to share file changes I made with my Calendar editor.

Frank

[Gil Heiman]

Great input Frank!

Hope you don't mind we contact you once we start exploring calendar integration options.

[foverton]

The ability to: 1) run your software as a service, 2) access the shared files with existing applications 3) automagically share files updated by 3rd partty apps      are features that extend well beyond "Calendars".

Do you intend to offer this type of service functionality to 3rd party apps?

(Your comments sound like you are going down the path of creating your own world of apps... tasks, calendars etc.)

[Mike_Coxon]

I have one additional comment on the Calendar feature that people seem to ask for...... Yes integration to office and importing, exporting, alerts, links to tasks etc would be nice but just a basic cal that can be shared and maintained in a workspace would probably hit 90% of people’s requirements. A Cal with Day / Week / Month views after that integrating it with Outlook/exchange then probably gets you 98% of peoples requirements, anything much more than that and you will never compete with Exchange, Notes MS Project etc......

Two additional features that I know were supported in Grove were Simple Gantt charts and the mindmanager tool from mindjet both of which are superb collaboration applications….

[sdpearl]

Overall I really like Collanos.  I run a 100 person volunteer communications team in my county and Collanos solves a major problem without me needing to get into the cost of Groove or the complexity of web hosting.  I simply set up one machine as the "hub" server to insure that everything is replicated and backed up regularly and the rest log in and out as available.

ON THE CALENDAR...

Recognizing that turning Collanos into Outlook or Notes is not the goal, I think the biggest Calendar help is a calendar by workspace.  In other words, turning the tasks into a Calendar rather than a list.  This would at least help you see graphically how the milestones within a folder are organized.  Consolidation of multiple calendars across workspaces would be ideal, but I'll take baby steps for now.

GREAT PRODUCT!