Marc Andreesson, one of the authors of Mosaic, the original web browser, has taken up blogging, and in his first week he’s got some thought-provoking posts. I’ve adopted many of David Allen’s Getting Things Done ideas to help get my business off the ground, but Marc has some great tips here: blog.pmarca.com: The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity.
I particularly like structured procrastination and strategic incompetence…
Just yesterday I was talking about calendar sharing with a potential client, and today I run across this:
IMAP shared Contacts and Calendar extension for Thunderbird. Originally started to provide Thunderbird support for the Kolab Server project, it works with an ordinary IMAP account to store contacts and calendars and access them from multiple locations. Using IMAP shared folders, you can also set up group contacts and calendars. Very cool.
Names of open source projects are suddenly getting ridiculous. Two new names were just unveiled in the Open Source world: Zimbra, and Joomla. While the names may be silly and potentially off-putting, the projects themselves are compelling.
Joomla is simply a new name for a very popular web site management system that was called Mambo. Due to some political in-fighting between the company that sponsored Mambo and the core developers of the project, Mambo has now forked. For now, our bets are on the core developers, who have adopted the name Joomla for the project. At Freelock, we’re closing in on a dozen Mambo installs, so we’re big fans of this software.
Today, we learned about a new project with a funny name, called Zimbra. Zimbra looks like a combination of Gmail, Exchange, and Hula, and they’ve managed to beat Hula to a working release. It’s a mail server, calendar server, and contact/directory server, running on a completely open source stack. They’ve concentrated on doing a rich browser interface and providing a migration path for Exchange. Looks like a very promising project–the demos make me want to get it up and running right now. Unfortunately, it’s primarily a Java application, which is outside our area of expertise. And they’ve made lots of other architectural choices that make this one look difficult to get going. But go check out the demos–this one may well prove to be worth the pain.
Novell is sponsoring development of a new email/calendar server called Hula. This promises to be an Exchange killer, providing standards-based calendar sharing and storage using WebCal to share calendars and free/busy information. It’s also a complete SMTP/IMAP/POP server with a built-in web interface, vacation messages, and eventually the ability to do server-side sorting and spam and virus filtering.
The project was announced last week, but they already have a working version, mainly because it’s built upon Novell’s NetMail product. Evolution, Chandler, and Mozilla Thunderbird will all support this soon!
Frank Neugebauer has written a step-by-step set of instructions to install OpenExchange in Mandrake Linux. OpenExchange is a groupware server providing similar functionality to Microsoft Exchange, only with many more features.
Updated: PHPiCalendar link
Software
Web Sites