ldopa.net

Linked from the wiki page describing clients that work with Apple’s new open source calendar server is this list:

• Apple’s iCal
• Apple’s Teams
• OSAF’s Chandler
• OSAF’s Scooby
• Mozilla’s Sunbird
• Mozilla’s Lightning

Yeah, so, what’s “Teams”? I’m guessing this is either an add-on to the OS, one of the sooper sekrit things that Steve couldn’t talk about yesterday, or more likely an upcoming new groupware collaboration app in iWork ’07. Either way, this much is certain: it involves calendars and it involves teams.

If anyone’s old enough to remember System 7′s “Publish and Subscribe”, it might be like that; certain users have privledges to change certain parts of certain documents, which lives on a server somewhere. It was a pretty neat feature, but aside from a couple high-end publishing houses, no one actually used the feature and it disappeared into the haze of history.

“Teams” could very well be like that. Google’s Spreadsheet does sharing right: you define a list of users (by email address) that can see your spreadsheet, and then another list of people who can edit the speadsheet. “Teams” could potentially be like that. Micheal Biven points out that there is a screenshot of something suspiciously “Teams-like” on Apple’s PR site, but all we can glean from that is that it’s a list of people. Cripes, that could be anything.

But: I think I’ve figured out why I’m not so jazzed about “Teams” and Apple’s latest OS features in general: I strongly suspect they’re all local and Mac client based (also, they’re kind of boring). There seems to be two competing philosophies in the groupware world: web-browser-based and client-based — and Apple seems to be pushing the client kind. Most of their stabs at groupware in the past have begun with the presupposition that “ok, so everyone on the team has macs and the latest OS, and…” and in the real world that simply does not happen. Some people have macs, most people have PCs, and there’s that one guy in IT with a linux box.

In the past, Apple has been unwilling to sully their apps in order to speak to Windows or linux clients, or if they do, it’s an afterthought. There’s a reason; you can guarantee a fairly stellar experience by controlling both ends. But it has resulted in Mail.app sort-of-kind-of-not-really-though getting Outlook appointments, iChat kind-of-maybe video chatting to PCs, but I suspect no one really uses these features because they’re 0.5-assed.

These days, I’m far more enamored of web-based groupware these days, the Knowledge Trees, the Google Calendars, etc. It just makes more sense: the time where everyone has to be on the same platform to work together is drawing to a close. It makes sense that Apple, being a company that sells client computers, would be pushing a client-based approach to groupware. But they seem to be on the right track for comprimise with the open source calendar server, they’re pushing open standards, at least — let’s hope there’s a web-based front end for their calendar as well. And I also hope I’m wrong about the proprietary “walled-garden” client approach I suspect they’re taking; I just want there to be a way to fully enable all this supposed collaboration in Leopard via other, non-mac clients, and this far in Apple’s history, not so much.

~jeff