We are trying to make a PIM which is substantive enough and enticing enough to make people want to move to it from whatever they are currently using, which statistically is probably Microsoft Outlook. I'm not going to bash Outlook here. Suffice it to say that while feature-rich, it is very complex, which renders most of its functionality moot. Its information sharing features require use of Microsoft Exchange, a server-based product, which is both expensive and complex to administer. Exchange is overkill for small-to-medium organizations, which we think creates on opportunity we intend to pursue (as well of course as serving individual users)
Have I mentioned it's going to run on Macintosh, Linux, and Windows and will not require a server? This is an ambitious goal, but we are convinced is possible to achieve using a cross-platform tool kit. (We are working with wxWindows/wxPython).
Also, everything is going to be fully open sourced.
This entails making sure we dot our I's and cross out T's with respect to all the features a product must have to be best-of-class, without sacrificing ease of use. We need to worry about migration paths from existing products, synchronization with PDA's and a whole host of details beyond core functionality which are required to make a truly first-rate product. On top of that, we have to have perhaps half a dozen killer features elsewhere unavailable, which I will be writing about in future entries. (Don't mean to tease; there's just too much to say all at once). One area which I will mention is that we have a lot of faith that the general and powerful information-sharing technology (built on top of Jabber) we are embedding, will make it trivially simple
9:58:03 AM Google It! comment
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