[Design] Introduction

[Mitch Kapor]

Here is a place to discuss the functionality and features of OSAF's PIM 
product.  See www.osafoundation.org for more information on 
OSAF.  Well-reasoned feature suggestions and thoughtful critique are 
appreciated.  For convenience, I am posting relevant portions of the 
product description and feature summary from the OSAF web site as of 
October 20, 2002.  See also http://blogs.osafoundation.org/Mitch for my 
weblog, which will also discuss the design of the product.

Our product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist 
Raymond Chandler), is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use 
in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and 
reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list. 
Because of the ease with which Chandler users can share information with 
others, we might call Chandler the first Interpersonal Information Manager. 
(The term PIM was first used in conjunction with the product Lotus Agenda 
in the 1980's. Chandler is the spiritual descendant of Agenda (and has a 
common designer in Mitch Kapor.)

Today's de facto standard PIM is Microsoft Outlook, which dominates both 
the corporate and consumer markets. Outlook is stuffed with features, but 
no one can fairly claim it is either an elegant product to use or an easy 
one to maintain. The full feature set, including, for instance, the sharing 
of calendars, is only available in the Enterprise edition with the 
Microsoft Exchange server, not to Internet users with a standalone Outlook 
application. Outlook/Exchange is scalable, but extremely complex to 
administer, making it unsuitable for organizational deployment without a 
large information technology budget for administration, maintenance, and 
support. The enterprise version of Outlook is expensive, given Microsoft's 
license fee structure, and, of course, the full version only runs under 
Windows, leaving Macintosh and Linux users out in the cold.
Recent open source groupware products & projects (Evolution, Kroupware) use 
Outlook as the baseline for design and functionality, an approach which 
benefits users by being familiar, but doesn't take design risks which could 
have big pay-offs for users in power and simplicity. We're trying to 
re-think the PIM in fundamental ways and expect to be judged in terms of 
our success in achieving that goal. We're building the product on using 
up-to-date architectural components (peer-to-peer networking, integrated 
instant messaging, an RDF-compatible semantic database) and are not saddled 
with legacy code. At the same time, we will be fully compliant with a 
variety of open standards, such as iCal, vCard and the Jabber protocol.

We don't expect to cut significantly into Outlook's share of the overall 
enterprise market or its revenue. In its initial incarnation, Chandler is 
designed for individuals and small-to-medium enterprises of up to about 100 
people (populations, which, by the way, are under-served by Outlook/Exchange).

We are committed to making free software, supported on multiple platforms, 
which emphasize ease of use and administration, while also adding 
significant new capabilities.



This is our initial cut of features for version 1.0.  We expect it to 
evolve as we progress.

Email:

·POP/IMAP retrieval
·HTML viewing and composition
·auto-completion of addressees
·stationery
·signatures
·multiple profiles/personalities/identities
·spelling checker
·auto-archiving of old mail
·fast searching via full-text indexing
·importing existing data and settings
·in-line viewing of attachments
·user-defined views, rules, and filters
·user-scripting capabilities
·"active" mail - mail with buttons for actions
·transparent encryption and authentication of mail
·automatic Spam filtering
·filing of messages in multiple folders


Information Sharing & Exchange

·integrated Instant Messaging & presence management (Jabber)
·sending contacts and appointments via mail (iCal, vCard support)
·remote peer-to-peer browsing of others' data
·flexible security model to control access
·file and document sharing
·remote queries, e.g., look up address in another person's contact list
·automatic updating of information from remote sources: receive new 
contacts, changes to existing ones automatically (publish-subscribe)


Access

·home and work PC's with complete automatic replication of data
·online or offline use with access to all data
·synchronize with popular PDA's


Calendar

·day/week/month views
·recurring appointments
·see another person's free/busy blocks for scheduling
·see another person's calendars as overlays


Other

·simple Web-style navigation (back, forward, home and home buttons, single 
click on a link to navigate, bookmarks, URL references to user data)
·easily customizable user-defined categories
·structure data how you like it, view it that way, change your mind at any 
time
·automatic recognition of names, places, dates, and etc.; automatic 
categorization of items
·developer extensibility architecture