[csg fall 2004] Chandler developments

The Chandler Westwood Advisory Council met today with Mitch Kapor, Chao Lam, and Pieter Hartsook from OSAF. The Chandler folks have, unsurprisingly, found that their development timelines are longer than originally predicted. The plans now call for a 0.4 release in late October that will support a basic user interface for email, calendar, and sharing items via WebDav.

After 0.4 there will be a 0.5 release in the first quarter of 2005 that will be designed to be usable for basic individual and collaborative tasks in a small workgroup - OSAF intends to adopt that release for their own uses, hence the nickname "dogfood" (as in "eat our own...") for this release.

The "Kibble" release, coming in the fourth quarter of 2005, will have enough functionality for use by groups of early adopters.

We had a lot of discussion about whether it would make sense for OSAF to elevate the priority of adding calendaring client functionality (using CalDAV) earlier rather than later (that of course begged the question of who was going to build a CalDAV server). The prevailing sentiment in the group was that sounded like a good idea, but we wanted some more detail on the level of effort required and which other features were likely to be deferred to make that happen.

Chao's slides for the meeting today are available from the agenda page on OSAF's Wiki.