Email and Calendar integration

I use Mulberry which is a very technical email client particularly designed to manage IMAP.

I asked why the new Alpha of Mulberry has an iCal agent - it seemed so odd in a product that has been so single minded.

There seems to be a move to counter Microsoft's attempt to tie everything into Outlook or Entourage . Someone copied the correspondence below to me.

It is rather too technical for me, but I wonder if what is said below will have any bearing on the development of Thunderbird and the Sunbird iCal agent?

I invite comment as I quote from the list mulberry-discuss@cyrusoft.com and a personal email (with some addresses removed), and I highlight the conclusion:

. . . the new CalDAV protocol . . . has significant interest from other vendors with a goal to making it a proper standard supported by many clients and servers.

------------ Forwarded Message ------------
Date: Friday January 2005 13:26 -0800
From: Rich Ramos
To: Cyrus Daboo <daboo@isamet.com>, mulberry-discuss@cyrusoft.com
Subject: Re: Exchange Calendar support (was: 4.0 - WebDAV Calendar)


On Monday Jan 3rd, Cyrus said:
> Right now we are concentrating on the new CalDAV protocol which has
> significant interest from other vendors with a goal to making it a
> proper standard supported by many clients and servers. I won't rule
> out adding Exchange support at some point in the future, but we
> want to concentrate on a solution that does not require people to
> setup an Exchange server for now.

(note: questions for Cyrus below)

Well I've now had the chance to play with Entourage and learn more about it
and Exchange (unfortunately our company does already have an Exchange
server and we are required to use it).

Some interesting things about Entourage:

1) No more IMAP. All access (mail, calendar & contacts) is done through
OWA (proprietary webdav).

2) Many cool features:
- Much more flexible categories
- assign follow ups to emails (alarms & tracking)
- link emails to events/notes/tasks
- create an event/note/task from an email
- if you replied to a message that is in your inbox, a shortcut appears
that allows you to directly see the reply by just clicking on the 'show
reply'

3) Project Center: A way to keep all information relating to a project
organized. This goes far beyond emails and extends to notes, contacts,
tasks, calendar events, files in your filesystem,...


Now the rub, if I use Mulberry (or Thunderbird) to move a message from one
mailbox to another all those cool features are lost from the email. It
seems to be apparent that Microsoft has linked those new features to
proprietary WebDAV properties and if an IMAP client goes mucking about with
the message you lose those properties. (Note shocking, Standard Operating
Procedure for Microsoft proprietary lock-in). Being the Microsoft
conspiracy theorist that I am, I could see Microsoft dropping IMAP support
altogether in the future of Exchange.

So Cyrus, I'm wondering what the goal of CalDAV & IMAP is and how it's
going to compete against the proprietary Microsoft offering?
Are CalDAV and IMAP to be complementary or do you see phasing out IMAP for
CalDAV (in a similar fashion to what Microsoft has done)?
Do you envision having the same features that I've described above from
Entourage being supported in the brave new word of CalDAV?
How long before you could see competing features to what's in Entourage now?

-Rich


--- Original ---
From: Cyrus Daboo <daboo@isamet.com>
To: Rich Ramos
Date: 1/3/05 10:22 PM -0500
Subject: Re: Exchange Calendar support (was: 4.0 - WebDAV Calendar)

Hi Rich,

--On January 3, 2005 2:35:16 PM -0800 Rich Ramos
wrote:

>> We currently have no plans to support Exchange servers (as
>> some other clients have done with special 'connectors').
>
> This is disappointing to hear, is it still true?
>
> I'm pretty sure that for Calendaring, Exchange has the biggest
> market share (of course I have no idea if this is true for the
> ISAMET customer base) and would be a big target for a calendaring
> client since you are integrating calendaring into v4.
>
> I have no doubt that Exchange's OWA (aka WebDAV) is proprietary,
> however it must not be impossible to reverse engineer or Ximian
> wouldn't have been able to do it. AFAIK their connector is now
> open source, couldn't that be leveraged?
>

Right now we are concentrating on the new CalDAV protocol which has
significant interest from other vendors with a goal to making it a
proper standard supported by many clients and servers. I won't rule
out adding Exchange support at some point in the future, but we
want to concentrate on a solution that does not require people to
setup an Exchange server for now.

--
Cyrus Daboo

 

And this discussion continues on the other list:

--On January 7, 2005 1:26:57 PM -0800 Rich Ramos wrote:

> So Cyrus, I'm wondering what the goal of CalDAV & IMAP is and how it's
> going to compete against the proprietary Microsoft offering?

I am currently at a calendaring interop event in Seattle at the moment of one of the points of discussion is the possibility of creating an Exchange 'connector' that would allow CalDAV clients to access Exchange (through CalDAV) rather than having to build in the Exchange 'native' protocol into the client. I believe that this would be the right approach to take for Exchange compatability.

> Are CalDAV and IMAP to be complementary or do you see phasing out IMAP
> for CalDAV (in a similar fashion to what Microsoft has done)?

CalDAV is only meant for calendaring data. In theory you could also use WebDAV for email (or any type of data). Right now I do not see that happening in the short term as there is already a large deployment of IMAP and POP servers.

> Do you envision having the same features that I've described above from
> Entourage being supported in the brave new word of CalDAV?

Yes - in fact I do have plans for linking email and calendar objects together in Mulberry. Unfortunately its not as easy at it might seem due to the fact that email messages in IMAP do not have a global unique identifier which means it is difficult to keep track of messages if they are moved between mailboxes.

> How long before you could see competing features to what's in Entourage
> now?

First of all we need to get the basics of calendaring and scheduling working well. Once that is done we can look at adding more useful data integration features. But this is certainly not a short term project.


--
Cyrus Daboo