b.cognosco

The Flash demo of Zimbra is quite interesting, but then demos always are. After years of hype the Chandler project of the Open Source Applications Foundation still languishes at release 0.5. Can AJAX, eXtreme Programming, and other techno buzztrends overtake the open source uber-PIM and deliver a challenger to Outlook in our lifetime?

Calendaring seems to be the barrier. E-mail and search are pretty standard. But calendaring, and sharing calendars, is a real bear when the Outlook-driven corporate world is involved. I’m not at all sure iCal is up to the challenge, but we have yet to see a truly robust iCal app. [Link via Judith Meskill]

Zimbra is open source, AJAX-enabled email, calendaring, and collaboration

What I like about Zimbra is its open sourceness (natch) and its intelligent approach to information presentation as applied to email and calendaring. Think Gmail but with tight integration with a web-based calendar, and with a lot of neat little information integration bells and whistles — like generating a contextual menu from a phone number in an email with an option to place a VoIP call. AJAX is no mere hot buzzword here but is well applied such that mousing over bits of data can generate tooltip-style boxes with related information, such that rolling over a date will pop up any items on your calendar for that day, e.g. Also slick, it understands relative terms like “tomorrow” or “next Tuesday” and will popover relevant calendar details for those terms. What’s exciting about this is that it eliminates a sizeable portion of the need to keep switching back and forth between panes, interfaces or applications to access information you’ve always felt should be available to you from right where you are.