The Savvy Technologist

New mail and calendar project from Novell

We don’t run Exchange in my district, and nothing we’ve seen makes our email admin eager to give it a try. We’re also a cross-platform district which makes finding an email and calendaring solution that works equally well for everyone quite a challenge. As of today, and thanks to the fine folks at Novell who’ve found religion in Linux, there’s another option to investigate. Hula is an open source and open standards-based calendar and mail server. From Novell employee Nat Friedman’s blog:

Our direction is distinct from other open source collaboration server projects in that we’re not trying to build every conceivable bit of functionality that someone might consider “collaboration” into the server. Instead, we are focused on building great calendar and mail functionality. The dominant collaboration solutions today (Exchange and Notes) are built on a pre-Internet design and are just no fun to use for real people who live on the web, who collaborate across organizational boundaries (or who don’t have organizational boundaries to worry about), who want light-weight tools and URLs for their meetings and their appointments on their cell phone and so on.

This sounds interesting.

We want to build a real web-based calendar: to make it trivially easy to publish a calendar, to invite anyone with an email address to an an appointment and process their RSVPs, to get to your calendar via HTML or RSS or with an instant messenger or with SMS.

Also interesting is the Hula team’s decision to use a wiki for their Web site. Will the site blow up from wiki spam or will the user community collaborate on the site in cool ways?

Tags: Open source, wiki