[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde-pim
Subject:    Re: [Kde-pim] [RFC]: KDE GroupWare solution
From:       Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-06-15 19:30:09
[Download RAW message or body]

On Saturday 15 June 2002 18:10, David Bishop wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 11:57:07AM +0200, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> > On Saturday 15 June 2002 05:26, David Bishop wrote:
> > > I don't think the "room scheduling" part is coming across, so
> > > I'll give it a go, as well :-)  At my job, we have about 6 rooms
> > > for meetings, that roughly 800 people share (many, many different
> > > groups).  When we want to schedule our monday morning meeting at
> > > 9am, in room 202b, whatever tool we use to do that should be able
> > > to tell us that it is either free or busy (Hey! Free/Busy :-) ). 
> > > Then, if it is free, then we have to switch the status to busy. 
> > > Emailng 800 people isn't an option, so as far as I can tell,
> > > there is no way to do this without having a centralized server.
> >
> > You don't have to email all 800 people. The information that there
> > is a meeting is only interesting to the few poor people having to
> > participate and when you schedule a new meeting.
>
> Well, the other 795 people need to know that the room is no longer
> available, for when they schedule *their* meetings.

Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to say. They need the information, 
when they schedule their meetings, not before. So it doesn't make sense 
to send them a mail, because they wouldn't be interested. When they 
schedule a meeting they can get the information from the server where 
the schedule or the free/busy info for the room is published.

> > > The requirements are 1)
> > > a way of anyone being able to tell the status of the room
> >
> > That would be solved by putting the free/busy information on a
> > server. You wouldn't actively push this information to all users,
> > but would make it available for the few who need it when scheduling
> > meetings.
>
> That's my point, there isn't just a few people that would need it. 
> Any of those 800 people are capable (and do) schedule meetings
> themselves. We don't have personal secretaries, to do this for us,
> and the area secretary would laugh in our face if we asked her to do
> it for us.

I'm not saying that somebody else should organize the meeting. But a 
meeting usually only involves a few people. All others don't have to 
know about it. The information about the room has to be available to 
all people organizing meetings, and this typically are also much less 
than people participating in meetings. The information has to be 
available for all, but it isn't accessed by all and probably not very 
frequently.

> > > A "read-only" web interface, seperated between users
> > > (i.e., *someone* has to be able to write to the
> > > database/flatfile/whatever, or there wouldn't be much info ;-)
> > > doesn't solve that problem, again, afaict.  Maybe I'm missing
> > > something, as it's late on a Friday night, and I want to go up
> > > and cuddle with my wife, so I'm not paying much attention to what
> > > I'm typing...
> >
> > With the current KOrganizer version you could solve the room
> > scheduling problem as follows: You create an email account
> > representing the room and use this email address just like an
> > attendee. A person responsible for the room (and maybe also for
> > making coffee at the right time) gets the emails and maintains a
> > normal calendar for the room (by using the groupscheduling features
> > of KOrganizer). This calendar can be put on the web, so that all
> > people can see when the room is occupied.
>
> But there is no person responsible for the room.  That's kinda what
> I've been trying to say :-)  There is noone to email, thus multiple
> people would have to have "write privs" to the rooms calendar, and by
> multiple people, I mean every one of those 800.

The person receiving the mails for the room wouldn't have to do much 
about it, because the mails automatically get into the calendar and 
that's all. It might be favourable to have a person responsible for it 
for tasks which can't get done automatically like locking/unlocking the 
room, making coffee, or whatever, but if there is no responsible the 
email could also just get processed by a script which does nothing else 
than putting it into the calendar and publish it on the intranet.

> And then we're back
> to the "oh, and make sure one person doesn't overwrite some elses". 

What would happen, when two people schedule the room for the same time? 
Two events would be created in parallel, there wouldn't be overwritten 
anything. If this happens by accident, it is easy to resolve by the 
person requesting the meeting. If this happens deliberately, the 
company has a problem which can't be solved by software.

> I'm really sorry if I seem to be persnickety, as I really am not
> trying to be, I just know how our current system works, and it works
> very well.  Going back to the old "track down the secretary in the
> next building over to see if we can have a meeting in this room in
> two weeks" just isn't going to cut it, *for my company*.  That
> doesn't mean, of course, that it wouldn't be workable for other
> companies.

I completely agree, that it's not an option to require a secretary to 
organize the meetings or to actively maintain a rooms schedule. But 
that isn't necessary with iTIP. It just requires that people are 
willing to work together and that the iTIP mails for the room end up in 
a calendar in some way.

> > It would be even better, if there would be a way to handle
> > free/busy information on a server, so that it would be more
> > comfortable to find a free slot for a meeting, but that isn't
> > necessary to accomplish the task.
>
> Well, not *strictly* necessary, but I can (pretty much) guaruntee
> that without it, I wouldn't be able to switch even my group over to
> korganizer.

Wouldn't it be sufficient to have a web page where the room schedules 
are published and where you can look up when the room is free before 
scheduling a meeting? Of course it would be nicer to have it available 
directly in KOrganizer.

> However, and I think this point has been lost, I don't
> expect korganizer to do anything about it. Writing a groupware
> server is out of the scope of KDE (repetition is the basis of
> learning!). So, if korganizer could come up with a peer2peer version
> to do this, without having a standalone server, that would work for
> small groups, or even medium sized ones, then that is great!  Then,
> add support for the groupware servers out there (phpfoo, etc), and
> you have the best of both worlds.  The whole point to my mini-rant
> was that there is indeed uses for servers, that cannot be (fully)
> addressed in a p2p manner.

I think the role of a server for calendaring is usually overrated and 
the reason I'm spending so much time on this thread is that I would 
like to show how alternatives could work. I'm not sure that this would 
work very well with the current KOrganizer version in practice, but I 
think we should work towards the goal of making KOrganizer a serious 
alternative for companies like yours.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher@kde.org>
_______________________________________________
kde-pim mailing list
kde-pim@mail.kde.org
http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim
kde-pim home page at http://pim.kde.org/
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]