Bill PrayI have asserted that calendaring is broke in previous blogs:
Separating Calendar from E-mail
Calendars: A Personal Tool in an Enterprise World
Email is tightly integrated with calendar. However, the calendar functionality in email is based on the old paradigm of the paper planner – a paradigm that breaks down in today’s environment.
I am not the only one who thinks calendaring is broke. In research for email systems management, some of the statements about calendaring were:
“The half-assed way things are implemented in calendars is irritating customers.”
“The calendar functionality (as part of migration to a central location) has delayed upgrades.”
“Calendaring has caused us problems with people using Macs, mobile devices, or external…”
“Admins really suffer the pain. They have to use two different interfaces – one to manage executives calendars, one to manage email.”
“They give me the rope and then they yank it away (referring to calendaring standards and vendor solutions).”
“More than anything else, calendar is a total vendor lock-in.”
“Integration problems (with two different e-mail solutions) caused problems with calendar free/busy and delegation”.”
A Call for Action
E-mail solution vendors need to fix calendaring. The vendors need to fully embrace calendaring standards. Calendaring standards need to be extended to facilitate integration and consumption within other application environments. Vendors need to provide interoperability between calendaring solutions. And, perhaps the most important, vendors need to revisit their calendaring design paradigm and provide new calendaring functionality where the calendar becomes an intelligent filtering tool that aids users to more effectively live and work.
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Category: Communication Tags: calendar, Communication, e-mail
