All Hands Meeting June 3 2004

Announcements

• Next week, Andi and David will give demos

Demos

• Jed demos the latest from the Apps Group: Last time we showed the back end drag and drop. Now we can drag a view to a tab, and it will create a new tab to replace the existing tab with that view.

Other

John has been working on refactoring. We have fewer lines of code now than before, and it now fits together in a cleaner fashion. (This is hard to demo!) We are making good progress and John hopes to put this behind him soon, and to start working on new tasks so we'll have more to demo soon.

Calendaring standards

Lisa is planning to a bunch of folks in the industry interested in calendars to see if a consensus develops. She gave us a summary of a presentation she'd developed.

As far as the functional requirements for sharing go, we must be able to:

• synchronize calendars,
• share views,
• share and synchronize contacts, tasks, email with a set of people who we want to share our stuff with (what we are now calling a "sharing circle�).

The abstract requirements for a �sharing circle" include: mutual authentication, access control/multiple authors, data browsing, data synchronization, search, notifications, IM, and the ability to locate peers dynamically.

There is not one standard that meets all of these requirements. There are some standards and some non-standards that meet part of this, and may be on the way to achieving our requirements. Modular Protocol Composition � taking a bunch of standards and tacking them together is a practice that is becoming more common. (e.g. using URLs and MIME, supporting SSL, etc.) This modular design approach, contrasted to the more traditional silo method (e.g. IMAP, NNTP, CAP, HTTP) we have more flexibility, etc. We must support some existing solutions, such as IMAP, POP3, SMTP for mail because they are so widely used, even if they are difficult to deal with. WebDAV solves some repository access requirements, provides additional benefits and clear data model for any application semantics, and is proven, deployed, open technology.

We don�t want to assume any one type of data, or form of �discussion� transport (i.e., email, IM, etc.) There isn�t one protocol that will accommodate all of this.

Mitch said that at a meeting earlier this week on sharing transport, one of the principal takeaways was that WebDAV is going to play a larger role sooner in accomplishing our sharing goals. It Won't be to the exclusion of peer to peer, but we�re going to let people work offline and be able to share stuff opportunistically. We�re not going to be able to finesse this issue.

-- EstherSun and DuckySherwood - 08 Jun 2004