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Having ranted on half of the groupware hate that I feel at the moment,
let me rant on the other half - address books.
I know a bunch of people, some online, some offline, and some both.
I want to store a bunch of information on them, and have relevant
subsets accessible from:
* my mobile phone
* my mail client
* my web based "I can't get at my own PC" mail client
* my PDA, when I get one again
* my partners mail client
* my partners PDA
Now, I would have thought that somewhere along the way *someone* else
might have found this beneficial, but apparently not.
Several days of looking show me that there is *NOTHING* out there that
copes with any sort of shared address book in an even vaguely useful
fashion.
LDAP looks close - at least, in theory it can share the address book
between the machines that are on the local network, and export to other
devices like the phone...
...but no. LDAP is a read-goddamn-only address book system. Nothing,
it seems, actually supports writing back to an LDAP directory, except
for dedicated client software.
Oh, and possibly Outlook, but I can't say for sure because even that
isn't really documented!
The worst part is, of course, that even if I do find the magic to make
Mozilla, Gnus and LDAP all play nice, it still isn't going to do what I
want.
At that point I have an address book system that makes me hate it,
because it is full of insanely stupid data management decisions like
"a home phone number is a property of an individual person"
Bah. No it isn't. I don't want to have to go and update two, three or
even four records because the phone number at a house changed.
I want to see that person X lives at house Y, and I can call house Y on
phone number Z. Then I can update the record for the house, and have it
all work.
I want an address book system that understands the concept of "old"
contact details, so I can keep a historic record of things like, say,
"foobar173256@xxxxxxx.xxx" is actually my friend Joe, but that I can't
reach Joe there today.
I want an address book where I can track the relationship between
people, so that I can jump from someone to their partner, or their
housemate, or both - and know what the link is.
It also bothers me that writing this really makes me think that what I
am after is "Orkut in a can", because that just seems somehow wrong...
Daniel
--
Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is
possible but nothing of interest is easy.
-- Alan J. Perlis, _Epigrams in Programming_ (September, 1982)
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