iPhone, We All Phone (and Collaborate)
Continuing the sequence of blogs in which I keep up my responsibilities as a blogger in the tech blogosphere, I thought I'd offer a few of my own musings on the rumored Apple iPhone (or ApplePhone or whatever it may ultimately be called).
For those of you who don't know, the iPhone is the long rumored Apple branded cell phone/media player. There has been speculation that it may be announced at next weeks MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. I have no knowledge as to whether they will make that date next week or not. But what I do firmly believe is that some time in the next 3-6 months Apple will introduce a phone. There are a lot of good things that Apple could do to (for?) the cell phone industry, which is in need of a shakeup. Currently there are too many "standards" across carriers and manufacturers, which is supplemented by too much control by the carriers (witness "crippling of many features when the carriers release phones on their networks).
But that is not what I am going to muse about today. Nor will I speculate on the multimedia features that are likely to be the advertising focus of this phone when it does appear on the market. What I will speculate on is the role this phone might play in communication and collaboration.
One of the oft rumored features of the iPhone (which will not be its name BTW, since that was recently snatched up by Cisco for a VOIP phone) is integration with iChat. For me iChat video has brought the video phone to reality. Real time collaboration with individuals and groups is a breeze with this technology. If Apple can put that on a phone (which I believe it can) it could make this technology ubiquitous, permitting voice, text and video streaming from anywhere.
Even iChat video may not be the iPhone's greatest contribution to collaboration. For that feature we may need to wait until the 2nd generation iPhone. Most of the rumors that have circulated convey a small and simple device being introduced initially, followed later by a "smartphone". It is the smartphone that could make the difference. Look around today and you can tell people's professions (or role in an organization) by the phone that they carry. There are the Blackberry/Treo (B/T) users and there is everyone else. The B/T crowd work for large organizations, or are in management/executive positions. The exclusivity of this club comes not from the cost of the device (or perhaps even how geeky it is), but from the back end servers that are needed to power them.
Apple has the potential to bring groupware (email + calendaring/scheduling) to the masses through a standards-based sexy device. A simple device that has IMAP and iCal/CalDAV support (of course to hook into .Mac accounts, but usable anywhere) would free the devices from the expense and complexity of the servers that are required to run them. Consumers and people in smaller organizations, and even the "regular' people within organizations who have been excluded from the B/T club can have access to their information through these devices. While it is true that many phones can now sync data through SyncML, it still hasn't been easy for regular people to set up, and perhaps more importantly it has not been touted by the industry. Apple will change that.
Updates on Epiware and Zimbra
Enough speculation and now for some feedback. I've been hacking away at Epiware the last couple of weeks, and testing out Zimbra and I have some further thoughts.
In my previous post on Epiware, I had some issues getting the calendar to work correctly. I posted my issues over in the Epiware Forums, and it took some time to get a response (understandable during the holiday period). Finally I got a response, which directed me to replace one of the files in my installation. No luck. However, the file pointed me towards some PHP settings to manipulate. Through some trial and error I found the conflicting setting and go the calendar to work.
Epiware does need some updating of their code for newer installations of PHP, but I have otherwise found the code to be quite stable. Further, I think it has an excellent set of features. Between tasks assignments, calendars, document versioning and even the Wiki, it has a good size feature set. Not too much to be overwhelming to manage, and not too little to feel constrained. As I tinker further, it is quickly becoming my top choice for project management, particularly when documents are central to the project. I'll do some comparisons to ActiveCollab (the BaseCamp) clone in an upcoming blog.
I have also been testing Zimbra quite thoroughly on my virtual server. After the couple of days that it took me to sort out my DNS/Bind/Host settings, it has been running flawlessly. I find the interface to be a joy to use, and its feature set seems to keep growing. The forums are active, and there seems to be a good community around both the free and paid versions. I've experimented with both calendaring and email and they work quite well. I have to commend the interface again. The one place it still falls short (for the free version) is in offline use. It is easy enough to pull down ical feeds from all of your calendars into iCal or your client of choice, but that is unidirectional. Indications are that this problem will be solved in the near future. CalDAV support is upcoming, and there were postings in the forums about getting Sunbird working. And then there is the announced offline AJAX support, which could be the most intriguing. I'll try those out as soon as they happen.