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Hi Ed,
On 2010-03-05 19:18, Ed W wrote:
Go on... Why's that..?
Weight of history defines that we do things in certain ways and we sometimes get stuck in a bit of a rut, but if M$ has shown us one thing it's that we should (cautiously) look at how disparate systems can be integrated into a cohesive whole (granted they also showed how you can make an insecure system also, but I think that's an optional problem).
Not a dig at Dovecot, but: many software projects overlook the opportunity to integrate with other systems and become larger than the individual pieces. An example in point would be that I'm sitting here battling with SNMP + Cacti + Nagios trying to get them all to talk to each other... There has to be a reason Groundworks charges so much for selling you a package where this is already done...
Spinning off at a tangent, but I fell in love with (the concept of) Lotus Notes some 18 years ago. The way I saw it was a massive distributed multi-master data store + some presentation layers which could make any database look like whatever you wanted it to look like. I used it for:
- Email inbox
- Calendar
- Project documentation, discussion and design
- Staff holiday tracking
- Recruitment workflow (track all candidate details, results of interviews, contact correspondence, etc)
- Loads of inhouse custom one off projects
I also used it as an SQL database (with a bit of magic) and built an application used to handle billions of £s of financing for a UK bank. The IRA blew up one of the banks offices (which kind of stopped the server working so well), all the staff simply changed their Notes tel number to that of a different office and just carried on as though nothing had happened... No data lost, work carried on
I had naively assumed that IMAP servers would head down the same road... To my eye it's all just unstructured data and I really don't see what's so special about a CalDev server or an SMTP server which makes it anything other than a plugin to "an unstructured data store".
If anyone starts to buy that idea then lift your vision and imagine that we start to see all these just distributed databases, specialist interfaces to query them efficiently and a bunch of protocols to distribute documents between the databases - personally I would then vote we start to shift to some kind of jabber style protocol to connect all these datastores together. Once you head down that road you can imagine perhaps an MMS style storage model where the sender hosts all the mail storage and just sends a short "SMS" note to the recipient to let them know an email is waiting for them. (possibly even has some small positive anti-spam benefit...)
... kind of reminds me of Wave. I see a huge potential in Wave, once they get the federation part and some other details right. :)
Patrick.
STAR Software (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. http://www.star-group.net/ Phone: +86 (21) 3462 7688 x 826 Fax: +86 (21) 3462 7779
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