Re: What goes in gnome office? (Lets keep it simple)

[Adrian Custer <acuster nature berkeley edu>]

Hey all,

Glad to see this discussion starting up again. You are all talking hard
about the programer's side of things but I would encourage you to think
about the user's side as a way of making your decisions and for a bit of
long term strategy.


For instance, the email client debate. An office suite in today's
computing world has to have an email client/addressbook/calendar. If I'm
using GNOME 3.0 in an office it's a matter of hours before I'll need a
calendar. If I start typing a letter, I need the addressee's address in
the first lines. The whole idea about integration is that I can tell
abiword to "insert mr. client's address" and it grabs that address from
wherever it's stored in the office platform. The issue is NOT evolution
vs. balsa but what features an email client will have to support
minimally to be "integratable." For instance, in both abiword and
gnumeric, a user should be able to do "file"->"send as email attachment"
and a new message editor would pop up with the current file as an
attachement. So any GNOME office integrated mailer has to support a
standard way to open to a new email message with the attachement passed
to it.

GNOME office, in this view, is not a list of apps, but a definition of
interactive functionality. This allows all the users to mix and match
according to their preference or their work needs. Many of you are
champions of your particular project. That's great. But don't make it,
make you exclude the competition from other projects. GNOME and UNIX
have incredible redundancy. Projects come and go, flourish, become
irrelevant. The GNOME office platform can transcend this. Some users may
require specific functionality today which we cannot yet provide with
this standard list (tables, 3D graphing). So they should be able to use
the open office component of one app and the rest of the standard
platform. (If open office is going to work to be GNOME office compliant)

In this view, Abiword, gnumeric et al. provide a model implementation of
the integration needed but don't become the once and for ever more GNOME
office blessed application. I also suspect that by explicitly defining
what each app is providing to others you will have a better
understanding of the work you are doing in common but that's just a
guess :-)

The preliminary work then is to define what each piece must provide to
the users/other apps in the platform to interoperate cleanly. The
requirements should start minimal but be required of any application
playing a particular role in the suite. Evolution could provide three
functionalities: calandar, addressbook, email. Or someone may have
Evolution providing only the email component and have the calandering
provided by something else. This platfrom definition is beyond me but
can be developed by each of you considering what interoperability you
would need from other apps. 

Currently GNOME office is a collection of apps. The dissucussion has
been on how to have those apps use common components. From a user's
prespective, this is irrelevant. How apps do their work is not a user's
concern. That they allow users to mix and match different data/documents
is much more interesting.

Hope that helps your thinking,

adrian