[nzlug] (slightly)OT - huge OSS opportunity

[David McNab]

Hi,

(apologies for OT post - this is about OSS and business, not
specifically linux)

Over the last few days, I've been going through dozens of web-based
groupware apps looking for something to suit our consultancy business.

<rant>

The bottom line - all the web-based groupware apps suck!
SugarCRM sucks slightly less, so I've gone with that. But it still has
major problems.

The groupware development scene is a fascinating phenomenon. Sourceforge
and Freshmeat list hundreds of groupware apps, which vary only in their
position on the suck spectrum, various places ranging from 'severely' to
'extremely' to 'impossibly'.

It seems that people start up a new groupware app, aiming to come up
with something less painful than the existing offerings, but end up with
something just as bad or worse.

So what I'm saying is that IMHO there exists a tremendous opportunity
for someone with great web app dev skills to steal a huge chunk of the
market.

Firstly, I need to get specific about the existing groupware suckage:

 * all groupware apps do one or two things well, maybe many things well,
   but no app does everything well

 * the set of features I'm looking for is diffused among many
   different groupware apps, and not available in a single app, features
   such as:
    - composite to-do tasks (tasks with dependencies)
    - ease of sharing tasks, appointments, contacts etc between users
    - good level of AJAX usage
    - categories management - allow categories to be assigned to:
        - contacts
        - appointments
        - to-do items
    - bleeding obvious - a 'schedule meeting' button on the display of
      a contact's record, which sets up a meeting with that contact,
      and avoids the name to type the contact's name into the 'subject'
      field for the meeting
    - rich-text editing for emails, notes etc
    - bulk-mailing (not spamming) to opt-in clients
    - good xml-rpc or SOAP interface
    - product catalogue, with order processing

 * nearly all the existing OSS groupware apps are written in PHP, which
   is one excruciating language which by its very structure tempts
   people into poor design/programming practice, introducts exponential
   growth of complexity and hikes up development costs.

   A winning OSS groupware app should use an OO RAD web app framework
   like Ruby on Rails, Python's TurboGears or similar good Java
   equivalents

   Also, a good groupware app should have facilities for users to set
   up custom views, forms etc

</rant>

Cheers
David