4 ms·

I'd absolutely love to pick her brain about what she thinks is wrong with enterprise calendaring.

mathgladiator 16y ago
I was thinking exact same thing since I would love to sell NASA an awesome web2.0 smart-phone-enabled awesome calendar.
bayareaguy 16y ago
Me too. As someone who looked at Bedework[1] a while back, I'd like to know if she considered it. [1] - http://www.bedework.org/bedework/ http://www.bedework.org/bedework/
slater 16y ago
In my experience, there is always SOMETHING that doesn't quite work right with calendaring, whether it's "enterprise" (whatever that's supposed to mean) or not. Mainly synching.
adestefan 16y ago
People want cross-platform Exchanged-hosted Outlook calendars. They want the ability to see other people's calendars, invite them to meetings and accept/reject invites via email. This is especially important to places like NASA that have engineers on Linux desktops. I've been at a place that was going to go so far as to installing VMware with a Windows VM just so everyone could have access to Outlook for calendars. I've also found that people really, really hate web based calendars. It's amazing how picky people are when it comes to the views of their schedule and most web-based solutions do not address these needs very well.
damoncali 16y ago
It's not calendar software, it's NASA. It's a ridiculously fragmented organization. The various space centers all operate as their own little (or big, really) entities, and compete for influence. Then, in parallel with the space centers there are massive projects (think Hubble Space Telescope or International Space Station) that operate separately from each other, but across multiple centers. Now, throw in that NASA does almost none of its own work. They hire the Lockheeds and Boeings of the world to do that for them. They, in turn hire the likes of Orbital and Swales (and other medium to tiny firms you've never heard of) to do their work. They, in turn, well, you get the point... On top of that, every pork loving congressman (or sometimes a dimwitted vice president - look up Triana for that story[1]) comes poking around, causing budgets to shift, vendors to be changed, and generally making asses of themselves in the name of their constituents. It's really amazing that it works at all. And not so amazing that it costs what it does to launch a space shuttle. Can you imagine the software that would be required to put all of NASA on the same page? Yikes. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory I worked on this project back in the day. The wikipedia article is very kind to the project's worth and to Al Gore. He literally dreamt up the idea that we should have a continual view of the sunlit side of the earth because it was inspiring or some such nonsense (I was told you could easily piece together that image from available data and nobody would know the difference). He woke up the next day, called the NASA head, and the project was born. We spent millions (I think it had a budget of about $75 million, but don't quote me on that), until finally someone called it out for being utterly worthless and devoid of scientific value. Nobody really had an argument against that.

I was thinking exact same thing since I would love to sell NASA an awesome web2.0 smart-phone-enabled awesome calendar.

Me too. As someone who looked at Bedework[1] a while back, I'd like to know if she considered it. [1] - http://www.bedework.org/bedework/ http://www.bedework.org/bedework/

slater 16y ago

In my experience, there is always SOMETHING that doesn't quite work right with calendaring, whether it's "enterprise" (whatever that's supposed to mean) or not. Mainly synching.

adestefan 16y ago

People want cross-platform Exchanged-hosted Outlook calendars. They want the ability to see other people's calendars, invite them to meetings and accept/reject invites via email. This is especially important to places like NASA that have engineers on Linux desktops. I've been at a place that was going to go so far as to installing VMware with a Windows VM just so everyone could have access to Outlook for calendars. I've also found that people really, really hate web based calendars. It's amazing how picky people are when it comes to the views of their schedule and most web-based solutions do not address these needs very well.

damoncali 16y ago

It's not calendar software, it's NASA. It's a ridiculously fragmented organization. The various space centers all operate as their own little (or big, really) entities, and compete for influence. Then, in parallel with the space centers there are massive projects (think Hubble Space Telescope or International Space Station) that operate separately from each other, but across multiple centers. Now, throw in that NASA does almost none of its own work. They hire the Lockheeds and Boeings of the world to do that for them. They, in turn hire the likes of Orbital and Swales (and other medium to tiny firms you've never heard of) to do their work. They, in turn, well, you get the point... On top of that, every pork loving congressman (or sometimes a dimwitted vice president - look up Triana for that story[1]) comes poking around, causing budgets to shift, vendors to be changed, and generally making asses of themselves in the name of their constituents. It's really amazing that it works at all. And not so amazing that it costs what it does to launch a space shuttle. Can you imagine the software that would be required to put all of NASA on the same page? Yikes. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory I worked on this project back in the day. The wikipedia article is very kind to the project's worth and to Al Gore. He literally dreamt up the idea that we should have a continual view of the sunlit side of the earth because it was inspiring or some such nonsense (I was told you could easily piece together that image from available data and nobody would know the difference). He woke up the next day, called the NASA head, and the project was born. We spent millions (I think it had a budget of about $75 million, but don't quote me on that), until finally someone called it out for being utterly worthless and devoid of scientific value. Nobody really had an argument against that.