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February 04, 2005
Interoperability
(This started out as a comment to Meghan's post about her new Mac but it got too long...)
Regardless of OS/platform wars, the goal to me is total interoperability. Good examples of awesome interoperability are email and the web. It works for everyone all the time on every platform.
An example with shared contacts is LDAP and/or Active Directory. Both Microsoft Outlook and Apple's Address Book application can talk to these types of servers just fine. In theory and perhaps in practice, you guys on the agency network could seamlessly use the company shared contacts with Address Book and Mail. We should try that. The same may be true of scheduling with iCal/Outlook.
For folks like us, the base set of tools we need is something like this:
web
email
instant messaging
contact management
scheduling
word processing
spreadsheet
presentation
All of these have associated protocols, almost all of which are completely interoperable on Mac/Windows/*nix. The only one that is not ubiquitously interoperable is scheduling. Otherwise we can all pretty much share information across platforms.
This is good. We should all be able to use whatever the hell we want.
Posted by Michael at February 4, 2005 11:48 AM
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Comments
Amen. I wouldn't call myself a "Mac person" or a "Windows person." I'm a "give me something that works and I'll use it" person.
Interoperability is key!
Posted by: Meghan ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.techevangelists.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 5, 2005 09:54 AM