SharedCalendar

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Outlook has become a dominant MUA, not because it is a particularly good at being an MUA, but because it is integrated with calendars and shared address books. These features are essential to efficient project management. It is vital that all the members of a project an communicate properly with each other, and this means that if one person is using the calendaring features of Outlook, everyone has to. Sites that have a mix of Windows and Unix systems lose out altogether.

It would be desirable to have something that works well but is not tightly bound to one particular MUA or to one platform.

The core features should include:

Calendar/diary and address books
Sharing of that diary to others, with various levels of access.
A simple way to start a telephone dialer or MUA.
The ability to determine when everyone is free for a meeting.

The address book must have good integration with directory services so users don't copy data from a directory into their private copy.

The levels of read access should include:

Ability to see everything
Ability to see busy/free periods
No data

The levels of write access should include:

Ability to add appointments or address book entries.
Ability to propose an appointment or address book entry

In addition, for appointments, there should be hints so that certain classes of people are encouraged to choose certain times for meetings, eg. undergrads get Tues afternoons only.

Access control lists should be able to include groups and individuals, the groups being defined either by the organisation running the facility or by the user of the program.

You should be able to subscribe to multiple address books, eg. the department's, the project's and your personal book. You should be able to subscribe to a remote site's address book if the access controls permit it.

Notification of meeting times should be done in different ways, according to user request. A bare minimum should be by email.