Our Product

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Our product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist Raymond Chandler,) is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list. Because of the ease with which Chandler users can share information with others, Chandler might be called the first Interpersonal Information Manager. (The term PIM was first used in conjunction with the product Lotus Agenda in the 1980's. Chandler is the spiritual descendant of Agenda (and has a common designer in Mitch Kapor.)

Today's de facto standard PIM is Microsoft Outlook, which dominates both the corporate and consumer markets. Outlook is stuffed with features, but no one can fairly claim it's either an elegant product to use or an easy one to maintain. The full feature set, (including, for instance, the sharing of calendars,) is available only in the Enterprise edition with the Microsoft Exchange server, and not to Internet users with a standalone Outlook application. Outlook/Exchange is scalable but extremely complex to administer, making it unsuitable for organizational deployment without a large information technology budget for administration, maintenance, and support. The enterprise version of Outlook is expensive, given Microsoft's license fee structure, and, of course, the full version runs only under Windows, leaving Macintosh and Linux users out in the cold.

Recent open-source groupware products and projects (Evolution, Kroupware) use Outlook as the baseline for design and functionality. This approach benefits users because it's familiar, but it doesn't take design risks that could have big payoffs for users in power and simplicity. We're trying to rethink the PIM in fundamental ways and we expect to be judged in terms of our success in achieving that goal. We're building the product by using up-to-date architectural components such as peer-to-peer networking, integrated instant messaging, and an RDF-compatible semantic database, and we're not saddled with legacy code. At the same time, we'll be fully compliant with a variety of open standards, such as iCal, vCard and the Jabber protocol.

We don't expect to cut significantly into Outlook's share of the overall enterprise market or its revenue. In its initial incarnation, Chandler is designed for individuals and small-to-medium enterprises of up to about 100 people (populations, which, by the way, are underserved by Outlook/Exchange).

We're committed to making free software, supported on multiple platforms that emphasize ease of use and administration, while also adding significant new capabilities.