It appears that I missed the announcement that DAMO is going to be history...

(Thanks to Ed and Stuart for the information!)

DAMO always seemed doomed to me - and not just because of the danger of Microsoft "accidentally" breaking the product with a patch or upgrade.

But because one of the core features of Notes - calendaring - is incredibly difficult to emulate and interoperate with.

I've seen very few calendaring implementations that are as comprehensive and complex as the one Notes has.  And that's always caused issue when trying to interoperate with other systems.

The most noticeable example is repeating meetings.  Check the Notes implementation out - it's incredible!  Repeating daily, weekly, monthly (by date), monthly (by day), or yearly.

And each of those has multiple options for how often it should repeat - every two days, or every two months, etc.  Plus of course if the day falls on aweekend, you can have thecalendar entry deleted, moved to the friday, or moved to the monday, or moved to the nearest weekday.

Notes calendaring is capable of some pretty impressive, labyrinthine calculations that make the calendar capable of expressing repeating patterns almost as people would when they talk to each other.  Which is a fairly impressive feat...

Unfortunately, many other calendaring systems are...  Less complex.

In fact, primitive would be complimentary for some calendaring implementations.  For most other systems, repeating meetings means that they happen every n days, and that's your lot.

And it's always been a pain in the posterior to interoperate with a Notes calendar because of this. Even back in the days of the early Palm devices, I remember repeating entries going missing because the synchronising software couldn't figure out how to represent that particular repeating pattern on the Palm.

Or worse, if you edited a repeating meeting you suddenly found it duplicated on the next synchronsation, or found that the software had deleted that repeating instance and replaced it with a standalone one - meaning that changes to the meeting invitees skipped that one ex-instance.

You even get the same thing on the Blackberry - which has a better calendar than a Palm, but not by much. If someone has a problem with calendar entries on a Blackberry, bet on them being repeating ones.  You'll break the bank!

All this data translation for other applications just gets very tricky.  Putting the Notes calendar into most other calendaring systems is like putting a V12 engine on a unicycle.  Daring, exciting, innovative and more than just a little foolhardy.

I mention all of this because my first memory of DAMO was a reproducible crash with a repeating calendar entry.  Every time you opened it, you crashed Outlook.

It was early days, and DAMO improved - but I always felt that these kinds of edge issues (as Ed discussed) meant that in a mixed environment, DAMO was a poor choice.  Webmail would be better - at least it doesn't crash when you open meetings!

(Now, in a pure DAMO environment, things would be fine.  Nobody can produce edge cases, so everyone's OK.)

I won't miss DAMO.  There are better options available for almost all purposes, and I think that the kinds of data-translation issues I've mentioned heer mean that in the long run you're better off trying to standardise on "native" clients wherever possible.

And it's not like we're short of native clients - Notes, DWA, Traveler, etc.

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