Product Reviews

If there is truth in the axiom that success in business is all about timing, then Meeting Maker Millennium must surely be in big trouble. After all, the release of this venerable scheduling application could scarcely have come at a worse moment.

Millennium may be a networkable, cross-platform group scheduling solution - still a sought-after rarity on the Mac - but it has arrived under the shadow of a significant upgrade to Microsoft Entourage vX, which finally allows it to function as a Mac client for Microsoft's dominant Outlook collaborative environment; and even Mac OS X 10.3's revamped Mail application offers rudimentary Exchange Mail server and Address Book synchronisation support. Alongside this, hitherto unheralded alternatives such as MarketCircle's DayLite, continue to offer ever stiffer, cut-price competition.

However, if Millennium finds the groupware landscape more crowded nowadays, at least it boasts some tempting goodies of its own.

The package comprises three applications: a server utility that supports both TCP and SSL connections, alongside a client program - Calendar - and an administration tool that lets you register and install accounts which must be authorised via the Internet. While setting up a Meeting Maker-based network isn't fundamentally difficult, it is nonetheless hindered by a dysfunctional online help system that still lacks a workable search function.

Each account set up by the Admin program can be either an individual user - each can be allocated its own time zone - or an equivalent number of resources and locations, which can be assigned to users on a first come, first served basis or by proxy to a specified user's control.

Millennium's client application, Calendar, has been dragged into the 21st century. Its interface is no longer as grim as a caravan holiday in February: now a neat task bar on the left allows you to switch calendar views and create multiple-day banners and to-dos. At last, you can also view multiple main windows simultaneously, so you can see weekly and monthly appointments alongside each other.

Activities and meetings are created in familiar iCal-like fashion by

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dragging an activity box over the relevant area of the calendar. Clicking on a small Invite Guests hyperlink at the bottom of each box turns the activity into a meeting and displays a dialog box with potential participants' availability marked on a time grid as either free, busy or non-work. Two buttons here fulfil critical functions: the Autopick button automatically finds the next available free slot for all participants and the Email guests button emails non-Calendar users the date, time and agenda of the proposed meeting.

Crossing over

Calendar does well here. Cross-platform availability is one of the program's selling points - as well as Mac and Windows clients, you can access calendars on Palm, Pocket PC and RIM Blackberry devices and even over the Web. But Calendar also now co-operates with other applications more effectively. External guests listed in Calendar's address book receive invites to meetings as attachments in iCalendar format, a standard shared by Microsoft Entourage and Apple's iCal. Drop the attachment over an iCal or Entourage calendar window and the meeting appears in their favoured scheduling application.

You can also export and import Calendar events directly, although not without encountering glitches: we found that by using the desktop as an intermediary, we could drag and drop activities created in Entourage into Calendar, but invitees were sometimes not properly recognised. We could also export Calendar appointments into Entourage using the new Export as iCalendar option in Calendar's File menu, but don't expect every detail of the meeting to transfer easily. We were less successful with iCal: while we could successfully import Calendar iCalendar files, their iCal-created equivalents resolutely refused to transfer across.

Meeting Maker has long had a proxy feature, similar in function to Outlook's delegate tool, which lets you assign read/write access to other users. It's still uncomfortably fiddly to configure, as you can't easily give all users access to a calendar; instead you have to add each user manually through a dialog box. On the plus side, the new ability to view all proxies in a pane next to your own calendar is useful for planning.

There's little doubt that if you're choosing your first corporate groupware application, Meeting Maker has scalability advantages - up to 2,000 users are supported on a single Mac, Windows, Linux or Solaris server. Equally, the low system requirements shouldn't be overlooked by administrators, although the lack of client-side Mac OS 9 support will disappoint a few.

Even taking into account the worthwhile improvements, they are not compelling enough to persuade corporate networks to switch. Meeting Maker has missed a clear opportunity.