Spark Plugin API - Simple Task List Project

Hi All,

I’‘m about to start working remotely for my software company and I’‘m attempting to put together a toolset for collaboration and basic communication within our small organization (about 6 regular employees, 3 devels, 1 support, 1 sales, 1 office manager). It seems that IM is really the only appropriate method by which to maintain timely contact with the home office, so I’'ve settled on using Jive Messenger in combination with an XMPP capable client (probably Spark) as the main communication platform.

However, one addition to the IM functionality that would be really useful to us would be a simple per user task list with simple priority settings and notekeeping. Users with appropriate privileges should be able to view and modify the task lists of other users and add notes/links to resources, etc. Additionally, there should be a notification system that sent an IM to a user when their task list has been updated by another user.

A quick perusal of the Jive Messenger API docs makes me think that I could whip up a server plugin to handle the required functionality in a fairly short time frame. However, I’‘m interested to know how long it will be before the Spark Plugin API is available in some form that would allow me to get started on the client side as well. I imagine that it would be possible to use the Smack API to produce my own custom client, but I’‘d like to save myself the effort of recreating the basic client functionality that’'s been implemented so well in Spark.

So, do you guys have a timeframe for the availability of the Spark API documentation? Or, do you have some basic beta quality docs that you would be willing to share?

And to the users, is there some other IM package that will already do what I want to do? This sounds like a fun project to me, but time is money for my employer, so I’'d hate to find out that I could have just purchased what I need from some other source (no offense, to you Jive guys. You really seem to have your stuff together, just double-checking my research).

Nothing that does that in what I know of, however I could be wrong. The only real clients I tested were listed on the Jabber web page. Miranda-IM is what I had been using since switching to a Jabber back-end (MessagePal before that, a server-less client), but felt it was too complicated for my users. Spark is going in a great direction, and I love it thus far.

The task list is interesting, though. We just use a shared calendar for out tasks (a free Linux email server is Scalix–very comparable to Exchange). I think Sunbird has a shared feature with a task list. You can also look around Sourceforge for task lists for groups.