"Dr. Douglas C. MacKenzie" <doug_at_mobile-intelligence.com> asks:
> Is Coda is ready to deploy in an office environment?
...
> Is anyone using it in a similar situation?  If so, would you
> recommend it?  I don't want to spend a lot of time keeping
> Coda running and I don't want to have a lot of downtime from
> system crashes.

Georg Graf <georg_at_graf.priv.at> asks:
> I am considering to use coda on a set of webservers. On the coda
> webpage it says coda is barely ready for production use. Many of
> the manual pages come from 1997, 1995 or even earlier.
> 
> Is the development of coda frozen? Is coda still not ready for
> production use?

A new version of the administration and user manual was released
recently.  I am working through it, and have already found some
minor errors, but it's a great improvement over the old stuff.
I presented a paper recently (http://www.mcc.ac.uk/~zlsiial/coda)
which is already a little out of date; I shall be presenting a
revised version in July.  In my opinion, the file serving function
of Coda is not only ready for production use, it will provide an
extremely resilient, solid platform for some purposes.  With the
revision of the admin manual, my remarks about the documentation are
no longer quite appropriate.  But I still feel that the system lacks
the tools which make it easy to administer.  In my case, I have no
doubt that the resiliency makes it worth the effort.

Coda is not frozen, and it does some things extremely well.  I would
for the moment warn you not to put vast amounts of data in it, or
to have many users doing things in disconnected mode.  But both of
these are problems which, in my view, can be eased relatively
simply, and it seems that some effort is going towards solving these
problems at the moment.

If Coda is to benefit from being open source, it needs users who 
will at least make suggestions and, even better, offer patches.
I think (as an interested outside user) that it is ready for some
uses, and can be a valuable tool in the right circumstances.

     -- Owen
     LeBlanc_at_mcc.ac.uk