Mitch Kapor's Outlook-Killer

Kent Brewster writes "In the San Jose Mercury this morning: 'For more than a year, [Mitch] Kapor and his small team have been working on what they're calling an open-source "Interpersonal Information Manager." The software is being designed to securely handle personal e-mail, calendars, contacts and other such data in new ways, and to make it simple to collaborate and share information with others without having to run powerful, expensive server computers.'" Kapor explains his intent in his own words.

Comments

Cool apps

[LinuxGeek]

Linux ( FreeBSD, etc...) already has many small single purpose cool apps, but not many large ( mozilla scale) cool apps. Agenda spawned a whole wave of business users to the DOS world and could do the same for Linux.

From the feature list, this takes care of 80% of the needs that keep business people using windows just to have Outlook calender functions. Agenda was replaced by Symphony and Symphony wasn't the simple freeform database/calendar app that Agenda had been.

Agenda was allowing complex datamining from freeform databases before the term 'datamining' existed. If this is going to be an extension of Agenda, then much coolness is ahead and many people will be interested in trying Linux just to run the new Agenda.

Re:Evolution....

[illusion_2K]

Being an evolution user (and former Outlooker) myself, I was curious to see what he plans on doing. But from what I see on his features page I only noticed a couple features that interested me. (Naturally YMMV)

Mail:

• auto-archiving of old mail

Information Sharing & Exchange

• integrated Instant Messaging and presence management (Jabber)
• remote peer-to-peer browsing of others' data
• flexible security model to control access
• file and document sharing
• remote queries, e.g., look up address in another person's contact list
• automatic updating of information from remote sources: receive new contacts, changes to existing contacts automatically (publish-subscribe)

Access

• home and work PC's with complete automatic replication of data

Evolution seems to have all the other features already in place (although some may only be accessible via the Exchange connector). I'm sure they would be able to add the others without too much difficulty.

Apologies for the total cut & paste job.

Ummmm

[IamTheRealMike]

I don't mean to diss their work, but considering they've spent a year "designing the architecture", where are the docs explaining exactly how it's going to work?

So far the only info on the site are a rundown of the technologies they've "evaluated". However, they talk about using Jabber as a P2P transport - but Jabber is server based. I've not seen any demos of a p2p version of jabber either. Have they actually thought this through?

Python

[rbeattie]

No one has mentioned it yet - I'm amazed it wasn't in the headline. The project is going to be written mostly in Python.

Pretty neat. I've been meaning to swap some books in Safari and check out the Learning Python... I guess I finally have some reason.

This whole project sounds great - but why is there no code available? Supposedly a small group of core developers have been holed up for a year designing this thing... so where's the code already? Man, I can announce an Outlook Killer and throw some html up on the web too. But then again, I'm not Mitch Kapor...

-Russ

Re:good idea

[delta407]

OL2K is more than an email prog, it's got a lot of cool things going for it. You've got the calendar, the todo list, the sticky notes, and contact list. This may not seem all that interesting until you synch up with an device such as a PDA.

Or, until you hook it up to an Exchange server in a company with a few hundred employees. Most corporations that use Outlook do so not for the e-mail capability, but rather the groupware capability -- scheduling appointments collectively, meeting requests, delegatation, etc. As it stands, there are few products that can match Outlook's rather full feature set.

Outlook is actually a decent program with far fewer vulnerabilities than Outlook Express. Also, since a corporate deployment of Outlook is in a controlled environment, server-side antivirus solutions are possible and make a whole lot of sense. Properly set up, Outlook can be a good solution to an office communication problem.

(Of course, I still hate Exchange, but the users don't seem to mind...)

Go look at ecco first.

[Malcontent]

If you are thinking of "rethinking the pim" go look at an old version ecco pro. That was one awsome pim that got buried for no reason.

Re:Evolution....

[Tokerat]

No, really, take your own advice.

Without a server, clients need to simply discover each other. Rendezvous will allow then to do this, clean and without user intervention (i.e. no typing in someone's computer name or IP). The protocol of transer will be TCP/IP, however I believe you're refering to the structure of the datagram, i.e. what goes into each packet that is sent, which is entirely up to the designers.

I don't think Rendezvous is overrated at all. I think it's the way things should have been done 10 years ago, and it's almost sad that it wasn't.