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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.
Or did anyone else read the headline and think there was yet another outlook vulnerability?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
for a good replacement for some time now for the windows platform. Outlook works fine but from a security standpoint, its horrible. I'm glad this is open source because i don't want to shell out lots of money either. Updates will be prompt as well :D
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Why not build on the success of evolution?
--------- I have no signature
Kinda disappointed... For a second there, I thought it was another email worm that uninstalled Outlook on its way out...
=)
But as long as I do not see at least some screenshots it is just vaporware for me.
:-)
Perhaps this is a bit exaggerated but I've simply experienced too many disappointments with software which does not exist yet.
Anyway, still I wish good luck to this project!
Good thing. I despise outlook. I work at a tech support department at a medium sized college, and we officially support netscape (not much of a better choice) but outlook attracts email worms like a neon light attracts bugs. After the hundreth box that I had to zero or get our net engineer to block I'd love to see something more secure. I'm using Eudora right now.
Also, I'd love to see popular email programs support background encryption, something that happened behind the scenes without the users notice, so even the most inept id10t could handle it. It's ridiculous that 90% of the world is sending it's email around in cleartext. Are we just begging the FBI or the NSA to read our minds?
Code-named ``Chandler''
At least it wasn't named after the same character from 'Friends'...
People might have worried that the software would take after the character... get a bit bloated and be a bit sarcastic. :)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I wasn't too impressed by his description and explination, so I found the page that had the real details, enjoy: http://www.osafoundation.org/our_product_desc.htm
... is Exchange =)
Mozilla is already open source why do these guys need to re-invent the wheel when they could take the mail and news client already exists and expand on it to make it infinately more useable?
I mean isn't that the whole point of open source, not having to re-invent everything but to expand and improve on what's already out there?
Maybe I'm missing something.
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.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
it is. Read the article.
/other/ reasons.
It isnt an Outlook-Killer for
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
If they're not careful, they very well could mimic outlook even moreso. Under Feature Summary:
-user-scripting capabilities
This might not end well...
I guess they can't screw things up worse than Outlook though.
Under http://www.osafoundation.org/technology.htm, they mention the parts of Mozilla they're planning on using. Mainly just the Gecko engine and the development tools. From the looks of things, they'll be using Jabber quite a bit, maybe that model doesn't fit as well directly to Mozillas PIM features.
Jason
True enough, because you're completely wrong about Symphony. Lotus Symphony, a DOS application, was released in 1985. It was a spreadsheet/business graphics/database program that was supposed to be the logical successor to 1-2-3, but suffered from a number of problems, not the least of which was a nasty user interface. Think of it as "1-2-3 plus a few utilities".
Agenda first shipped in 1988, and was a Windows-based PIM application. It had almost nothing in common with Symphony, or any other Lotus product.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
so many projects reinventing the same wheel
in this case, i-ve already got pine and ldap
simple tools that work well and don-t need to be reinvented to be "feature-rich"
and, anyway, why is something so good becuase its done "without a server"?
were all servents, or should be, and whats the harm in extra computing power and bandwidth when its all so cheap
lets drop our interest in these highprofile highfalutin projects and go where the action should be, openbios, open spectrum, and opencores
Turn it on, hook it in, no admin
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?
It's not necessarily sensible to encrypt non-
sensitive material. There's a performance cost,
a risk of future unreadability, there's the key-
distribution problem, and of course the difficulty
of making everyone's implementation compatible.
There are good reasons to encrypt everything, too,
I'm just saying it's not black and white.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
No. It said, "Outlook KILLER," not "Outlook Express clone." :)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I've seen a number of responses asking why doesn't Mitch and his group put their efforts into (Evolution||Mozilla||etc).
... if I wanted to use Outlook, I'd install Outlook. I don't like the interface of Outlook and Evolution seems to be a rehash of the same.
... that is to be -better- than what Microsoft has currently locked most work desktops onto rather than just replicating those interfaces and functionality on a different OS.
I may be in the minority, but I hate the Mozilla mail client. It just doesn't work for me.
I refuse to use Evolution
In fact, right now I use Palm Desktop for my PIM (even though my PDA has been without batteries for 9+ months due to inactivity) and Eudora for my email. I would love the -functionality- of Outlook including reliable synchronization with integration with a good email client.
If I had that, I would switch to Linux as my primary work machine (currently I experiment with several distributions and my off-hours machine is Linux, but my work desktop still runs Windows).
My point is, why should they contribute to projects they don't like? It's their time and it sounds like they have adopted project directions that many of us have been wanting for a long time
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Now I'm not familiar with wxWindows/wxPython, but the problem I see is that by writing using a cross-platform library, you can't take advantage of OS-specific features. You are stuck with the generic widgets that appear to work the same way accross platforms. For example, on windows, you cannot take advantage of COM functionality unless you isolate the code and make it windows-only. Yes python supports COM, but that code will crap out on linux...
Example: one of the worst interfaces I've seen is Ethereal. Excellent program, very useful, but the interface bites.
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
Me
> remote peer-to-peer browsing of others' data
And when that data is sitting on someones laptop? What then?
Macka
now overwhelmingly dominated by Microsoft's inelegant but overwhelmingly dominant Outlook
This surprisingly clumsy phrase was clumsy but surprising to me.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
OK, now I know that I don't have to write a single line of code to get my project spalshed across the front page. Good. Now, what was it I was going to write...
:-)
(head scratching)
Oh yea. I remember. Hey, Taco, I'm going to invent a perpetual motion machine the day after tomorrow. For real. Not vaporware. Honest! I demand my story submitted.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
If the software is going to work without a server I expect it's going to need to share information between clients somehow, so my best guess is that it's going to use P2P technology to do this in conjunction with the Jabber stuff for messaging. But without a central server for replication this is going to mean that data will get out of sync if it has to be cached on other users machines, or otherwise a user will need to keep their machine on all the time they want to share their information such as calendars, etc.
Inter-operaterability with other systems would most likely be ignored whilst prefering to encourage transistion and migration from one system to another. That way they'll be able to get you to move your data over and use it right away, but not talk with the Exchange server requiring an Evolution like connector (which is not open or free).
I wish them luck. I can remember sitting in a bar discussing the pros and cons of coming up with a competing product to Exchange and Outlook around about a week before the first time I saw Evolution mentioned, which was on Slashdot.
I hope that they can pursuade the Mozilla people to allow people to use it if it's that much better.
/usr/bin/awake/too/long
Bloat.
These guys are aiming to make an outlook killer, not trying to further the mail reading capabilities of a huge bloated piece of software that does everything but render pages as well as IE.
A bit optimistic. Better hope that the organizer of events never loses a hard drive or leaves their notebook at home. All the technology and specs already exist to make an Outlook/Exchange killer. vCard, iCal, iTIP are all good protocols for PDI and can be used via e-mail and HTTP (defined in iMIP). The best part (and Apple realized this by picking vCard and iCal for their OSX PIM software) is that Outlook already supports auto importing of vCard and iCal data (no if they would auto-export it then life would be great).
Is there a standard PIM messaging format to interchange appointments, contacts, etc., between various apps?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Among the features the email client will have are "in-line viewing of attachments" and "user-scripting capabilities". (!)
In order to displace Outlook, I suppose people will demand these features. But let's hope the OSA Foundation does a better job on securing these features than MS!
I hope I shall not spoil any party!!!
1. Mr. Kapor is on Groove Networks board of directors, isn't there any conflict of interests...
2. IMHO the OSAF target features are quite similar to Groove's...never mind the spesific technology used...
3. MS had invsted $51 million in Groove, and to my best recall parts of Groove were integrated into Outlook (or at least there was intention for such integration)
One may only wonder if:
a)Mr. Kapor is looking for a silver bullet against Gate's embrace & extend strategy? as well for Groove financial status?
To make a long story short, why not open & port Groove Networks source code? would it not be simpler? Groove shall still be the best party to package it as well tailoring new business components...
Try this on a network of any size. 2 computers means 2 computers (1 for each), three means 4, 4 means 12, and so on-- the number of possible connections gets out of hand rapidly. If you have 100 peers, you have 9900 possible connections on your networks, with 99 computers that might need to be searched at a given time!
This is why we have servers (LDAP, email, etc.) but they don't have to be expensive... P2P doesn't scape THAT well for the corporate workstation, and instead, people tend to rely on networks of servers and networks of workstations instead.
So although this might be nice for the small office, I have serious questions about its scalability.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
what we need isn't a mail client that "LOOKS" like outlook but one that functions like outlook. Something for *nix desktop/workstation that can interact and use exchange server. That would be something else... not another look a like.
Consider Yahoo mail and calendar. I can use them from anywhere and get a consistent view of my data. To me the era of the communications client is over - I need to see my data anywhere. Locking me down to one desktop isn't a step forward.
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.
War is necrophilia.
Note to reader: this is not a flame! I'm just joking around. It's funny, laugh.
From the article:
A couple of paragraphs ago, it became clear that I could not take all of Mitch Kapor's claims seriously while at the same time fully realizing my internal goals of being honest to myself and others. This gave rise to an important idea, which is that (maybe) Mitch has been in marketing far too long. I felt it was important to continue reading so that I could be fully informed. All of which is to say that I have to keep reading while Mitch drones on and on about "product" and "deferring work" and more "product".
At this point, a small team has spent the better part of a year thinking through the problem space and developing a theory to explain wtf Mitch's problem is. (Their answer? Five tons of flax! (see ddate(1) or your peneal gland for more info)) I've made a number of fundamental decisions about the quality of the weblog I've just read and have arrived at a (not preliminary) set of conclusions:
The part that really got me was the first line of the second quoted paragraph. Yes, I understand what he means by "thinking through the problem space", but I can't ignore that he actually phrased it that way. Guys, the only time a programmer should talk of "problem space" is when she or he is writing code that handles one. E.g. an expert system that has to search its database to find the "best" answer to the user's querry or a (chess-like) games program that has to search the tree of valid moves to find a good one or a root finding program that has to search in the x-y plane (or the x-y-z space or n-dimensional space) for the set of points where f(x[1],x[2],...,x[n])=0.
Now go talk amongst yourselves while I "think through the problem space" of how to quit being a slashdot bum and go get a job. :-P (I know, I know. The answer is obvious...)
Furry cows moo and decompress.
If I hear that sure-fire, badge of stupidity, quoted one more time I may just roll over, die AND throw up on my shoes. Not in that order of course.
Wheels get re-invented ALL the time. It's called PROGRESS. What? You didn't realize that progress was cumulative? That everyone stands "on the shoulders of giants"? Every post, it seems, that says ANYTHING, someone drags it out "What's the point? We've done that with x?"
Bozo. You folks are supposed to be thinkers. So think.
No Wheel, no rubber tyre - no rubber tyre, no tractor - no tracter, no avocado farm - no avocado farm, no Guacamole for the masses!
And then where would we be? Mmmmm?
Okay, so I'm a _little_ off topic but at least I have my chips and dip.
Stoptional
I've still got the dos installation disks. I could never bear to throw them out. (Even today when I'm on a Mac!)
That thing, in the the day of DOS was the most advanced information manager I've ever used. It would mine information out of the context of your notes and relentlessly track details like a bad luck bookie. Nothing I've used since has come close to the pure elegance of Agenda.
Oh, to have it back! And on a Mac!
Anyone got a small paper bag for me to breathe into?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
People think that just because gnutella doesn't scale very well that any peer-to-peer will have the same flaws.
If you can have hosts that don't go up and down all the time, and you don't care about anonymity (which you really shouldn't if you're looking up addresses in other people's contact lists) then peer to peer can scale in a way which is competitive with client-server. Plus, nobody needs to invest in a massive server (or server farm).
The guy I heard talk about this has a paper up (sorry, it's postscript).
Powered by Web3.5 RC 2
Reads and updates my calendar from the outlook server.
That is the only requirement. Anything that does not do this is be defininition not an outlook killer, in that I will still be forced to use outlook at work. Something I can just drop in frees a whole box from runnign Windows.
I have thought of using Evolution with the connector, but haven't taken a look at it yet.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He seems to have been involved with similar products in the past (so hopefully realises the megnitude of the task) and it's great to see some forward thinking (rather reactive development). Yeah, don't rely on it, but we're (hopefully) going to see more projects trying to create something better rather than reinventing wheels.
;o)
Isn't this *exactly* how M$ works? "Don't buy that, we're going to release something that does that next year!"
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
There was and is a unix-based server that works like Exchange. It can use Outlook as a client, and can also use Java-based and Web-based clients, as well as other Unix mail clients.
HP developed it and used to sell it as Openmail, but they don't sell it any more.
Now it's been picked up by Samsung. Here's the FAQ.
"having every feature a user wants"
/. will have their comments in an email format.
/. addicts... just wait to see this stuff working !!!
That of course means that
Imagine the anxiety just waiting for that pop-up window saying: "Your message has been replied" or "You've been moderated insighful".
And believe that some of us are
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
OTOH our economy has had great success with non-existant money. Just as Enron...
And M$ releaees non-existant killer apps all the time...
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
in their 'Employment' section, they list the following position:
:)
"Software Engineer/Interface Designer"
Sorry, but software engineers do NOT good interface designers make. Programmers are not designers and vice-versa. When you combine those two jobs, you get things like emacs. Sure, it'll do the job, but GEEZ!
And they think something designed by a software engineer is going to fly with the Mac crowd? They're on crack!
Their web site is nice, though.
If you used Sam Spade or something like that you would prolly find that the IP address that Eudora is going to is at Qualcomm and that all it's doing is sucking down more ad banners. Opera does the same thing. Not a serious problem. Eudora's privacy policies are golden. Eudora is pretty Opera-like on that score. If you are really concerned don't run it. I pick my privacy battles and with truly evil schtuff like Doubleclick and Kazaa out there Eudora and Opera don't seem like a big deal.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
-------------
* IBM PROFS was the worst. The original Prodigy 300-baud 24x40-character mail system was heinous also. The homebrew Kermit-based system we used that crashed when receiving more than 200KB of mail was about on par with MSMail in those days...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What "we" need isn't a client that functions like Outlook. "We" need something that feels like Outlook, but functions properly. Well, actually, "we" need a client that feels like Outlook Express, but functions properly.
"Have I mentioned it's going to run on Macintosh, Linux, and Windows and will not require a server"
So what happends when I want to schedule a meeting with Anne, Bo and Chris, and Both Bo and Chris are on hollidays (due back tommorrow). I won't have access to their calenders will I ??
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I'm surprised not to see any references to Pegasus. I know it's windows only, but that is where Outlook runs... I don't have enough recent experience with Outlook to comment on how they compare, but I've been using it for a while and am quite happy with it. One feature is has that Outlook got rid of a few versions ago is the ability to pick and choose what to download from you POP server.
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
Who funds OSAF? Kapor himself?
Thats why we don't flap.. just drop like a rock. :-) Admittedly a little different than the flying birds do, but hey, its still feels like flying (especially once you're under your parachute).
Cheers!
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Oh, goody! A list of features! Can that list remind me about my wife's birthday? Well, no. It can't do anything. It's not software. It's just hot air.
Do I smell JOS here? (I know that site vanished two or three years ago; that's the point).
Where's the product? I see an announcement, and I see a public discussion about what people might like to do, if by some quirk of fate they were to shut up and start writing code. I see an elaborate "Mission Statement" located on a slick-looking web site. But I don't see any code. I don't see any output at all.
A lot of people are going to jump into this and start arguing endlessly about features, programming patterns, methodology, licenses, and all manner of irrelevant crapola. No functional product will ever emerge, because they're doing it backwards. This is a truism, but people never seem to remember it: If you start with code, you may end up with something. If you start with a flashy web site, a vague 400-word mission statement (any "mission statement" longer than ten words is a death sentence), and a public call for sidewalk superintendents to gum things up, you'll never end up with anything. The latter approach is best described as Announcement Engineering. It's been tried, and it has failed, and it has been tried again, and it has failed again.
Why does it fail? Because if you start a discussion, you'll get people who specialize in discussing things. If you start a slick web site, you'll get people who like slick web sites. Both of those groups are self-selected for parasitism and uselessness. If, on the other hand, you start writing code, you'll get people who like to write code. If writing code is your goal, people who write code are the people you want. Not sidewalk superintendents. Not methodology-obsessed BS artists. Not visionaries, not self-appointed "philosophers", not "online community" addicts, not Open Source rock stars, spokesmodels, public figures, beloved elder statesmen, or opinionated teenagers -- all of which are going to descend on Kapor like a horde of locusts. For programming, you want programmers. But all the programmers are somewhere else, working on projects that actually exist.
Devil's Advocate Dept.: What about the GNU Manifesto? It does superficially resemble Announcement Engineering, but one crucial ingredient of AE is missing: Stallman never asked for anybody's goddamn opinion, and to this day he still hasn't. He doesn't want to discuss anything with anybody. When Stallman wants to know what you think, Stallman will tell you what you think. He never asked anybody for an opinion in that announcement; he just asked for code.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
You are confusing NetBIOS with NetBEUI.
If you run NetBIOS over TCP/IP, you start introducing the computer browsing services which acts as a cache for locating machines. This helps to reduce the amount of broadcast packets flying around, and makes NetBIOS slightly more scalable. Then you have WINS and all that sort of stuff which solves most of the other issues, if you want to go to an NT domain model.
We're running pretty recent Outlook here, and this is real Outlook, not Outlook Express. Happened just last week (actually, it was two 5MB Powerpoints....) Sometimes you can do other things while receiving large files, but sometimes you can't - it may be that the difference is between steady-state where you're already running when the file arrives vs. having it queued up when you first dial in?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Get professional help before it is too late!
Would you call GOD a professional?
You don't go by the nickname "dubya", do you, by any chance?
See my name.