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More On Kapor's Attempt To Best Outlook
An anonymous reader writes "There's a story on the Boston Globe's Digital MASS section about Mitch Kapor , the guy who created Lotus 1-2-3. He will reportedly spend about $5 mil to create something competing with MS Outlook. More of the story here." We mentioned this a few months ago as well, and it sounds like any software release is still some time off.
Outlook 2000 is the weakest piece of shit I've seen Microsoft produce for years. I hope (but doubt) the version in Office XP is better.
:(
Sure wish Cloudmark would ship an Outlook Express plugin for SpamNet. It's amazing how much better the freebie OE is than the full-fledged Outlook product.
I definitely wish him the best of luck. Having a free email/calender/planner/whatever else piece of software that is free, better than Outlook, and available for Mac, Linux and Windows is certainly a hefty goal, but if he can pull it off it will certainly be an excellent feat.
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
Duke Nukem Forever is looking better than ever. No, really. It's going to rock! This will be the ultimate computer game. Really. It's gonna be great. I'll see you all in line at Best Buy!
you can take the road that takes you to the stars...
Mitch Kapor was also responsible for the promotion of Lotus Notes.
Sure it burned the eyes out of your skull to use it, but it was a combination of Outlook, HTML, PGP, IMAP, and NNTP done back in the 1980s. If he can make that sort of leap again, it will be something to reckon with.
Evolution is also trying this, and they deliver Exchange connectivity. The KDE group is busy on a groupware solution, and it will shortly be released.
If you want to use Linux in an office environment, a groupware solution is a must-have. The more people who are working on this subject, the better, in my opinion....
how many people actually consider an outlook-killer such a killer app as to be worth $5 million?
Imagine if that got put into something else like OpenBeOS (sure, I'm a bit biased towards BeOS =] )
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
One must always be careful in praising vaporware, but the prototypes on the OSAF web site sure look impressive. I am particularly glad they place such a strong emphasis on security! That is an even better reason than MS-loathing to urge Outlook users to switch. OSAF will do the Internet a great service if Vista can cut down the number of Outlook viruses flooding my emailbox every day!
Since when is "Microsoft Outlook shipped with most Windows computers"?
Seems to me that if Outlook was shipped, Microsoft wouldn't have gone to all the trouble to work Outlook Express into the OS as they have.
It seems like a well funded project, and seems 'noble' enough, but is it really needed? I just use KMail for e-mail. Even at work where I do use Outlook for Exchange connectivity, we don't really use the Calender features. Maybe if I had a PDA and could sync back and forth, but then I'd have to get used to entering all my appointments into the calender. It's easier to just write it down on a piece of paper or use my brain.
All I'd really need if I was in a Linux shop would be a mail client that could connect to Exchange (and there are already several projects working on this), but if it were a Linux shop, we wouldn't have Exchange, would we?
Also, a little off topic, Slashdot is soo slow (so slow as to be unusable) every day from about 2:30 AM to about 3:30 AM [EST].. I had to post this comment twice, since I lost it the first time due to a server timeout.
But, there is NOTHING like Exchange out there in the free software world. Corporate users need group calendaring most of all. I realize that OpenLDAP lets us trade contact info, but the critical thing is group calendaring (which includes task lists). Oh, and the group calendaring has to interoperate with Outlook so that Outlook and non-Outlook users can trade meeting invitations. I think Mr. Kapor should spend a little bit of money on enhancing Evolution and spend the rest on building a great Exchange-killer instead.
On a side note... it would take very little effort to get Evolution to be able to parse winmail.dat attachments, so that Evolution and Outlook clients could do peer-to-peer exchanges of meetings and tasks. That would be a fantastic step. They can already trade contacts with no problems. Trading calendaring info should be not much more difficult and it would be a tremendous help to letting Evolution sneak into offices.
This will make Wired's 2003 vaporware award. But we won't care cause we'll be using Evolution, Aethera and Kroupware.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I for one think the "Identity/Account" system is one of the most self-contadictory buggy confusing systems in any mail client. It sucks! I think apps like Evolution, KMail, Mozilla Mail, Netscape Communicator and even pine tower over outlook in usability.
I'm really looking forward to the maturation of the K suite (KOffice), as it works in such harmony with the K environment. As soon as the prones at K ditch XFree86 (a looong way down the track) in favour of a nicer, more responsive light system (ala OS X), I will be home and hosed.
Outlook has already been "bested", but if Kapor wants to throw another superior client out there, then I'm all for it!
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
It won't work, and for the same reason that people don't switch over from IE. Outlook/IE is the default. It's what came with their computer and they're just too lazy/actually like it/uninformed/used to it to change over.
Even if it is significantly better, it's not likely to gain much of a hold.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Note: This was meant to be funny. However, at 2:30 in the morning, this is the best you're going to get. My apologies.
It can read and write calendar information to an outlook server. Someone should spend $5 million studying just that, I don't need another mail client no matter how bellsy and whistley.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Aside from it being "free" which outlook might as well be since it ships as part of office, how is this better?
Cross platform stuff is great, but what features make it better than outlook for a windows user?
{ What a coincidence! I was just browsing their site for the last 2 hours & came here to check out if there were any articles about them. }
;
This is one OS project I am definitely looking forward to contribute to, big time.
I would recommend you to subscribe to the mailinglists here
or atleast to the "Major announcements from OSAF" here.
Link to prototype:
People working on it: (Impressive list)
OFFTOPIC? Yay. Now I can bitch like every other slashturbator..
What... other than cost, stability, performance, and flexability?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
On the other hand, I think Outlook-like programs are prime candidates for breaking with the straight-jacket of Windows-like GUIs. With sustained funding and free from the shackles of backwards compatibility with outmoded paradigms, an open source project, together with some HCI and information retrieval researchers, could really do something ground-breakingly better than anything Microsoft, or anybody else, is delivering.
Unless some millions go into advertising. People not willing to buy a product might still be able to be sold on an image or style that goes along with it. "See Bob, we at blarg are 'down with' the latest cutting edge technology. Much as you might recall those catch phrase spouting youngsters on the television comercials were.".
Everything will be taken away from you.
Lotus Notes is the worst. Email client. Ever.
Come on. That was just funny. :)
If you don't understand the relevance, that's your fault, but don't mod it offtopic!
Sig.i>
Maybe I'm the only one, but I like alt-tabbing between applications. In my last job, I found it a never ending annoyance to not be able to alt-tab between my email and calendar because Outlook is a single program (e.g., you're looking at your 25th email in the inbox, switch to calendar to see if you're available on the date of some lame meeting, remember you forgot to check the time, go back to inbox - scroll down through the junk, find that email again, go back to calendar, it's automatically returned to today's date so you have select the relevent date again, and finally you can check - it's a Royal Pain!) At home, I found Evolution to be similarly annoying. Even if one organization makes a product like this, they should be able to make it act as several components rather than a single program. Then it's just a flash back and forth.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
oh yeah, and find the poster and garrote him with some ide cables....
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Actually, Evolution does hold your place in email and calendar. I still like to between programs than mouse click
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Maybe if you instead dumped that money into a good cause for the advancment of competing projects we wouldn't have Microsoft Outlook as the efault eMail client in the first place. Besides, what makes anyone think thye can tell Microsoft what to do on its own OS? Microsoft sells licenses, albeit a verry disgusting one that Microsoft customers don't read and just select the "I agree" action to install the software. Speak on those merits, emphasize the evil, and give people their options: show them a list of current GUI userfriendl eMail clients. I recommend only implementing hotmail and try to implement yahoo mail interface through an eMail client, but is that asking too much out of the priceless time of my fellow opensource developers?
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
has he used evolution? it's integration with everything I throw at it is incredible to the point of almost being beyond belief. of his 5 mil that he's got earmarked for this new company, he could probably spend a fraction of that and get evoluition to the point where it could blow any client out of the water hands down.
hell, he could spend that money to to fund 20 develpopers for 5 years to write a linux compatibilty layer for windoww (think wine, but Line) that would run non-native (linux) evolution faster than that pos that wants to virus me more than a bitter ex-girlfriend.
anyway, them's just my thoughts and you could be full of it, as my pappy always used to say.
Those are all good qualities, until you realise Linux has no software, a crappy GUI and YHBT.
nice job Breyer, spoken like a true master.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
guy says he will best outlook...article posted about slashdot...
months pass, an additional media outlet finds the story and posts and article, slashdot mentions it...
but nothing new has happened yet.
WHAT IS NEW ABOUT THIS STORY? it's slashdot posting a dup and admitting it. sigh.
I'm working on the necessary MAPI code to have outlook connect to open source servers, eg. Cyrus, OpenLDAP, etc. but still export all functionality. Have been for a few months now. Haven't got to calendering yet ( still working on the message store), I'm hoping on an alpha code release in late Jan maybe Feburary.
The truth is the client does most the work not the server. All the server is an IMAP server with a special 'calender' folder that appointments etc. are stored. Cyrus or any other IMAP server would suffice.
The issue is that Microsoft has made sure that outlook 'MAPI intermediary code' ( in want for a better name ) requires a little more from the server, enough to mean that that code has to be written for the client.
There are many solutions out there that have written the MAPI dlls necessary. Baynari, Lotus, Samsung, etc. all do this. Hopefully we'll have a GPL version soon.
Alternatively, theres the iCal spec which is almost done I hear. Unlike the other iCalender specs, it defines the transport protocol ( relies on Beep I believe ). That should be interesting as well.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I use Outlook a great deal. I used Ecco before Outlook. I really miss the outlining capability of Ecco. However, in the overall evaluation of things, Outlook is clearly more capable.
I have tried a few other clients but none had the all-around capability that Outlook has. I often wonder if the folks that diss Outlook here have used it much. I have never had a virus problem, although I had a few close calls that my virus scanner caught. I have had one great debacle when I was fooling around with the pst file about 3 versions ago. It was my fault and it cause me a lot of pain.
Outlook is much more that just an email client with calendar and contact manager.
For a time I used Outlook as my desktop. You can launch all your applications from Outlook if you choose to. It works quite effectively. It just turned out to be a little too boring, not enough visual appeal after a number of months. However if you want a sparse no-nonsense desktop Outlook has it.
Another of the seldom mentioned capabilities of Outlook are the automatic journaling of Office applications and email activity by name date and time. I just wish that could be extended to any application. You can manually journal anything. Outlook can provide journaling reports in multiple formats. This is a lifesaver for me when I do my monthly billing.
Outlook has alarms for arbitrary uses. It has rules that can automate various filtering and file location tasks.
Other applications may have some of these maybe even most of these. I don't know of any application that has them all.
I looked at Evolution. It looks like an Outlook knock-off. Certainly that is somewhat flattering to Outlook's designers. Kapor's effort also looks similar. I wish him luck and ask that he not forget the journaling capability. It would really be great if any application could be registered with the software and have its activity automatically journalized.
Did I mention easy synchronization with PDA devices? Or, that it can also use "stationery." I haven't personally found a use for this, However, I have received a few messages on "stationery." That's how I learned that it existed.
In summary, Outlook is useful, robust, very flexible and capable, and pretty secure (a la pgp) if configured as recommended for security and backed by a virus scanner. I depend on it.
I've got years of mail archived in .pst format for Outlook. This is what's keeping me from switching my mail over to something on SuSE (or even, God help me, Gentoo). If there's a reliable program that will suck mail out of that file and sort it into the directory structure in which it's currently put, I can finally retire my Office 2000 install.
Get off my launchpad!
But James Breyer, a longtime Kapor friend, said the OSAF model is a return to the "old-fashioned way" of designing software, in small development teams on tight budgets.
:-)
Wow, $5 million is a "tight budget"?
Assuming roughly $100K/year per developer (salary plus benefits) and 20% in overhead costs (utilities, office space, etc), that's 20 developers a year for two years. Or 10 developers a year for four years.
Even if more than 20% of the budget goes to marketing (I don't know if that's applicable in their case, since they're going the free/Free route), underage hookers, or whatEVER, that still seems like a pretty nice budget to work with!
Whatever the case, best of luck to them, though!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Yeah, we had no idea that was true before Napster.
-Enfors-
Robin Dunn, founder & maintainer of wxPython, an excellent Python-Wrapper around wxWindows, anounced in the wxpython-mailinglist that he was contracted by OSAF.
And who ever has enjoyed wxPython and the excellent support of Robin in the mailinglist knows: he get's things done. Or dunn.
So... if they don't succeed in travelling to space, at least teflon will be available.
if Mitch Kapor, Ximian, and Mozilla ever got together? With Andy Hertzfeld for lead UI designer?
Er, sorry bout that, it's late (early?) And I must be dreaming.... good night, all.
C|N>K
Note that this only makes the link to Mac users even stronger.
Cloning Outlook doesn't hurt Microsoft, it's the serverside which should be attacked.
:-) but the calendar part of it? It's buried deep in the beast.
A couple of weeks ago my boss asked me to find a replacement for the calendar server in Exchange, one which would work with... Outlook.
Nowhere to be found. I can replace the mail-part very easy (we're already doing that for years), the addressbook is nearly finished now (LDAP rules/sucks
And as long as you can't replace all what an Exchange server does, you won't have a chance in hell to replace Outlook.
bash$
Lotsa hype. No actual code to be seen. Unfortunately it's likely to be on the "whatever happened to that?" pile before you know it.
If I'm wrong, great, congrats the world is now better.
It's not gonna succeed if they keep ripping off Microsoft's Exchange Icon :-)
What he said!
-MT.
- Mozilla offered an easy migration path, i.e. all his mail from Outlook Express was converted.
- Mozilla Mail was easy to use and offered more features.
I have no doubt that this program will make it out (though I'm sure Mitch will not be in a rush--he'll release it when it's ready) and it will be successful because it'll be a lot more than just a plain e-mail, news and scheduling system. It's going to be great.<aol>I fully agree with the poster who said Pine has better usability than Outlook</aol>
The problem is not to create a better product. It is more to distribute to the masses. There are many products better than OL out there. The only problem is that M$ has control over the vast majority of users.
Since the last article there's:
* news of a prototype, Vista, which is proof of concept
* AND very active mailing lists discussion design and development issues.
If you can't say anything informed, please keep your ugly head up your ass and spare us your genius.
The Midgard application server could easily be used as a groupware server -- MySQL backend, Web Services interfaces, replication, etc.
It already has storage APIs for most of the groupware stuff -- contacts, group calendaring and hierarchical data storage ("topics and articles"), all which support additional metadata and file attachments. Some nice web interfaces already exist for the calendaring and contacts stuff.
Midgard provides a PHP API for managing all that data and is available under LGPL.
/Bergie
Midgard Project - Open Source CMS
Mitch Kapor for the best vaporware of 2002!
Evolution is pretty much a carbon copy of Outlook. I see no innovation there.
it's a nice idea but... all of my emails are in outlooks pst file - it would be really great if there were some program on linux that could read the outlook file so i could use email properly on both windows and linux
I work with many small businesses where they'd love to have an integrated mail/calendar/todo system but don't have the $ to buy an exchange server (or they're Mac users who don't want to put up with Microsoft's on-again off-again Outlook for Mac crap).
I'm dreaming of a standards based system where we'll be able to send a cross-platform invite to a meeting (or todo) via email (ala iCal and Mozilla Calendar) in a peer to peer way, yet integrated with mail and a small scale todo/project/PIM system for tasking. Also imagine being able to form up small project group by subscribing to someone else's general or special project calendar or project sub-todo list regardless of platform (except for those Timex-Sinclair OS boys). Note: BTW this is the way we use iCal even in it's current crude state.
What will make this different? It'll be different if they build in Lotus Agenda-like features. For Pete's sake! Agenda came out in 1988 and no one has every really matched it!
Huzza! Huzza! Kapor!
Agenda is dead! Long live Agenda!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
It's funny! (And I'm American, btw. Luckily, I fall into the good 1.5% and realize that the rest of the country is a bunch of retards.)
Your head!
Vapor's all there must be in there if you are proclaiming a recently announced project as vapor when it has not yet shown a vapor trail.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Yes, Kapor can likely succeed in surpassing Outlook. And Windows-using Slashdot users might love it. But I think the hardest part, harder even than writing the program, will be getting the 'average' computer users to understand why they should use it. Most people seem to have an 'allegience' to Microsoft, and refuse to believe that anything (especially anything cheaper) could possibly be better.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Sack.
Sounds like you're in the low part of your bipolar cycle, Pal.
Now that I have my precious Newton 2100 (which works like a portable version of Lotus Agenda) syncing with iCal (thanks everchanging software!)- theoretically , I'll be able to use it with 'Chandler' since it'll probably use standards based calendar and todo events...
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Teflon was invented in 1938 and had nothing to do with NASA.
</nitpick>
And thanks for the links, btw.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It is important to note that Chandler is primarily aimed at small organizations. It isn't designed to replace Exchange in corporations that are successfully using it. It isn't designed to help one person handle their email. It is designed to allow coordination between individuals in small organizations that don't have enough infrastructure and expertise to run a server-based system.
Novell's GroupWise is a full-featured collaboration suite (and I don't mean just client, but server, too), including document and form management, and a very nice web interface.
The calendaring and collaboration features of GroupWise beat Outlook+Exchange pants down. Or was it hands down?
Sigged!
The reason Notes has a non-standard interface... it was developed before the standard! Notes Release 1 came out in something like 1986 - long before Windows became a big thing. So by the time Windows did appear, Lotus with left with two unappetizing options: 1) totally revamp their interface to conform with Microsoft's "standard", and piss off all their existing users, or 2) keep doing what they were doing, and piss off potential new users.
Keep in mind that the "standard" you refer to is not something the user community at large agreed to - it was forced down our throats by M$. I hardly think Lotus can be faulted merely because they didn't play along.
This is not to say that I'm totally in love with the Notes interface - it does have significant weaknesses (but these are markedly reduced in Notes 6). But the underlying power and security in Notes is well worth the trouble.
Sean
All the groupware products seem to rely on some proprietary protocol between the client and the server for their native, feature-rich behavior.
I'd like to see the IMAP protocol expanded so that it could perform most of these tasks. Outlook and Exchange are most of the way there, except for the ability to use your calendar or do things like busy searches.
An expanded IMAP protocol (if it was open) would allow for non-"rich" clients to still work and participate meaningfully; calendar should be a folder that displays appointments in a human-readable format, with the idea that a 'rich' client would parse it into whatever GUI or textmode the user wanted.
We'd end up at a place where, instead of having to buy and use one client and one server product, it'd be possible to mix-match based upon what you wanted.
Unfortunately I think that the whole groupware trend is headed to the web and no one wants to invest in a whole lot of client-side technologies.
You're kidding me, right?
I guess you didn't know that every bit of data in Notes can be exposed as XML - trivially.
You're right, keeping two separate databases, one for "corporate data", and one for the individual users, is dumb. So get rid of your other corporate database and use Notes for both - getting you a unified data model AND all the nice stuff for your users. Or use the built in tools to integrate your corporate DB with Notes. Duh.
Sorry, I didn't realize that the objective for company IT departments was to make systems integrators happy. I foolishly believed that they were supposed to support the needs of the line-of-business types. My mistake.
Icap seems dead, and mcal languishing..
I thought that is was 10% of the population that likes the same sex ... maybe the same
10% that use Macs!
I personally don't care for it, but it's not Microsoft, if that's what you're after. I've found it fully functional, but without some of the features I expect: available SPAM filtering, available virus scanning integration, and I'm not sure if there's a PalmPilot conduit available.
--g
it will not get used!!! The only way for a mail client to spring forth that can truly replace outlook, is to have it have access to all the same information that Outlook does. Then you can sneak it in on a grassroots level. But until it supports reading/writing outlook calendars, it might as well be a large chunk of mud for all the good it does me.
Innovation only really moves things forward when it provides some tie to the past, at least to start with.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks for the link, I'll take a look at that although it's hard to tell if it's more of an outlook or outlook server replacement from what I've read so far...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I know this isn't free, but there are alternatives. Oracle Calendar Server is an up an coming competitor to Outlook.
When was Outlook released? A better description of Notes would be Outlook, Exchange and the forthcoming XDocs.
And if that fails then they can always resort to mud slinging and talking trash about the other product(s). You have to admit, if Microsoft didn't innovate FUD as a practice in the business world in general then they atleast perfected it.
Hmmmmm...leveraging P2P functionality in a groupware scenario does have kind of a fascinating ring to it, doesn't it? E-mail may be handled in a traditional manner (IMAP/SMTP), but calendaring and contact information could be, for lack of a better term, "floating" around in a localized p2p network.
Dang...I wish I could code.
I loved the quote from the marketing research guy:
"I have trouble seeing how this model makes sense long-term," he said.
Marketroids really have trouble understanding that peopl with enough money aren't always driven by the need to make more. Think of it from Kapor's perspective. At worst it's a charitable donation of $5M that will keep some programmers employed. If it works and either a) kills Outlook or b) causes Outlook to evolve into a less stinking pile of dog doo that's just a bonus.
Its interesting if you can base anything off of the screenshots from Vista, that they are using a layout very close to Outlook 97(or Eudora).
Microsoft is really moving away from this type of layout in their next versino Outlook 11.
If you wanna create an Outlook 'killer', dont
look to the past and copy it, creating something
better from the ground up.
Will it have all the important features that users demand? Is it 100% virus compatible? Microsoft works hard to expand Outlook's virus compatibility, going from JavaScript virii, EXE virii, VB virii, and soon VB.NET virii will be implemented. Who knows what lies next? Virii that you don't even have to open the e-mail to take affect?
How does this guy think he can possibly compete?
He'd rather spend some time on hacking new features into Ximian Evolution...
I myself have recently switched from IE to Mozilla because I tried it and I liked it better. I wouldn't have switched to Netscape 4 or Opera. My brother and other people I talk to and show it start using Opera, too.
And that's not just me. It _is_ happening, because people get more and more annoyed from the licensing practices of Microsoft, the bugs, the security/virus problems you face with Microsoft software (yes, _all_ of my friends got infected with Win32.Klez last year) and the bugging they receive from the software. Even people new to computing start saying "What's that damn paper clip on the right bottom of my screen!?".
I'm still using Windows w/ Outlook, but if Outlook gets worse (or alternative solutions get better) I'll use them. It's just that easy.
There are plenty of contenders to best Outlook on the client side. The real "problem" is having the server side emulate/better the features most corporate droids expect from Exchange Server.
I said to myself: "Boy, I guess it's time to upgrade from Outlook Express, which doesn't have much of an opening book."
- a.c.
um, and windows 3.1, its contemporary operating system, was so good that you couldn't improve on its approach?
come on, you can't have innovation without change. hopefully, people put a lot of thought into ui or interface changes; just because things are different and not exactly what you've grown accustomed to using for the last however many years doesn't mean they are bad.
You fucking idiot. Of course it was 10% of the population that likes the same sex, but it was that figure that was widely debunked. Kindly die, thx!
If the Tao is great, then the operating system is great. If the
operating system is great, then the compiler is great. If the compiler
is great, then the application is great. If the application is great, then
the user is pleased and there is harmony in the world.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth
to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand
languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language
expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within
the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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