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.

Comments

problem *is* the client

[Kunta Kinte]

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.