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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 $5 mil to create something competing with MS Outlook. More of the story here." We mentioned this a few months ago as well, and it sounds like any software release is still some time off.
I definitely wish him the best of luck. Having a free email/calender/planner/whatever else piece of software that is free, better than Outlook, and available for Mac, Linux and Windows is certainly a hefty goal, but if he can pull it off it will certainly be an excellent feat.
And so we go, on with our lives
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Duke Nukem Forever is looking better than ever. No, really. It's going to rock! This will be the ultimate computer game. Really. It's gonna be great. I'll see you all in line at Best Buy!
you can take the road that takes you to the stars...
Mitch Kapor was also responsible for the promotion of Lotus Notes.
Sure it burned the eyes out of your skull to use it, but it was a combination of Outlook, HTML, PGP, IMAP, and NNTP done back in the 1980s. If he can make that sort of leap again, it will be something to reckon with.
Evolution is also trying this, and they deliver Exchange connectivity. The KDE group is busy on a groupware solution, and it will shortly be released.
If you want to use Linux in an office environment, a groupware solution is a must-have. The more people who are working on this subject, the better, in my opinion....
wow, that is some serious M$-bashing karma-whorin' outlook has it cons definately, viruses and worms, and definate pros, like the planner,sticky notes, contact, and having not even tried xp, just assuming that they'd just repackage the software with no enhancements is bad practice
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
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 --
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
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.
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
If I might make a suggestion: Keep out anything that comes near VBScript, auto-rendering of e-mail, and other technologies that are easily misused by virus-builders. Outlook performs well enough as a groupware client, but its abundance of features are often used against it.
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)
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.
nice job Breyer, spoken like a true master.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
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 $100K/year per developer (salary plus benefits) and 20% in overhead costs (utilities, office space, etc), that's 20 developers a year for two years. Or 10 developers a year for four years.
Even if more than 20% of the budget goes to marketing (I don't know if that's applicable in their case, since they're going the free/Free route), underage hookers, or whatEVER, that still seems like a pretty nice budget to work with!
Whatever the case, best of luck to them, though!
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Robin Dunn, founder & maintainer of wxPython, an excellent Python-Wrapper around wxWindows, anounced in the wxpython-mailinglist that he was contracted by OSAF.
And who ever has enjoyed wxPython and the excellent support of Robin in the mailinglist knows: he get's things done. Or dunn.
So... if they don't succeed in travelling to space, at least teflon will be available.
if Mitch Kapor, Ximian, and Mozilla ever got together? With Andy Hertzfeld for lead UI designer?
Er, sorry bout that, it's late (early?) And I must be dreaming.... good night, all.
C|N>K
Cloning Outlook doesn't hurt Microsoft, it's the serverside which should be attacked.
:-) but the calendar part of it? It's buried deep in the beast.
A couple of weeks ago my boss asked me to find a replacement for the calendar server in Exchange, one which would work with... Outlook.
Nowhere to be found. I can replace the mail-part very easy (we're already doing that for years), the addressbook is nearly finished now (LDAP rules/sucks
And as long as you can't replace all what an Exchange server does, you won't have a chance in hell to replace Outlook.
bash$
You guys do know about the 100ms SMB turnaround time to Domain Controllers? By default DCs deliberately slow down SMB transactions to prioritize replication traffic; if you try to multi-role a DC you'll see degraded network performance. There is a registry setting to configure this behaviour - search the KB.
Jon.
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.
Mitch Kapor for the best vaporware of 2002!
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!
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
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!
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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!
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.
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
What products are better than outlook?
I would like an intergrated e-mail, calender, task list, etc program that could comm with my palm.
I couldn't find any than runs on Windows, except for Outlook.
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?