Slashdot Mirror
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
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....
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!
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
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 --
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.
Since when is "Microsoft Outlook shipped with most Windows computers"?
I think the reporter made a mistake and meant to say Outlook Express, which is shipped with most every PC since it's a part of IE.
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.
So, your argument is that because you don't use Outlook/Exchange for groupware stuff, that no one should? I'm sure there are thousands of sysadmins out there that would love to be freed from maintaining an Exchange server, but there is nothing out there that even comes close to doing the job. Most regular computer users (and especially the decision makers who are the most busy) grow very fond of Outlook's calendering functions. The plain fact is there really is no viable alternative.
It's easier to just write it down on a piece of paper or use my brain.
So, that's it. Just convince all those Fortune 500 companies to switch to the high tech "Post-It Note" system. I'm sure 3M has tried that one but was forced to put it on the back burner. Sorry, just because you don't use or appreciate the app doesn't mean that thousands and thousands of office people shouldn't either.
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.
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.
there are several freely available software programs available that parse your PST files and output files that can be imported by other mail programs.
we had a situation at my last employer where someone had hosed their box pretty badly due to literally 1gig of email. outlook wouldn't open and the PST files were corrupted. after searching around a bit, i found 3 or 4 programs for dealing with this issue.
poke around on google or freshmeat, i'm sure you'll find something similarly useful.
E V E R Y T H I N G I W R I T E I S F A L S E
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.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
yes, it integrates a calendar too! isn't that all dependant on the email server being used in the organization? it lets us invite other people to meetings and know if they'll be available. 8 years ago we had to have these "planners" where we wrote our appointments into. everyone would sit around the table at the meeting to decide a good time for the weekly meetings to occur. once everyone figured a good time, it was put into the planner. now at the meetings everyone pulls out their iLittlePalmToy and fumbles around for 4-5 minutes with it trying to figure out where all that scheduling stuff is and determine weather it's been synched in a while... then finally ends up saying "i'll get back to you on a good time, this thing isn't working quite right today".
we've come a long way baby.
how many people actually consider an outlook-killer such a killer app as to be worth $5 million?
Listen, we're in the dark ages as far as collaboration software goes. The more money that gets thrown at this problem, the better.
It's not just that there's no good collaboration software out there. It's that nobody even knows how to do collaboration in a way that doesn't absolutely suck. Somebody needs to start at the beginning and ask the questions, "What does it need to do?" and "How does it need to do it?" Nobody has asked those questions in a comprehensive way yet, so we've ended up with glorified email applications like Outlook and Notes that rely on a store-and-forward message-passing system, built around a central server and a lot of caches. All the eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Somebody needs to take collaboration all the way back to the drawing board. Is Kapor the guy to do it? No idea. But it's good that somebody is trying.
I write in my journal
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.
Groupwise isn't perfect. I prefer it over OutHouse, but it's just as restricitive as OutHouse/Exchange. You need a Novell server, you need to pay Novell gobs of money for proprietary software, all to get a package that's incompatible with everything else. It keeps us safe from OutHouse virus attacks, but that's really it's only strong point. The web interface is mediocre at best, and some of the widgets on the client act a little funny. I had a feature wish list I came up with after 2 years of using Groupwise, of course I can't find it now.
Some of the features I like are unique to Groupwise, but on the whole it's everything bad about Exchange wrapped into a different propritary license. The same can be said for Lotus Notes, it has its nice features and it's not M$, but you still have proprietary incompatible software as your mail client.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
No! The point of Chandler is that it does not need any server. So, people will be able to get all required groupware functionality, without a server.
...richie - It is a good day to code.