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Mozilla Lightning to Challenge Outlook
MS IE Bug Finder writes "Although Microsoft is dismissing Mozilla Lightning, the article indicates the combination of Thunderbird (mail) with Sunbird (calendaring) should be a worthy opponent against Outlook by the middle of the new year." Reader EvilStein adds a link to the Lightning Q&A.
Think about this:
...
- Security
- Remote image blocking
- No IE core
- RSS reader
-
Conclusion: Thunderbird rocks.
Check populicio.us
I agree with you. Without Exchange integration, an Outlook knockoff would be useless to me.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
If it is readily compatible with sync apps for a handheld, etc, I will surely give it a try. However, it still needs the ability to sync wirelessly/over the internet/etc like exchange server can, in order to have a chance on a large scale.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
Thunderbird also needs more robust address handling, and the ability to sync with palm and other handhelds before it can adequately compete with Outlook.
I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly if I were Microsoft. With the code for connecting to Microsoft's exchange servers GPL'd from Novell's Evolution, that could (possibly) be integrated into Lightning and Lightning would also be free rather than part of a very expensive office suite. While Lightning isn't here yet, if it can duplicate enough of Outlook's functionality, a lot of people might switch to it to avoid the high cost and security holes. It's a much easier sell than Firefox, in my opinion, because Outlook costs money while Internet Explorer doesn't.
Worry Microsoft! WORRY!
I would not use an e-mail client without robust calendar features built-in. The ability to organize my day revolves around e-mail, and my appointment book. Why would I want to separate the two?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Although there is the MAPI protocol for communication with Exchange, it appears that you generally need a connector on the client side for non-Outlook clients. That's convenient for the user and administrator, and a strike against third-party email clients currently.
Looks like Thunderbird is going after the same people as Novell's Evolution. Maybe this will serve as the incentive for Novel release a Windows version soon.
But the thing that makes the Microsoft offering so strong is not Outlook by itself, but the combination of Outlook and Exchange Server.
You could cobble together an IMAP server and some other OSS pieces and approximate the Outlook/Exchange experience, but since they are not all seamlessly integrated, you would have an administrative nightmare if you ever migrated to another server, found a security hole in one of the pieces, or had to change any piece in any way.
Make Thunderbird and Sunbird (and something that intelligently managed tasks, workflow, and sticky notes) 100% compatible with Exchange. THAT would be an Outlook killer. Though all MS would have to do is break it in the next patch.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Meeting requests, polls, ability to recall messages, view other peoples calendars, etc.
If it doesn't allow users to share contacts then it's no competition. My customers could care less about shared calendaring. What people need is an alternative to the simple shared contact database that Exchange provides.
There are three components to the holy grail of exchange destroyers:
1. Shared mail store
2. Shared calendaring
3. Shared contacts.
I've got 1 and 2 covered (Courier IMAP and Mozilla calendar with WebDAV backend). There is still no uniform contact database backend... and don't start talking LDAP. LDAP only allows me to read from a directory. People have to be able to add/delete/change records and share entire directories just like in Exchange. *AND* it has to be a cross-platform accessible format so that the I can write a plug-in for any interface (web, mozilla, etc). I was thinking something similar to WebDAV that I use for calendars.
People need their personal contact database and shared db's in their organization to be accessible from anywhere, anytime. I can't believe MS is the only player in this court. Groupwise doesn't count because it's still sucks. Opengroupware and it's clones only work with outlook. The point is to get away entirely from the crushing thumb of MS.
rant over.
Ditto. I've been using Calendar for the past year+. I just got a PocketPC and I'm hoping someone will bust through with some sync software so I don't have to switch to Outlook.
:)
If they get a sync feature running, I'll try it in alpha testing. Heck, I might even file bug reports.
Most slashdotters just dont get that Outlook, (not Outlook Express as most here think) goes way beyond a simple mail client. Show me how to include all the synching, scheduling and work flow features available, or easily built onto of Outlook/Exchange and you might have something. Then just need to persuade organisations to deploy this shiny new unproven technology into their core infrastructure.
As a side rant I love firefox but thunderbird is a fairly average effort at best. I almost fell off my chair laughing at a post the other day about someone saying how cool and innovative the new sorting and grouping was, features that were available in Outlook 97 (and probably other mail clients at that period). This is another reason why Lightening, same as Chandler is not going to work. Just too far behind the curve and not focussed enough on power deployments.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
- Undiscovered security holes ...
- Netscape invented Javascript and HTML e-mail, remember
- Buggy Mozilla core instead of buggy IE core
- Undiscovered bugs in RSS reader
-
Conclusion: Same insecurity, different pile.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
Not unless it syncs with a PDA
Repeat after me. Calendaring. Calendaring. Calendaring.
Only the execs rally care about syncing to their PDAs/Treos/whatevers, and that CAN be done server side these days. What is much more of a deal-breaker is Outlook's meeting scheduling. Everyone I know in the company here uses it. Everyone in every company I've ever worked at has used Outlook to schedule meetings and confirm people can make it.
I have never understood what is so mind-bendingly complex about it. When I used to use a POP/IMAP client to get my mail, meeting invitations from an Outlook/Exchange user looked to be a set of key/value items, one per line, with all the data necessary for a client (such as Mozilla with the calendaring plugin) to parse it handily, ask the user if they want to add it/see their calendar/whatever, etc.
I honestly think that open-source developers resent Outlook so much, they can't bring themselves to do what those of us trying to use open source in corporate environments have been dying for- interworking with Outlook's meeting notifications and some form of well-integrated calendaring.
Please help metamoderate.
The only problem I've experienced in trying to switch completely to Thunderbird is its inability to import my large (over 1 gig) Outlook PST files. This is on a P4 2.8 rig with a gig of RAM. Perhaps someone can write up an extension to read the PST files directly.
www.lonseidman.com
Well, "single app" is a bit ambiguous. "Crash" is also ambiguous.
A single bloated process can use enough resources to effectively bring a machine to a halt, ie. not respond in a timely manner according to a human timescale.
The processor hasn't halted/core dumped/BSODed, but the system is effectively unusable at this point.
So you try to kill the errant process. You Ctrl-Alt-Del, wait for taskmgr to come up. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's extremely slow, and you can tell it to kill the process, and sometimes it even listens.
I'm sure eventually it will respond, but you don't have an infinite amount of time to resolve the issue. So you generally shut the machine down as gracefully as possible after waiting a "reasonable" amount of time -- 30 minutes seems fair.
#1. Start-->Shutdown-->logoff
#2. Start-->Shutdown-->Shutdown
#3. (try to kill the explore.exe if taskmgr is responding)
#4. Hold in the power button for 10 seconds, mutter under your breath, and pray it comes back up nicely.
#5. Boot and Uninstall crappy application.
What would be really nice is if someone came out
with open standard protocols that support all the things that exchange does.
Email is already taken care of with IMAP4.
We need an open protocol for Calender, Tasks, Journals, Contacts, and all that good stuff.
Then we can have a ton of clients written that can plug into any number of email server.
We are running Exchange 5.5, and upgrading to a newer version is incrediably hard. MS screwed up big time by requiring active directory, and all that jazz to make it work. I don't understand why Exchange can't just run stand-alone or with NT security. All about making people upgrade, probably going to byte them in the but.
The only effective way to kill off Outlook, or even compete with it effectively is to first kill off Exchange.
Until there is a feature-for-feature (or at least close) drop-in replacement for Exchange people will stick with Outlook. Now I'm not talking about assembling some IMAP/LDAP/SMTP/iCal monster from different parts, rather a true, pre-packaged installer that handles most if not all of the setup and configuration.
Once you liberate the back end server you'll have no problem with the client.
My problem is with the priorities they're working on
The mandate of Lightning, headed by longtime Mozilla volunteer and current Oracle technical staffer Mike Shaver, will be to integrate Sunbird features into Thunderbird so that users can do things like search across e-mail documents and calendar entries, and click a button to turn an e-mail message into a calendar task or reminder.
These are things I do, but rarely.
The one thing I do *every day* is to synch my handheld with my calendar and address book. Until Sunbird/Thunderbird can do that, I cannot completely switch. In fact, Sunbird is completely useless until then.
Until the Mozilla folks take handhelds seriously, Thunderbird and Sunbird are not going to be competitive IMO.
I think the lock-in is deeper than most people understand. Exchange is not just a mail and calender server. It's a groupware application platform with email and calendaring installed out of the box. But that doesn't even really cover the half of it. Even if you could replace those two functions, you'd be left with all the other commercial and proprietary applications that are tacked on top of it. This includes everything from MS project integration to third party commercial and home brewed Exchange applications, like hours reporting and employee surveys. I've seen a lot of things built on top of Exchange, and that's what would need to be seamlessly replaced. This is the same problem with the office applications. It's an issue of existing functionality and lock-in versus the cost of change. Really is a shame that it's so painful to eliminate a dependence on MS.
I've seen nothing that works as well as Outlook 2003 for managing incoming and outgoing data and communication. I can receive a constant stream of incoming email and deal with it on the fly. No other email client works as well. Here is why:
All incoming emails pop up a small note in the notification area. This note contains the name, subject and a few lines of the email. It will fade and disappear after a few seconds. Before it does I can bring it up, flag it (more about that later) cause it to disappear immediately, or delete it immediately.
All emails can be flagged with different colors with a mouse click. You know how it goes when you are "catching up" on email after lunch or in the morning? You go down through a ton of unimportant messages, see a few that need taken care of and occasionally hit that one that is so important it's worth immediately breaking away from going through your mail. With OL2003 you do your "catch up" with flags. You can blow through the whole list and flag stuff that you need to go back to, red-flag those critical items, maybe blue-flag the personal stuff you'll get to on your lunch hour. You don't have to remember to get back to something or break off from email to handle something before you forget. I've not seen anything else that has this feature and it makes a HUGE difference when you are catching up. When you get something done, you just click the flag and it turns to a check box. At the end of the day you can make a quick glance to the built in search that shows you any orange-flags (for instance) that you left unchecked.
It also integrates with messenger. If you start to send someone an email the moment their name is completed it will check their online status. You may start typing your short email only to notice that the person is online. A quick right click and you're in IM instead of email.
Cleaning up your inbox/outbox? There are tools built in that will let you see "All the old crap that's big or has an attachment" for instance. Sure every email client lets you setup rules or already has one built in that's similar but nothing does it as well.
There are other features that I never think about until I'm stuck on another email client. I was typing something on Lotus Notes (the suck) and without thinking, right clicked a particular word. I was expecting a list of synonyms to come up but no such luck. The polish and attention to detail in OL2003 is unmatched. With many of the other Office 2003 apps I can get by just fine in any other product, Wordperfect, Open Office etc. OL2003 though is head and shoulders above the competition right now. It's the first time in a long time that I can actually say a piece of software has increased my productivity.
Now since I'm paying MS, oops sorry I meant M$, a compliment here it's the law that someone needs to come bash me personally or rant about M$'s evils.... Outlook 2003 is still the shit though.
-----Original Message-----
From: smilin [mailto: http://slashdot.org/~Smilin/]
Sent: Thurday, December 24, 2004 10:29 AM
To: slashdot@slashdot.org
Subject: Re: Re: Outlook 2003 rocks. Period.
"I've seen nothing that works as well
>as Outlook 2003 for managing incoming and
>>outgoing data and communication. I can receive >a constant stream of incoming email and >deal
>>>with it on the fly. No other email client
>works as well."
Hmmm. I guess that not being a mutt user, you
>don't notice the broken threading, the lack of single key read,
>the oversized and easily
>corruptable mailboxes, and a long history of serious attachment-related problems as being
on >>
>
>
>the laundry list of features some people just don't want.
But it rocks, right?
Lightning will not be popular in corporate environments for several reasons. Some of these have already been mentioned, but some have not.
1. Outlook is "free" when you buy Office. Until OpenOffice is a true competitor to Office and companies stop buying Office, there's no reason to switch to a program with less features when you have one already.
2. Outlook 2003 is awesome. See other posts for details, but its ability to aggregate information, plus security features like remote image blocking, prove it to be an area of Office that Microsoft is actually proving. It'll be hard for Lightning to catch up to a moving target when it's already behind.
3. Never underestimate the power of PDA syncing. One poster claims that the only people who care about this are executives. That alone is enough to warrant a site license of Outlook. What IT staff would commit suicide by not giving the execs PDA syncing? In reality, PDA syncing is used by many more than the execs, unless you count college students, IT professionals, cops, and teachers as executives.
4. MAPI-compliance. You don't have to have an Exchange server (a bad idea in my opinion), but you do have to have a connector if you want Outlook to communicate with your non-Microsoft mail server. This is fine; most vendors provide the connector with the package, which is really just vendor-specific MAPI drivers. This is the only way they can compete with Exchange Server's functionality. Well, if you're creating a new email client that's supposed to be a competitor to Outlook, you'd better make it act just like Outlook, because no vendor is going to create a new Connector for a program with such a small install base.
5. Integration with calendering systems. We decided to go with Oracle Calendar instead of Exchange, since we already run Oracle's mail server (Oracle's solutions are Linux-based and very standards-compliant). So now, in addition to MAPI, you have to have a way for your calender server to interface with Lightning, also. We do, of course, because Oracle's Outlook connector also interfaces with the Calender server. Again, in order for Lightning to succeed, it's going to have to work with the connectors already out there. Nobody wants to use a standalone Calender app anymore, after they see the way they can integrate with Outlook. And this better sync with your PDA as well.
This program has to be the hub of everything you do. Outlook is moving towards becoming the center of organization and time management. That's a lot more than email with a calendar.