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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.
They should've called the project SHAZAM!
I do not know about thunder/sunbird, but supposedly Evolution fits in well in such an environment and is OSS.
Sorry, but this time Microsoft wins. Sunbird is not even a complete piece of software. Last time I used it, not all the menu buttons even did anything. (This was a known problem.) I imagine on a Windows system, where one app crashing can bring down the system, it is a lot more annoying.
I hate Microsoft Windows as much as the next guy, but Outlook has them beat. If only it worked on Linux.
Le français vous intéresse?
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.
Novell has developed Connector which is supposed to pull this off, the open source client currently using it is Evolution, but maybe the code can be re-used for this project as well...?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
We're just in the process of migrating most of our users from Outlook to Thunderbird and I have to say, natively being able to read the MS-TNEF format (i.e. anything in Outlook Rich-Text Format) would do a lot to help here. Someone write an extension, or even better something server-side for Exim!
And yes, I know that you can get convertors which take the winmail.dat file and sort it for you, but that's not the best solution.
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!
Why do you need a calendar, I was under the impression Outlook was used 99% of the time as a mail client.
My main clients are architects. They are all heavily dependant on Outlook as their primary project management tool -- email, calendar, etc.
I tried to convince them that Outlook is the world's worst spreader of viral mayhem. They agreed in principle, but were unwilling to give up Outlook. Reason: they're already heavily invested in knowing and using Outlook -- switching would be too much work, too disruptive.
Grr.
- kgj
-kgj
I would be willing to use any Open Source client but the Outlook server won't allow any other client to connect to it other than MS Outlook. Any hints on how to trick the thing to let me use other clients.
There's no reason why Windows-based clones can't talk to Exchange - the MAPI Exchange client is independent of Outlook, IIRC, and the API is reasonably well documented. (Up to about '98, at least - the newer features aren't I think.)
The problem is only on other OSes. As others have mentioned, a few have tried.
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.
Although Outlook is primarily a mail client it does have some 'nice' groupware abilities that businesses like. E.g. group calendaring and tasks and also shared contacts. Plus outlook forms can be very handy w.r.t. helpdesk systems, time sheets, etc etc.
Although of course with it being Microsoft it crashes more often than Holly Hunterin that Cronenberg movie.
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
I'd love to see an integration between some kind of OneNote (or WebNote [bright color warning - shield your eyes]) replacement instead of a calendar.
.xpi) of an app like that?
Free-form notes, easily sortable and searchable would be a killer app, not another dumb calendar. Maybe a calendar tied in with THAT would make it the ultimate?
Is there any thought (or already some kind of
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
It will mellow out to moonshine.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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.
The only reason I am not using sunbird, or another OSS Personal organization tool is that yahoo doesn't support iCal ( I have written to them suggesting it:c k).
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/my/cgi_feedba
Even though I like downloading my email I use yahoo because the convenience of getting to my information anywhere is compelling.
I even pay ( gladly ) for pop access
I would love to use the sunbird client and the other OSS PIM tools in combination with yahoo so that I could download ( and update ) my PIM stuff anywhere.
Even more, I would love to pay GNU or some other OSS org for this rather then paying yahoo.
If GNU or another OSS org implemented this kind of yahoo-like service ( using all OS software ) it would kill 4 birds with one Free(dom) software stone.
1. I get the services I want
2. GNU gets money, which it always needs
3. GNU employs programmers to build an maintain
GNUYahoo ( GNUwho ? ) -- a worthy thing these
days in itself
4. Free(dom) & OS software gets showcased and put
into use.
Almost Geeks have some sort of webmail account and would love to support GNU or another OSS org rather then ________, especially if they implement featurs geeks want like better spam filtering.
If these sites were made user friendly GNU would get a bonus____ giving something to ordinary people that they would like____ which would make GNU, as well as Free(dom) software relevant to their lives.
GNU and OSS especially needs this if they want to fight and win political battles.
Just a thought
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
Oh, and for all you M$ fanboys: Microsoft is going to unbundle Media Player by January. So, in 9 days over the Christmas and New Year's holidays, Microsoft is going to be able to unbundle Media Player from the OS? Boy, it must have been really tightly integrated, eh?
I don't get what you're saying.
I don't think MS ever claimed it was tightly integrated, did they? There's no reason they can't just strip the app and leave all the underlying APIs and ActiveX objects - in fact they'd be irresponsible if the gutted them out too, it'd break loads of applications e.g. the copying animation in explorer.
So what's your point?
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
Try Ctrl+M.
The Evolution connector uses OWA (Outlook Web Access) to get it's job done. Outlook Web Access is actually IIS handling WebDaV requests with stylesheets for access so it makes third party access easy. Microsoft's own Entourage connector on OSX does the very same thing along with LDAP for address lookups.
It's not pretty but you can for example on any Exchange 2000+ server mount your mailbox as a WebDAV share.
I've run into a few environments where either OWA is turned off and IMAP/POP are not turned on. Which leaves everyone stuck with a MAPI client. Granted the MAPI object is a *fairly* well documented API however it does limit the client to a Windows platform with MAPI installed. There is some value in it but with MS pulling away from MAPI as well in favor of more flexible HTTP based protocols it's getting long in the tooth.
That an important part of the licensing cost for Exchange is the Client Access License (CAL) - this means regardless of what you pay for the code that runs on your desktop, you still need to pay Microsoft a non-trivial amount of cash for the privilege.
The fix is to provide a seamless migration to a non-exchange server with a calendar-sharing mechanism.
Now that I think of it, when MS was looking to de-throne NetWare, they created a utility that allowed Windows users to see NetWare shares through a single login account on the NetWare box.
This meant that customers could 'upgrade' to Windows and not need to but any more client licenses for Novell.
I wonder if we should find a way to enable calendar browsing via some sort of mechanism that exploits only a single CAL so that uses of the free server side could see Outlook/Exhange calendars without paying CALs for all of the free server users.
Just like the Microsoft mechanism, this needs to be seamless and transparent - to make migration to free software easy and painless.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
The sooner the open source community develops a calendar client that is fully integrated with an open source groupware server, the sooner we will be able to mount a credible challenge against Outlook.
Reduce people's dependency on Outlook and it'll become much, much easier to topple Exchange. Topple Exchange and you've got a good chance at completely removing Microsoft from the server room!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
Corporate america is why. When I work I have to be able to send people at diverse locations meeting requests. Outlook lets me connect to their calendar and see when they are free so I do not schedule the meeting at a bad time. It lets me send the request and when people respond it updates everyones schedule to show who has accepted. It let's people suggest an alternative time or location if the original does not work. It then reminds me before the meeting so I can show up on time and be prepared. For people who have to collaborate in large organisations these are vital functions.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Unfortunately it involves persuading your sysadmin to IMAP on the Exchange server.
IME sysadmins are scared enough of enabling features (esp. on M$ products like Exchange) at the best of times.
Doesn't give you full integration into outlook features like shared calendars either IIRC.
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.
"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is *lightning* that does the work..."
Ximian Evolution should be considered the Outlook killer.
I don't mean to insult but how many people are in your business? How many offices? For a small office where everyone is within shouting distance, there isn't much need for email/calendaring clients that talk. My consulting biz runs exchange but only because it was free(action pack). Depending on the type of business, an organization with more (~15 or so) people and with more than one office, it (can) rapidly becomes crucial. I do a lot of work with Title companies (place where you sign papers to settle on house) and many times they have several offices but share guys that roam around and do the actual closings. Our largest has 35 offices in various states. Integrated calendars are crucial.
I suppose we could switch them to a web-based calendar deal but Exchange provides that already with OWA so why go to the bother? Inter-office email rides the VPN so sensitive stuff can be sent without having to teach all the ding-dongs about encryption. In addition, there are some great add-ons for exchange that do some really cool stuff with exchange calendars (team calendar by MS is one).
The other thing about exchange is the centralized storage of email/calendar/contact data. I don't have to worry about backing up 10-20 seperate pst/mbx/dbx/whatever email files. There are automated ways of backing up these files but you might (or might not) be surprised at how often users can fuck that up.
I will grant you this though: for many businesses the genesis of a new exchange installation is due to a new employee who used to work someplace else and simply can't do without it. Even when the $$thousands spent on purchase and implementation would pay for a web solution for years to come. In this much it is psychological.
From the Tools menu, select 'Read Mail'. This will launch your default email client - and thus, Thunderbird, if you've set it as default. Couldn't be easier'n that.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
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.
Indeed, Sunbird has yet to release its 0.2 version, and has never claimed to be a complete piece of software. The developer resources applied to Sunbird and the Mozilla calendaring components in general have grown materially over the last months, during which we've seen important refactoring work to support multiple calendar protocols, rearchitecture of the UI to handle async networking, implementation of initial CalDAV support, improvements in several pieces of the UI (including, you'll be glad to hear, a rationalization of the menu system), and many other smaller fixes. Attachments, attendee management, a sqlite-based local store for improved performance; I could go on, but it's more interesting to read the checkin logs for yourself, I assure you.
Now, as the Wiki indicates -- would that you could get to it! -- competition with Outlook is not a primary goal of Lightning at this point. To do calendaring in the year 2004 requires that you compete with Outlook in some sense, because they really own that market pretty completely, but knocking off their feature set isn't what we're after here. A lot of people have been asking for Sunbird's calendar capabilities (and more) to be integrated more tightly into the Thunderbird mail interface, and that's what Lightning is all about.
I believe that by the summer of 2005 the Lightning project will have developed software that is useful and interesting to a large enough number of people to warrant releasing it. Do I believe that people will abandon Outlook en masse for Lightning in its first release? Seems unlikely. Do I think that there are some users of Outlook who might rather use Thunderbird+Lightning at that point? I'm pretty sure there are.
Exchange interoperability is obviously a hot topic, and rightly so; IMO it was one of the most significant features of Evolution, and one that we're grateful Novell saw fit to release as open source after the acquisition of Ximian. The new protocol architecture we've been designing and implementing over the last few months should accomodate an exchange-protocol plugin, at least on the calendar side, though nobody has yet stepped up to write it. I have reason to believe that a serious contribution of such a plugin, no doubt based on lessons learned from the Evolution connector's source, would be very warmly received into the calendar tree, and featured prominently in Lightning.
I wish I had a local copy of the wiki's Q&A so that I could post it here, but, alas, I do not.
Mike
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?
Greetings,
e +O utlook/2100-7344_3-5501618.html
Since it appears that Thunderbird + Firebird now wants to compete more with Outlook, I'd like to propose an approach that may make this possible. Microsoft's comments here:
http://news.com.com/Mozillas+Lightning+to+strik
Are valid to a certain extent. People have come to demand more from "PIM" applications. Assuming Thunderbird and Sunbird were successfully integrated, that alone is not enough to compete with Outlook + Exchange. People want their data seemlessly synced up to all interfaces in which they access it. Exchange provides this currently. If I run Exchange and I can access my email, calendar, and contacts from Outlook, Outlook Web Access, and portable devices (i.e. phones and pdas) that offer Exchange plugins (i.e. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/) and everything "just works" seemlessly.
I believe the same can be said for Thunderbird + Sunbird without too much effort. Obviously, Thunderbird + Sunbird is just part of the solution in my above example and I am not proposing that the Mozilla foundation tries to build all the software for the whole solution. I am proposing that we come up with a viable solution to integrate all interfaces in which people access email, calendar data, contact data, todo lists, etc. on their primary PIM app, web based PIM interfaces, and mobile devices.
First lets take a look at what we have today: IMAP4 basically takes care of email for us, LDAP to a certain extent handles contacts, and ICAL over WebDAV handles calendar and todo list issues. I am not proposing that these interfaces are abandoned (especially IMAP) - but I would like to propose an alternative that may offer an easier way to reach our end goal of complete PIM data integration. I'm not saying that LDAP and and ICAL over WebDAV are bad - I just don't think they are going to offer a solution that can compete with Outlook + Exchange.
I think SyncML (http://www.openmobilealliance.org/syncml) offers a viable alternative that could relatively easily be bolted on to Thunderbird + Sunbird. SyncML offers the following benefits from my viewpoint:
* Open standard that already has a lot of traction. For example, it
is part of the WAP 2.0 standard so 90% of the cell phones you can
buy today already support synchronizing contacts, calendars, todo
lists over HTTP/SyncML. Also, many cell phones are now offering
email clients with IMAP support.
* To really compete with Outlook + Exchange, Thunderbird + Sunbird
will need to support Exchange. This is possible over SyncML and
this open source project: http://sync4j.funambol.com/.
* SyncML support should be there soon for the two most popular open
source web mail clients: IMP (http://www.horde.org/imp/) and
Squirrelmail (http://squirrelmail.org/). For example, IMP is
working on this already: http://www.horde.org/sync and a
Squirrelmail plugin to support SyncML should be easy enough to
write assuming Squirrelmail rolls out support for decent Calendar
and Contacts (already in CVS for both)
Furthermore, the Mozilla Foundation could host documentation for sys admins on how to setup Exchange integration over SyncML etc. A comprehensive HowTo would almost be a requirement since we are tying multiple software projects together in order to offer rich PIM client + Webmail + Mobile device integration.
Anyways, I am just brain-storming here and thought I would share this idea since this appears to be a topic of focus recently. It would appear to me that this would be the path of least resistance to offer a solution that can compete with Outlook + Exchange.
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.