Slashdot Mirror
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.
I do not know about thunder/sunbird, but supposedly Evolution fits in well in such an environment and is OSS.
Think about this:
...
- Security
- Remote image blocking
- No IE core
- RSS reader
-
Conclusion: Thunderbird rocks.
Check populicio.us
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!
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!
kidding, right?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
You said:
> 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.
The article said:
> should be a worthy opponent against Outlook by the middle of the new year."
Now... first of all, what was the last time you tried Sunbird? yesterday? 6 months ago?
Then, middle of the new year is kindof like 6 months from now...
I do not know if Sunbird is a good alternative or if it ever will be, but as you can read (or can you? past experience makes this a bit doubtfull) the claim was not that it is a good alternative now, but that it is growing into one and should be there some 6 months from now, so what exactly was your point besides wanting to be dismissive without having an argument?
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!
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.
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
Illustrator 8 and Illustrator 10. Do a search and replace for text which is on a locked layer. Locks the machine up every. Single. Time.
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
1. The poster is right. I am following it closely and plenty of things do not work yet. Most importantly - at least as of last month there was no event organizer/owner/user capability even if reading from a server. This makes it completely useless for anything but personal calendaring. In fact if you look at the roadmap this feature is not due in 6 months so there is no way it will be there in 6 months.
2. Even if it did not have the features it would have been useable if it did not screw every single other implementation that has. The biggest falling of Sunbird is that it wipes out all fields it does not understand when processing a calendar record. As a result you cannot use it in groupware mode as anything but a read only client (as of last month).
In fact even korganizer is a few years ahead of Sunbird.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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
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?
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.
Why would this be a problem?
You just change your MSI package to the updated one and on next boot/login it'll repair itself and in the process the patch will be applied.
It's no different than other third-party software packages.
wdd
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.
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.
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.
I hate Microsoft Windows as much as the next guy, but Outlook has them beat. If only it worked on Linux.
This is the problem with Linux programmers. Many want to reinvent the wheel, instead of trying formulas that are already known to work (see the GIMP vs Photoshop debate on yesterday's story).
See the example of Openoffice.org vs. MS Word. Openoffice was made to replace Microsoft Office. If there were as many Linux clones of windows software, sharing the user interface but not the internals, Linux wouldn't feel as alien as it does for common windows users.
And don't say that copying the user interface would be violating intelectual property. See the precedent in the Apple vs. Microsoft case regarding the GUI named "Windows".
So, why don't people do it? Why won't Linux programmers make "a better Photoshop than Photoshop", or in this case "A better Outlook than Outlook"?
Quoting a sitepoint.com article: "Good designers copy. Great designers steal."