Outlook, Evolution and Kontact Side-by-Side

gaijincory writes "Opensourceversus.com has put together a nice side-by-side comparison of Microsoft Outlook, Evolution and KDE's Kontact groupware programs. The screenshots delve in to the nitty gritty details and should help in making an informed choice, if nothing else. This is a follow up to their comparison of the Outlook Express and Thunderbird e-mail clients."

Comments

Pretty

[Tim C]

I like eye candy. I spend most of the day, most days sat staring at my monitor, so I want what's on it to look as pleasing as possible.

That said, I also want my software to work well. So in any comparison of groupware clients, I need two questions answered:

1) What is the speed like accessing mail on an Exchange server?

2) Does it fully integrate with Exchange's calendaring?

I ask 1) because my company uses Exchange, and in the past I've tried KMail and Mozilla Mail, and both were sluggish as hell accessing my mail. I'm impatient, I don't *want* to wait.

I ask 2) because several years ago, use of the Exchange calendaring feature was mandated. That's how you book meetings, that's how you're told you've been booked to attend a meeting (and some people don't bother speaking to you about it!), you're even supposed to mark time spent away from your desk on holiday or even at lunch, so people know you're not there. If the alternative groupware clients can't do all this with Exchange, then I can't use them.

Exchange is part of the reason I switched back to Windows. Sure, I could run Linux, but to access my mail (acceptably) and calendar (at all) I had to use Outlook, and that meant wasting resources running VMWare. (I also, personally, found XP more aesthetically pleasing than Mandrake 9, but that's purely subjective)

Outlook 2003 and Thunderbird

[timmyf2371]

I use Outlook 2003 myself for the simple reason that it handles mail in a sensible way and also integrates with Norton Antivirus. I don't get spam since I effectively manage my email addresses and each site I sign up to gets a unique address at my domain name and can easily be filtered if they step out of line.

I've used applications such as Evolution when I used Linux in the past but in reality it felt to me just like a cheap clone of Outlook with fewer features.

Recently however, I have been using Thunderbird on one of my systems as I am loath to purchase two licenses for MS Office and I've come to like it quite a lot and for someone who isn't looking to spend any more or for whatever reason requires free (as in speech) software I think it's an ideal application. It has junk mail handling which while I haven't had to use it myself, have read it can be quite effective. My one gripe with it is that setting up rules and filtering doesn't seem to be as easy as with Outlook and the user has to enter in any filters manually - ie, I can't click a few buttons to have mail from a certain email address go into a specific folder the way I can in Outlook, or at least if you can I've not found it yet.

Re:Windows and Linux

[swillden]

And the Gimp is equally FULLY SUPPORTED in Windowze, I can see you are just flamebaiting... ask the people who made the Gimp how much "more" they support The Gimp for windows and for Linux

This isn't true. The GIMP's primary developers all work on *nix and they design the UI around the common X11 window managers. This actually causes lots of complaints by GIMP users on Windows, because the X11 window managers are more sophisticated and featureful than Windows' is, and the result makes the GIMP UI behave badly on Windows. Most of the common complaints about the GIMP UI are problems only on the Windows version.

The GIMP's developers don't care, though, because they develop for X11, and it works just fine there.