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)