Slashdot Mirror
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."
These guys also did Windows and Linux comparisons which make for good viewing.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
How comes copying GUIs, look and feel and functionality of software is seen as a normal thing while people go mad about copied Ipods etc?
I don't see how three almost identical screenshots(of each piece of functionality) actually gives you enough information to make a choice.
I made the move a long time ago on my Windows machine from Outlook to Eudora, but after looking at the image comparison I think I might switch to some open alternative. Especially judging how easy the configuration appears to be on the open alternatives. Good to see that the interfaces are starting to look fairly standardized.
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)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The problem is that there are two groups arguing here, and often members are interchangable depending on the specific case. Group A wants innovation and less copying, to attract users. Group B wants everything to look like a commercial product to attract users. The problem is that Group B wins out hands down in the intial run, because most people out there want something that looks and feels familiar to them. If corporations are to take up linux on the desktop, you can bet they are going to go with something that looks and acts a whole lot like microsoft. Group A can get it's way when people have adopted the software philosophy, because they are then more open to trying new things that could potentialy be better than what they are used to.
stuff
Recent security issues in open source products have convinced me that obscurity provided by closed source is far superior security-wise.
:)
You're not a VBS virus writer, by any chance?
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Gmail is the perfect example of what can be done for the interface of an email client, even if it is only web only. Content groups, filtering, integrating search technologies, etc.
iCal is another good example, even if it doesn't seem it. It's simple enough for anyone to pick up and understand in minutes, and is compatible enough to work with the open source programs out there that do the same thing. Plus it gives you a lot of room and leeway to do what you want to do with it, such as RSS-like calendar feeds, which was all defined in the standard it was written to project.
Calendaring and email systems in my opinion are the worst programs out there in interface, which is why I stay with separate, very down to earth solutions for both. If a calendaring program could do good group management, automatically set up my contact groups based on who emails me, build social nets, etc etc, I'd switch to it in a heart beat. But these carbon clones of Outlook aren't helping me as a software consumer, which means there is virtually no incentive for me to switch to Open Source.
God forbid anyone thing that Open Source authors learn something about design instead of functionality. That's the difference between Software Engineers and Code Monkeys.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
A comparision side by side of the features of all these programmes. Can I handle my 2 Gb of PST files with Evolution and Kontact? If not, then I'm not interested. Can I search pretty quickly? If not, forget it.
Can I connect to POP3 / IMAP / Exchange / Notes servers? If not, come back when I can. Integration with calendar requests from MS Exchange and Lotus Notes? I think that is very necessary.
This sort of eyecandy is very nice to look at, but utterly useless.
No. I think if a code author writes code just to be writing it, he's a code monkey, reinventing the wheel.
A software engineer spends his or her time researching as well as implementing. For most Open Source authors, researching encompasses a Google search coming up blank. Now I'm not saying all of them are. There are a lot of good authors out there, creating things that I could have never dreamed up. But the problem is, these people are good engineers, and often are gulped up into companies like Microsoft for example, which has its margins, which means you do it their way, or its the highway.
If something really sucks, then that's an example of poor design, which means that the engineer did a poor job researching the situation.
Email clients are notoriously hard to get right. They've got to deal with a lot of information coming in, and try to process it in a way that it's useful, hopefully without cluttering the whole world up with useless buttons and scroll bars and chrome. But if you sit down and point out what's important in a mail client (the MAIL perhaps?) and think of how to represent it in a clear, concise way, then you quickly start getting ideas of how to implement it, and you can quickly go through those ideas, choosing which are good, and which are crap. I swear I don't think most of the code developers I know ever go through this step. They just look at something that exists, and clone it. And that's what I'm against.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
As far as im concerned I just use Thunderbird as a newsreader. Google nailed it dead on, when they designed Gmail i think they quite possibly found one of those lofty pinacles that so few programs ever manage to perch on where theres an overwhelming majority that agree wethere they use it or not that it has a superior design. But thats just me ;)
Gmail responds faster over my net connection than Thunderbird does and the UI is near perfect. and i am NEVER going to be happy without groups again. theyre a think of absoloute genius. I just wish i could flag my files like that for Google Desktop Search.
there is definatly room for Innovation. Shame that theres so little. But there has to be a "norm" for people or else everyone would give up cause no to things would be alike at all, and using a new program would take valuable time away from people that genuinely use these kinds of programs as buisness tools regardless of how much computer skill they have.
XML - A clever joke would be here if
A young man goes into a computer games shop. He says to an assistant
"I want a challenging computer game with lots of graphics. It should be
difficult, confusing and have plenty of contradictions to keep me busy".
The assistant replies "Have you tried Windows XP?"
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Simple: it's the law. The specific appearance of the iPod can be protected by design patents and its wheel thingy has a device patent on it. In contrast, the general arrangement of buttons and menus in an application cannot be protected.
Having said that, it doesn't bother me in the least if other companies clone iPod in any way they like.
Open Source projects are broader than KDE, Gnome and Mozilla.
Get out and look around, what you see might surprise you, but then don't start bitching that it doesn't have the interface you're used to.
In the meantime what the majority of users want is a Linux mirror of what they're already used to, not innovation.
Innovation itself is highly overated anyway. What you really want is what works, tweak it only when real improvement results and otherwise leave it the bloody hell alone, but you can't keep a revenue stream of new sales to old customers going that way.
KFG
The screenshots delve in to the nitty gritty details and should help in making an informed choice, if nothing else
...Outlook somehow manages to shine compared to the other two.
No the screenshots show some dude with one email account and one contact.
Even if this is to be just a UI comparison, there isn't much here to compare, really is there?
Given it (as advertised) only scratches the surface, and from the surface they all look pretty much the same... the screenshots hardly allow for an informed decision.
I've looked into all of these in some detail, although to be fair none of OSS offerings in some time. I hate to say it, but when you have 1000s of contacts, a pile email accounts (of both imap and pop), and the shit hits the fan (ie, bad server, bad connection, heavily loaded client machine)..
At the last indepth trial of non-Outlook groupware I just kept finding things missing from the other applications. Usually little things, like being able to group email a certain way, or create filters for one thing or another. Stupid little things I'd admit, things I normally wouldn't care about, but to be honest 100% of my usage for this sort of thing is for work.
That said, when all is going well, and the server is fine, and the connection is fast, somehow, outlook manages to shit it pants at random though infrequent intervals. To be honest, Outlook's ability to import and export to / from other sources is a bit weak and possibly worring (how will I get all these email attachments back out when I finally jump ship)
I'd be happy to switch to another system provided it did a better job than Outlook (*shudder*) I feel so dirty.
umm .. sorry, but SO WHAT?
would it have been so hard to have actually used each one of these programs a bit first? a visual comparison is USELESS without DATA!
those screenshots are mostly whitespace. beh!!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
>>Stealing the interface of an iPod is stealing the iPod.
Stealing the interface of Outlook is stealing Outlook.
I have a lot more respect for Apple (for Address Book and iCal) and OSAF (for Chandler) for their attempts at an "Outlook Killer" than I do for these two examples.
In the late 1990s, I was using Day Timer Organizer. It was essentially an electronic version of their paper organizer. For what it was, I thought it rocked... I switched to Outlook because of the integration between contacts and email (and it was on my new computer). In other words, I switched for a functionality.
>>most Open Source coders look at something that already exists, and try to mirror its functionality.
I think your comment does a disservice to Open Source coders that _don't_ do that. The real heroes are the ones that create an entirely new take on an existing problem. They're the ones who are pushing the envelope and they get my respect, open or closed.
My father is a blogger.
Have they by any chance done a tabular list of the exploits for each? This would be quite useful for comparison also.
Why UNIX?
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.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
You should have a look at Evolution:
v olution.html
Built-in Microsoft Exchange Support
Users can communicate directly with built-in WebDAV support, eliminating the need to maintain separate IMAP e-mail server access to support Linux and UNIX users.
From within Novell Evolution, users can view, edit and update e-mail, address books, calendars and task folders on the Exchange server.
Using existing global address lists, users can access names, addresses and contact information from the Exchange Global Address List.
Public folder support allows users to share documents and files in existing Exchange public folders. They can also create new public folders for collaboration.
Through the Manage Permissions feature, users can control access to personal and public folders, calendars and task lists.
With the proper authorization, users can open other users' calendars or shared folders.
The Out-of-Office Assistant helps users create custom vacation or notification messages that run on the Exchange server.
Through the Calendar Delegation feature, users can set permissions to allow others to view their calendars. Users can also delegate permission to a colleague (for example, an administrative assistant) to accept and schedule meetings in their calendars.
Direct resource booking reserves resources such as conference rooms or vehicles for your meetings and appointments.
The new mailbox- and folder-size features display Exchange server quota notifications to keep mailbox sizes down.
Taken from http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/e
As for question 1 & 2 I'm not quite sure, but a colleague uses it, and it looks like he accesses his mail without trouble (And accepts meeting requests, Accesses public folder, etc.).
Or does Windows not do any anti-aliasing? Looking at the screen shots side-by-side, it doesn't look as though anti-aliasing is turned on for windows. On the windows box I use at work, I've tried turning on 'font smoothing', and it in many cases makes fonts look worse. Has anyone else noticed this?
That said, it would have been nice to see a features side-by-side. Also, one thing Outlook has on its side is how many things out there syncronize with it, like yahoo contact/calendering, for example. Does Evolution syncronize with palms? Just curious.
... and this is why Linux is years from the corporate desktop.
I think evolution is a stone-age Email client. I am actually a KDE user but since using ububtu I decided to give gnome a try and was very impressed, until I migrated all my mail to evolution. I did this because I wanted a PIM suite that will allow me to sync with a mobile at some stage in the future.
Anyway, swicthing from KMail to Evolution really is taking several large steps backwards. Here's why:
a) Evolution is slow. There is a 3 second pause on my computer between clicking "New Mail" and the window appearing. This is not the case when the same machine is using KMail or Outlook.
b) There is no *simple* way of changing the date format (mm/dd/yy -> dd/mm/yy which europeans prefer). I believe it can be done via shell variables, but come on, Evo is supposed to be a proper GUI application.
c) There is no sensible simple mail notification. There is a "beep" option which is inaudible and some other useless / highly complex hacks. In Kmail you can specify whether new mail triggers a notification *per folder*, all via the GUI and without obscure shell scripts.
d) The junk mail filter is crap. I trained it on a folder of 1000 spams but still it doesn't seem to recognise half of them. And I have "external check" enabled. KMail uses external spam filters in a transparent way.
e) Spell checking: almost all modern spell-checking applications offer suggestions in a context menu when opened over a misspelt word. In Evo you have to open an extra window.
f) New Junk is not marked as unread. This would be nice so that you know what junk you've checked for false positives and which you haven't.
g) Sending a mail twice takes a whole load of inelegant cutting and pasting. See KMail for the elegant solution.
i) There is no way to automatically fetch mail immediately after startup. See KMail and Outlook.
j) You HAVE to specify a mail server in the Evo startup wizard. There is no way of getting around this. Very annoying.
k) The calenders feature is not too hot either. I only ever use the whole-month-view and when I scroll through the months it takes ages. Outlook was 10 times more responsive. And the default colour scheme means that looking for today's date is a real eye strainer.
These are just my views on evolution. I had always heard that it was such an excellent PIM suite and am dissapointed that it simply doesn't live up to the hype.
One of the advantages of using software that makes the source code available is that you are able to "correct" things like this. You could add a feature to the configuration where you could choose what happens after you delete a message. If you are not a programmer, you might have friends who are who could implement this for you. You could probably send an email to the evolution mailing list and say "Hey! I really want this feature. I'll pay the first person to add this to evolution $X." Or if you didn't feel comfortable with that maybe "Hey! I really want this feature. I'll make a donation of $X to the FSF (or any nice charity for that matter) when this has been implemented." Make the FOSS development model work for you!
The way to a man's heart is through the left ventricle
It seems to work fine as long as I'm continually using it, but if I leave it alone for a while (say, at night) Evolution seems to forget what to do. It stops keeping my folders up-to-date and I have to switch to a different folder then back to my Inbox to get an accurate view.
I have not figured out how to access my public folders. I can see them but I can't do anything with them.
I don't understand why they didn't implement the "check names" button. It is in OWA and Entourage, so it shouldn't be complicated to add.
This may be nitpicking, but it's clear that Outlook is still far more evolved than the other two shown here.
On the surface, the screenshots look identical. But, being an Outlook user for over 5 years now, I can tell you a few things that appear to be missing from those competitors that are reasons I love Outlook.
1) I don't see Notes or Journal options in Evo.
2) I see no evidence that Evo or Kontact let you group your folder items by from/date/sender/subject/etc.
3) Can you automatically format items based on rules? What if I want emails from my boss to show up in red?
4) Is there a rules manager so I can also automatically do things with incoming emails? Delete them, send a reply, file in a folder, etc?
5) I don't see that you can just straight to a contact from anywhere in the program by typing their partial name in the toolbar.
6) I'm sure Kontact has HTML email editing, I just don't see the toolbar buttons.
7) Contacts don't appear to let you add your own fields (corporate users love this!). Nor do I see a gigantic Notes field or support for Journaling.
8) I cannot tell if, in Calendar, you can configure the times to display multiple time zones when you are travelling.
9) It does not look like you can assign colorful labels to your Calendar events. This feature is priceless!
10) Do the other programs let you view multiple Calendars (like that of another user) side-by-side?
11) Can you schedule appointments with other users at all? If you can, I don't see the field to do it, and I certainly don't see how you can see their schedule.
12) The implementation of Recurrening Appointments on Evo would drive business people insane.
13) It doesn't look like Evo has enough fields to support a proper ToDo list. I don't even see a Due Date field.
14) Can you assign Tasks to other users? Get progress reports?
15) None of the screenshots demonstrate how configurable either program is. Sure, you can edit the source, but I'm talking about the Average User. Outlook is right-click customizable like crazy.
Maybe these things are not missing, but I couldn't see them from the screenshots.
Further, the screenshots only show the things that are nearly identical in all three versions. That is pretty low. There isn't even any sample data to show how things like Contacts are formatted in the Contact View. It's as if the author knew of the shortcomings in those programs and didn't want to display them.
-David