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Linux Desktop Email Key to Success
littlepill writes "It looks as though email clients are vital for Linux to succeed in the desktop battle. ZDNet says, "the lack of a powerful email application could hinder the adoption of Linux on the desktop". So, even though Novell's Evolution is one viable and valid product, it seems that there is a clear "message to application vendors to focus on developing a quality email application for the Linux desktop"." I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users.
I'm a power user you insensitive clod!
If they are calling outlook a "powerful" email solution then they really have not looked at what is available out there. And honestly nobody needs scripting abilities in their email client nor in the compose/reader which is where all the damned worms get their foothold.
Evolution is pretty darn good, the only thing I see it lacking is integration to microsoft servers and that can be fixed with a backend change to decent groupware servers running open protocols.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Mozilla developers are already addressing this issue. The Mozilla Foundation recently published an initial roadmap for 'Lightning', the project to integrate its calendar application Sunbird with its email application Thunderbird.
Soooo, it's not so much that there's any hindering going on. And like the Magic 8 Ball, Ask Again Later.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Do they really mean just e-mail, or do they mean a replacement for Outlook? There are many decent e-mail clients on many platforms, but IME it's the lack of things like calendars and Exchange connectivity that get in the way at the office, and cause things like Thunderbird to be rejected even though there's a Windows version.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Windows doesn't have a decent email client either but they seem to be doing okay on the desktop.
I've itched about this before as well - Thunderbird very well could blow away Outlook in many organizations, but the CALENDAR *SUCKS* - Sorry, Sunbird sucks more ass than anything that has even sucked ass before. The last time I tried it, it was incapable of recognizing its own calendar files, instead they were opening as plain old text in Mozilla.
Here's my idea: Ditch flippin Chatzilla. Put a lot of effort towards the calendar.
The Calendar is one of the big reasons (that I have found) that people stick with Microsoft Outlook.
It doesn't even have to be the whiz-bang calendar like Outlook has, but it'd be nice if it would actually work worth a crap.
Check out my website: Playfully Clever
The key to Linux not failing is email.
Without it, it will fail. Not failing != success.
I do agree in thinking webmail is the future.
What's wrong with pine? :) At least you are safe from worms and viruses.
With the emergence of Ajax there is soon going to be little reason to have apps like email clients on our computers, however if companies like MS take the bull by the horns and intergrate this into their product line there is no reason we won't see an AJAX powered outlook express sometime soon.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
Eh hem, at the risk of being marked as flamebait, I would like to say that it should have been "Intelligent people are Linux Desktop's key to success". For someone to say that Linux has a lack of powerful email clients is just absurd. People just don't know where to look or realize that sometimes, programs like mutt, fetchmail and all the other "do one thing well" programs are a better solution than having a large bloaty email app. If you don't believe me, look at the state of Internet email as caused by large GUI email applications. I'm all for more intuitive interfaces and GUI apps that make
People, computers are not cars, they are not toasters, they are not televisions.... they are anything that you want them to be, and this is fundamental reason they are hard to use, change so often and are prone to crashing.
was mozilla thunderbird completely overlooked in this FUD-filled article?
I second the webmail thing. Before I quit my last windows-dominated job (to try my hand at this full-time), it was common for me to use the IE-based Outlook Web Access client since Outlook itself was often buggier.
In fact, there's not much I need a Windows machine for.
Mutt works far better than any email program I have used on Windows -- including Outlook, Eudora, and Thunderbird.
FireFox is all I need for web browsing.
GAIM is all I need for IMing.
But, I haven't found a replacement for Agent for USENET access. Everything I've used on other platforms is inferior.
It doesn't let you work on email off-line. Also, bringing your messages to your local machine makes them somewhat easier to protect. Are you worried about someone reading your email? Disconnect from the 'net.
(No, it isn't the perfect solution. But I trust my system more than I trust my ISP.)
The only thing missing from Thunderbird in my opinion is built-in calender/meeting functionality, which exists as extensions and standalone apps, albeit in beta.
What are the downsides?
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
I'm really not sure what they mean exactly by a "powerful" e-mail application. Evolution seemed to "heavy" to me, so I have been using Thunderbird for awhile now and am very happy with it. Webmail seems more like an adjunct to me than a replacement, particularly because I have no control over what the company providing the webmail does with my mail. At the moment I'm using a work POP account, a personal POP account, and Gmail. I also download from Gmail through POP just to have a copy of the e-mail somewhere other than Google.
I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users.
Why? Webmail is slow at times and your Internet connection could be unavailable or only available at intervals. GMail, while great and all, isn't something I'm comfortable with even though I have 100s of labels and filters to make it readable. It's extremely slow on older CPUs and just b/c Google thinks that you don't need the "Folder concept" doesn't mean I don't want that.
With Webmail I can't get my e-mail to my machine and HOLD IT. I like the feeling that my e-mail is stored on *my* machine. I choose to archive my e-mail at GMail but it's not something I *must* have. In fact, depending on their future choices, I may remove all that e-mail and go back to just having it archived on WORM media.
I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users.
Bobbins. Even users who would join the luddites given half a chance, in my experience, prefer to use a proper mail client as soon as email becomes a part of everyday life.
I'm a fan of Thunderbird (in its new 1.5beta form) - though even with that I'm frustrated by the lack of support for updatable LDAP (or other shared) address books. That and 'grammar checking' are the two things I wish FOSS could catch up with. Outlook & exchange have had these essentials covered for years. FOSS needs a lightweight feature-complete email client - I'm still waiting.
I think this article has some very valid points. I will add that one of the issues surrounding Evolution is that:
a) it's future? who knows what's going to happen to it. Novell isn't making some of the best decisions with regards to it's Linux future. Who knows what they plan to do.
b) evolutions' inability to be updated. What the heck? I'm still having to run version 2.2.3 because there's no way to update unless I want to compile from source. Yes, I know how to compile from source but the dependencies of that app are a nightmare! and the average joe isn't about to start compiling from source just to update an applicaiton. this is really a show stopper considering tools like yum and apt-get. Why on earth are the evolution developers not making it possible to update their product with the most used tools to do so? makes no sense.
c) buggy. evolution still has some issues. from random crashes, to the spamassassin daemon issues, to odd UI changes. these are problems that will continue to plague this application.
don't get me wrong, i've been using evolution since it's beta days and it's come a long, long way. but there was a time when i could solve a lot of the above problems on my own. now i can't.
but to be honest, i don't see many changes happening in the future. and with Mozilla Thunderbird growing like it is, and the hopes of a calendar integration into Thunderbird, I just might know what my next mail client will be.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
The only problem with web based email is its lack of integration with many of nifty desktop integration features that most desktop clients enjoy. like right-clicking on a file to be sent to quickly begin composing a new message to send that file. Integration between email contacts, instant messaging and addressbook and appointments are presently lacking and all seem to involve a lot more clicking around with a web based interface. Desktop clients are here to stay a while yet, but the linux still needs something like outlook that is fully integrated with the target desktop which is unlike the current versions of evolution
1. Evolution deletes mail by putting it into a virtual folder and hiding the original message in your inbox. This is ok and seamless to the end user UNLESS you happen to also use webmail. In which case your inbox will be cluttered by messages you thought you'd gotten rid of ages ago. The evolution team has flat out refused to address this issue and has been calling this 'not a bug' (which is true) since 2001.
2. Same as above but for Junk Mail.
3. Finding unread messages in Evolution is difficult. Sorting in general is more flexible in Thunderbird IMHO.
4. Thunderbird is cross-platform. From a corporate standpoint this has let me train the entire staff on Thunderbird before installing linux on any workstation. Once linux is installed, they will be using all their familiar apps but without the viruses, spyware, and blue screens of death.
5. Thunderbird will eventually get calendaring as part of Mozilla Lightning. While that's probably years away, I am patient and hopefuly that this will allow us to eventually get back full exchange-type functionality. Regardless, the calendar is not critical for our office.
Evolution does have some great features, notably beagle integration which I would love love love to see in Thunderbird. Unfortunately I don't have the needed talent to make that happen..
I always try really hard to use evolution because of beagle integration and I always end up going back to Thunderbird which I feel is a good enough client to satisfy the typical corporate desktop. At least for small businesses who don't need the calendar.
I don't think Email client is the main problem that may leave Linux failing on the desktop. I would agree that web based email is looking pretty good to take over, but linux on the desktop, in my opinion, isn't being adopted because it isn't being used at an early age (ie. MS in schools, MS Word files being required for term papers).
If Outlook is the best *nix-incompatible offering Windows has, then the parent has a point.
And I think it's hilarious.
There is no way this person is thinking straight, with the features of Mozilla and technologies like AJAX the browser is becoming the app. Couple this with the growth of thin clients (think about where you work; how many people there *NEED* a full blown $2000 desktop computer to check email and trade word docs? Sure coders probably prefer a beefy box, but why not have them on a grid of computers to really get some performance? I'm getting off topic, but come on, Evolution has all the features that even 'power users' would need, but for 90% a great webmail client is going to be all ppl need. Don't get me started on Exchange and licensing...when will the madness end - YOU DON'T NEED THAT MANY COMPUTERS! Think server-side, think thin clients, think savings (overhead, support, utilities, etc).
fak3r.com
I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users.
i would have to say i agree. there was a time when i was using my Road RUnner mail acount and using a mail app to read all my mail, but the spam monster ate my inbox, so i've migrated online.
I use several diffrent services such as gmail and yahoo. My Yahoo is soley for those anoying "must register and be emailed key" type sites that i'm just not sure if they will sell my email.
I just find Gmail to handy not to use.-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is MY galaxy...go find your OWN!
Why is there a preoccupation with webmail? It's an annoying buzzwordy type solution - oh look, we've got WEBMAIL - and is crap compared to a proper desktop client. And yes, i've got gmail. Why would I want to spend time jumping to the next screen of 20 messages (outlook webmail anyone) when i can scroll properly through thousands in a desktop client? I can't think of a *single* advantage of webmail except for the ability to access email from any pc on the web - which in my book relegates it to a backup solution and not the preferred method of access.
Some users suggested that end user training issues could be alleviated if Linux supported more common desktop application such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.
Yo, Linus, are you listening? How come you don't support MS Office? Get with it, man!
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I got a chance to use Ximian Evolution once in a Linux computer lab several years ago at University, and I was impressed by how much better it was than Outlook Express, and felt a lot like Outlook. I'm not sure how good it is at the advanced calendar sharing that some offices seem to demand these days, but it strikes me as a worthy successor to Outlook.
Although I have a feeling it would never be too popular in Kansas.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This has got to be annother of those troll articles.
emacs + gnus
(I've tried evolution and kmail, too, but they just can't compete.)
is mutt or, better yet, mutt-ng if you're using IMAP.
No, really.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
ZDNet has it's collective head up where the sun don't shine. I quit using any ZDNet services or products, or even looking at what they are doing on their web site a long time ago.
I use Linux on a laptop (server development), and the only reason I still (also) carry around a Mac laptop is email and calendaring.
When you are traveling on planes or working on a bus, you cannot use a web email interface. Business people need this capability. Having a good email client with calendaring (Evolution and Thunderbird are not there yet) will make all the difference.
The market > Developers who sit at a desk.
There are lots of other reasons. I'm taking notes
at the OSDL desktop architects' meeting; see
http://kegel.com/osdl/da05.html
The problem keeping Linux from the desktop at my large corporate environment is not just email, it's email integration and reliability. I can get email all I want, but if I can't request and accept meeting requests, book meeting rooms reliably through email, etc, Linux has no chance here. The exchange connector plugin for Evolution has historically been completely unstable, which does not even give us a migration path away from M$ exchange.
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
I think the downfall of Linux is going to be the lack of proper GROUPWARE software. There's 'opengroupware' but it's nothing worth writing home about. There might be a few stragglers here and there, but by in large, nothing competes with Exchange other than Notes.
I for one am looking forward to seeing a true competitor to Exchange.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Much as I'd like to use Evolution, it's got a few show-stopping problems:
* Leaving POP3 mail on the server is all-or-nothing. I'd like to see the "delete after X days", "delete after it's gone from the inbox" options that have existed in other POP3 clients for the past ten years or so.
* Displaying large messages is slooooow. As a sysadmin, I regularly deal with 1-5MB log files in my email. If I have to wait 30 seconds each for them to display, I'm not gonna use that program.
* No advanced search. You can't search more than a single mailbox at a time.
On the upside, the GPG integration is better than any other mail client I've used. Still, until they can deal with these fairly basic problems/lack of features, it's a no-go.
Causation can cause correlation
"I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users"
Your task is to go find me some email users who don't behave they're power users. This is kind of the line of thinking that drives many public transit programs; if we make it better, everyone else (not me) will use it...
For instance, would Microsoft or the FBI trust Google to hold its corporate e-mail system?
Webmail here doesn't sound realistic.
It typically lacks a few features our users would never give up:
-efficient search and sorting capabilities
-spell checkers
-document management (attachments folders)
-good filtering
There isn't a webmail I've seen that comes close to matching Tiger's Mail.app, or even the slow but useful Entourage 2004.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
CmdrTaco said, "I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users."
This kind of thing hampers the ability of Slashdot editors to be good editors. Slashdot editors are very different people than average. In fact, many people who have little computer knowledge spend a half hour a day or more answering email, and those people need backups of all their email. Email is the preferred method of communicating with business people.
In my opinion, email is not the problem, but general ease-of-use is. I have dabbled in linux in the past, but I actually had to try about 3 different distros before I actually found one that would properly configure X to work properly (stupid shitty onboard video card wouldn't completely disable, leading to problems with hardware detection, but that's not my point). I think a lot of people would use linux if it weren't seen as a nightmare to setup
One thing that is nice about having people use web based e-mail is that there may be fewer points where information can leak out. If you're not using POP and SMTP to access your mail you don't have to worry about configuring your client to ensure security. It also means that people won't be running outlook express, and you don't have to update and patch all those desktops out there.
But I don't know if that means that most business users will move over to web-based. There are too many convenience reasons to have a client on the desktop... Outlook is way too complex for most users, Evolution is pretty nice but is in danger of getting too much like Outlook. I am really liking how Mail and iCal work together on OS X... I think all the Mozilla apps are headed that way, and are much more mature in their configurability standing alone.
My question... How can you convince users to give up Outlook, Entourage, and Evolution in favor of simple one function applications that tie together in a loose fashion?
What it turned up was that:
After that there was a speculation that maybe e-mail is still the killer app, or maybe that Linux needs better mail apps, or something.
It doesn't help that this is /. pointing to a hosed article in ZD citing coverage in desktoplinux.com
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
MAIL FROM: xxxx
RCPT TO: yyy
DATA
The msg
.
QUIT
What more does one need?
Business travellers especially like to have their email stored locally, so they can work on a plane, for example. Although some airlines are starting to offer wireless connectivity on their flights, it's going to be a while before it's ubiquitous.
Sure, eventually we'll all have a high-bandwidth connection all of the time. But until that happens, a useful offline mode is a critical feature for many users.
Sorry, this only works if you assume ubiquitous connectivity to your e-mail server. Not true today, not likely to be true anytime soon (at least in the US) for many business users. Price is too high, coverage too spotty, standards need to converge, etc., etc.
Standalone personal organizers (e.g., Outlook) are going to be around for a while. In fact, the whole notion in general that web apps can provide the same user experience as thick client apps (AJAX and so on notwithstanding) is suspect, and I am "unconvinced" this will change soon. The lack of any standards for the "Web UI" user experience has caused a mess. Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc solve this with a unified windowing interface. It's good, and users like it.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
I find it hard to believe the forture 500 companies and the like are going to say "Let's use gmail" even if they have tons of shares in google. With all the litigation and IP wars going on, companies are going to want to carefully control what and where information is stored. I suppose corps could use their own internal web based email as opposed to "fat" clients, but IIRC Outlook/Exchange already have a web based interface...or at least they did a few years ago at a former company I worked.
For Joe Public, yeah, web based email will probably be were he/she eventually ends up, but for businesses it just seems to risky due to the lack for control and implicit trust you must have with the provider.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Why? Webmail is slow at times and your Internet connection could be unavailable or only available at intervals.
And...what about people with multiple email addresses? It isn't that hard to set up Thunderbird/Mozilla Suite, and it saves you having to open like 3 browser windows (or ideally tabs) to check your webmail.
If you use Google Desktop, it can save a copy of your Gmail for offline searching.
Unless you are on a Mac or Linux that is.
Email sucks eggs, for the simple reason that SMTP isn't a trustworthy protocol. The whole email business needs a forklift upgrade, from the bottom up. If you really want to convince me you're a bimbo, tell me it will all be better if you slap me silly with a calendar on top.
In our case.
Novell integration and NT server integration
Virus protection (no system is immune from users)
Automatic updates (push and pull).
software management beyond updates (load/unload un/authorized software)
5250 and 3270 emulation
Office must run on it.
Oh, and all of it must have support available 24/7 from known companies. Then to top it off we will need 3 vendors to provide versions of their software to run under linux which will never happen.
E-Mail is the least of the worries. Its all the other pieces which make up the corporate PC. You then have to get past entrenched individuals (read: can't be fired) who can shoot down anything with FUD. (in our case Novell hacks)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The problem, as the article states, isn't email but a "powerful email application" aka Outlook replacement with calendaring and groupware support.
This has been a big hole for 5 years now. There are a many hurdles to be overcome before Microsoft's stranglehold on corperate infrastructres is loosened. It's nice to see some attention called to this, one of the biggest.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
The key problem to mass adoption of a linux desktop is the lack of proprietary apps on linux.
For example: I work in the dental industry. We use digital xrays and a computerized practice manager. There are few valid options for a practice manager running on linux, and NO digital xray apps.
Hence, we use windows.
I think if you go looking, you will see it's much to same for other industries.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I think what Linux needs to get to the masses is a "default" mail app that ships with every installation. I think that's what the Desktop Linux consortium is trying to get at. It's all well and good that there are five or six good alternatives, but to go Mainstream (and that's key here, because we're not talking about the few savvy techies, but the average Joe or Mom user), Linux needs a default Mail app that ships with EVERY distro, and has the same L&F, no matter whether the Distro ships with Gnome or KDE as the UI.
The other thing Linux needs is a better Install/Uninstall mechanism. I know there are RPMs and I know there are people who'd claim it's so much more powerful than Add/Remove on Windows, but for the Average Mainstream user who wants nothing more than an easy to use Install/Uninstall interface, Linux is quite challenging.
True there are lots and lots of Open Source apps, but all of them ship in this rather convuluted thing called an RPM. Now how in the world is an average user to understand how to install an RPM?! Can he be expected to install ANY RPM with a single click and a little wizard? How about unilstall from a nice GUI Uninstall utility.
These are areas that Linux needs to address. Sure, the core is definitely there, but as in many Open Source apps whos main users are adept at computer internals, the little polish that's reuired for an average user to be comfortable with the app is missing.
My $.02.
Listen up gang, the morons at ZDNet will always be publishing a "Linux will fail because....." article. Trolling is all they are good for anymore. Evolution even comes with a FREE connector to talk to Microsoft Exchange and they still post trolls trying to divert development effort into unproductive pursuits.
No, if you care about Linux on the desktop we need exactly two things.
1. An open replacement for Microsoft Exchange, so Evolution's connector isn't forever chasing Exchange's taillights and so more shops can get the Exchange monkey off their back. In the same vein as OpenDocument, establish an open standard for the scheduling and calendaring features of Ecchange PHBs love so and ram them hard enough Exchange and Outlook must fully implement them.
2. Pushing a wee bit harder for OpenDocument. Break MS Office's stranglehold on the world's data files and what OS is under your Office productivity app isn't nearly as important.
This isn't hard, Microsoft understood it perfectly when they stated the key to victory was to decommoditize the protocols. So long as they succeed in that they keep winning. And just as obviously if we can commoditize everything important in IT, mail, calendaring, directory services, file sharing, etc, we win.
Democrat delenda est
... is in the hands of old Korean people?
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
In most cases, I've had a pretty difficult time explaining the POP paradigm to less tech-savvy folks anyway. Before I manage to fix things, they don't understand why their friends are getting bounced emails about "full accounts" when their local inbox in OE is empty. Gmail and other webmail services remove that confusion and additionally provide the feature that the email-checking experience is roughly identical on any machine they use to check their mail. Non-power users simply don't consider it worth the effort to use a local mail reader.
E-mail is no longer the killer corporate app that is holding linux back, it is the calendar. If you don't have calendar, then you are not going to get into corporations.
I would love to switch all the engineering organizations I have been in off Outlook/Exchange, but with no viable calendar .... It is not going to happen.
CmdrTaco is totally high if he thinks that web mail can replace offline mail reading/composing/replying.
Your humble build servant.Novell makes a GroupWise Linux client. Of course you have to be a GroupWise shop to take advantage of this, but there are corporate mail systems with a Linux client.
doug
STFU & GBTW
I have been using various web mail clients since 1996. I firmly believe in them, because no major service has ever lost anything of mine. I have a hotmail account that has been around since before M$ bought them. I use GMAIL now, and I love it! In fact. I have been a comp tech for some time, and basically refuse to use outlook because, I don't need 100mb RAM {j/k}to be wasted on a program I don't ever need to use!
/xmail y mail and zmail too
>>>But it does x/y/z...
So does gmail/ hotmail / yahoomail
Ironically now I am forced to use outlook at work, and don't really know it as much as I like to get to know my applications. (yes i like to know my apps that well.)
This isn't my sig, this is
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
"Only" power users? Power users were the drivers for the bloat of office applications over the last 15 years. If the power users in which ever office environment aren't satisfied with the amount of crap in an application, the word will get around that it's "crippled". Face it, if a mail client doesn't match or exceed Outlook's feature set (minus the security hassles), the closest it'll get to the mass of business desktops is as a bullet point on C/Net.
Luke, help me take this mask off
e.mail is not the key to victory, neither is plug n play, nor games, nor any of that other stuff.
The key to victory is corps willingly adopting linux on the desktop, and furthermore, vendors *supporting* it (you know, as in writing drivers and recognizing when someone calls in with linux on their dell box.)
Until that point in time, linux will be a niche player.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
That is a really badly written and thought-out article. The survey doesn't say Linux needs "several powerful alternative email apps", just that it needs a powerful email app. Modifying that to "alternatives to Evolution" is the unsupported assertion of the writer, who doesn't even recognize that there are already alternatives. And their other conclusion, that businesses have "culturally shifted" to acccept "open source" has no backup, even if it's true: businesses are accepting Linux as an alternative to Windows, without regard to the openness of its source - even if that's an essential property of the alternative in question.
But the article is an excuse to look at the real dynamic of the current phase of Linux acceptance. People have long noticed that minorities have to do much better than incumbent majorities to become accepted, to exploit the same opportunities, to reap the same rewards. Linux is in the position of a tiny minority, facing a highly organized, rich and powerful majority in Windows. But we've also noticed that "#2 tries harder". Apple, the #2 OS in broad terms, has produced high quality innovations (that are often validated by #1, Microsoft, copying them). So we've got to see "#3 try hardest". Fortunately, the open source of Linux and many of its apps, including email, is an advantage. Because anyone who wants to can try as hard as they want, and everyone benefits. Collectively, Linux can produce the greatest effort, the most tries at success, of all the competitors. Which can overcome all those advantages of #1: majority, incumbency, central organization, wealth, media connections, sheer momentum. With time, and a little luck, we can get the benefit of the superior effort. It helps when we help.
--
make install -not war
------
[insert funny
I enjoy linux, I really do. It's powerful, it does what you want it to do, and you can customize the hell out of it...and if you're not skilled enough to do it yourself, chances are that someone else has already had the same idea as you, meaning that there is no need to reinvent the wheel. For me, however, this was not always the case.
I first began to interact with *nix environments in ernest while working for a now absorbed (by Earthlink) isp/hosting provider. There were growing pains, and when there was a problem, if someone wasn't around to help me out, and I couldn't find what I needed on the net (or man pages), I was left standing there, trousers around my ankles, and all of my bits flying in the wind. I'm resourceful and diligent, so I got past all of the problems (mostly because I was getting paid to handle things on my own, and I liked the pay checks). But, then, I am not most end users. End users like email, sure. They like the internet, too. You can get all the clients in the world on a linux platform, but in the end, the problem for most EUs is not the initial lack of a program (though one could argue that even Windows users do not like installing new programs), but the lack of an intuitive interface and structure (due to their having been exposed to years and years of readily available brainwashing).
Case in point, I once asked my mom to try her hand at installing SuSe (years back) on a machine that I had been able to get it going on with relatively little trouble...about two hours later, she comes to me and says she had no idea what to do, and that the manual was somewhat helpful, but often times a bit heady for a lay person. Long story short, she never got it installed. My mom, while not a stupid or ignorant person by any means, is about what one can expect from those who would be targeted by linux on the desktop, and until it becomes easier for them to install, use and maintain, the notion is going to remain stuck in neutral with very little forward progression in terms of percentage in use. I know that there are many available distributions that are 'ready to roll' for those less experienced, but therein lies another problem...the sheer amount of distributions that are out there. How is someone who has no real knowledge to know which will work best for them, or if it will be easy to use and work on?
You and me and a ton of other folks out there, the washed and initiated, have very few pains in using the *nix platforms, but we're not the demographic that could make the biggest impact in causing certain mega-entities to rethink how they do business and treat their users. I hate to say it, but sometimes, I think that OSS in general is just too haughty and high-brow for it's own good.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
is available on all platforms.
Outlook Express isn't what the corps discussed in the article are looking for; the desired client is the combination mail / group calendaring / contact management / task list / journaling / templatable / Personal Information Management application that is MS Outlook or Lotus Notes.
The best way to think of it is to imagine a Leatherman for on-the-road field sales staff and their managers.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
I believe this directly relates to the features/programs - importance/care - divide-between-users-and-developers-problem with linux adoption.
PS - before setting them up with outlook, i had to get them to ctrl-a, ctrl-c, ctrl-v into something else before hitting send, so they would have a copy of their words. this - of course - was something they hated having to do. And why not? with technological advancement age we live in, such simpleton-like, onerous ex-ante troubleshooting shouldn't have to occur.
------
[insert funny
Slashdot published this story shortly after OSDL publushed it. The zdnet people no doubt read the slashdot article, blogged about it, and now slashdot is covering the blog about the article.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
At work, my email was recently migrated to an exchange server. I use Evolution, so I figured that this would be a good chance to test its exchange capabilities (not that I have used Outlook much).
Initially, it didn't apply my filters to my new email There was no obvious way to modify server side filters from Evolution. No problem... I used Firefox to connect to the Exchange web interface, and logged in. Hmm... No way to modify server side filters. I called IT. They said "use IE".
I figure a way to fire up IE. It allows me to modify server side filters. I figured that I would translate my filters from Evolution to Exchange. I entered a rule based on a substring in the sender. That works for an application that sends me mail from different users -- all of which should end up in one special folder. No such luck. Exchange web interface requires that filters on senders require that the sender be in my address book.
In the end, I went from one simple rule based on a substring in the sender to several rules based on the subject line (and it still misses some cases). Sigh.
Magically, my evolution filters started working again. Go figure.
I have yet to find how to use Evolution to store files in Exchange (I think this is doable from within Outlook).
There is no way to modify server side rules from Evolution.
Evolution has support for Server side vacation mail.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
Well said. That is primarily my belief as well. I don't think that the average person gives a hoot to have Outlook on their computers. 9.99 times out of 10 it's configured wrong anyway. People who have outlook to check pop 3 allways check the "delete e-mail from servers on download" box and then format their machine, and want me to get their e-mails back. When I show them ComCast, or GMail they are thrilled, and usually switch.
Now for scheduling, and Corporate stuff, I will have to give a nod to the previous poster. You can't beat Outlook. Not in the next 3 years anyway. They have INTENSE market penetration. The ability to look up contact info within an organization is AWESOME if a little difficult to use. and SCHEDULING is the primary function at my Corporation.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
2007 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop! :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"the lack of a powerful email application could hinder the adoption of Linux on the desktop"
/usr/bin/mail, you name it we got it. Most home and business users are happy to use webmail at any rate, so the availability of a native desktop client doesn't seem to me like something that would "hinder the adoption of Linux". In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Linux actually outpaces the mail client availability of any other OS.
Uh, what? The selection of email clients for *nix OSes is one area that isn't lacking too sorely. We have email clients for darn near every kind of user and situation. Evolution, KMail, Thunderbird, Pine, Mutt, Opera,
Unless of course, by "powerful email application," the original author meant to say, "Microsoft Outlook." In which case, the author shouldn't be taken to seriously anyway.
It appears Scalix offers all of this. Anybody have any experience with it?
Why is it that no one ever defines their criteria in those articles? Once you do that, it becomes easy to evaluate the current apps. Here's my list.
#1. Shared email folders. I should be able to share a folder with anyone else in the company. (Totally amazing would be the ability to do so, securely, with anyone on the Internet).
#2. Shared calendars. Same as #1.
#3. Send appointments/meeting requests to people via #2.
#4. Delegation. I should be able to assign various rights to my email to other people so they can check the business crap when I'm on vacation.
#5. Alias/Roles. I should be able to send items as "webmaster" and "postmaster" and myself.
Okay, those are my 5. Anyone got anything I missed or any reason why one of those should not be there?
Which gets me to my second point, regarding the comment about webmail being the future. Perhaps I'm paranoid about security, but I like to encrypt a good portion of my email and I would really prefer not to store my private key on a server someone else controls. Maybe someone can come up with a solution that uses javascript or a plugin to the browser to decrypt the email in my browser instead of having the webmail server do it, but until that time, I'll hang on to my current setup.
Now, when corporate users talk about 'email' it usually means something like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook (at least, in my experience at larger companies). I've run a Linux desktop in these situations before, and it is difficult to integrate with those. Yes, you can make Notes run under Wine, but as I understand it there are required DLL files from MS that means it is legally questionable, and really not the solution anyone wants long term. Obviously the point the article is making is the need for a full application stack to replace these fairly entrenched proprietary solutions. It would be hugely helpful if IBM would release a Linux Lotus Notes client. Even though it wouldn't be an Open Source application, it would remove a hurdle for Linux on the desktop. At least their server pieces run on several different platforms already.
No flamebait intended, but if your friends didn't understand the reasons for these things, then your explanation can't have been that good. Would they be surprised if their RL mailbox turned out to be full after a while if they never removed mail from it? Probably not.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
No powerful email clients for Linux? I use VM (http://www.wonderworks.com/vm/), which runs in Emacs. That means there is an entire Lisp environment available for customization and extension. How much more power do these freaks need?
About 50% of companies use Exchange/Outlook (or OWA) for their e-mail. In order for Linux desktops to become more widespread they need to be able to seamlessly integrate with Exchange. Period.
Ironically, the next version of OWA will be so good that the Outlook rich-client will become more or less optional. As long as your Linux machine has a browser capable of displaying OWA, you've solved your e-mail problems.
The current version of OWA already has decent support for non-IE browsers, and they're apparently going to improve that a great deal in the next release.
See: Exchange 12 Channel 9 Video
Must we continue to follow Microsloths mistake of integrating calendaring with e-mail.
-- sas
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
While it's true that I can search gMail, Beagle indexes and collates *everything* so when I search it hits my email, my im logs, my music collections, text files in directories I choose, code... etc. So I'd rather get all of the information there than search gMail, and use ten other apps to look through my stuff.
As a student, all I have to do is search my email for "Exam" and up pops the emails I've gotten from my professors about when their exams are. Or "ACM" to find out when I have the next ACM meeting. Particularly useful for mailing lists, search your email for your problem and you'll find an answer if it's in the mailing list.
Most of the companies I have contact with use Outlook because of its meetings and appointments.
If a linux program can integrate with email to schedule tasks and meetings and have that information on a central server that everyone can view then that is all they really need.
Well... They also need server side rules and out of office replies.
Oh thirdly, they need the ability to recall messages and see if messages have been read by recipient. Its a corporate thing, trust me.
Oh and delegation! All these corp suits have this administrative assistants who need to be able to modify their calenders, read, their emails, send on their behalf, and then schedule meetings and set reminders.
Outlook can do all of the above, so can Groupwise, and so can Lotus Notes (well except the recall message and read receipt feature).
If a Linux program (or OS X program for that matter) can do all of the above then companies will be able to switch without too much problem. Pop mail and simple Imap won't cut it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
non-power users are probably more likely to trust Google or Yahoo with their email data anyway.
I have no issues with "trusting" Gmail with my personal email. Frankly, I've stopped using a local client since getting a gmail account. It's considerably more convienent and powerful for me.
For business use, however, I would never even consider using a 3rd party web host. Not even for a small company. And while some mail server web interfaces are excellent (Exchange), others make me weep (Oracle's). I would rather poke a stick in my eye than use Oracle's Web email interface. It's less painful and doesn't do as much long term damage. Plus you can plant a seedling, wait for the tree to grow, and harvest some high quality poking sticks in the time it takes for OCS to load the first dozen (literally -- 12; pray you don't need more than that) emails.
Yes, I am exagerating.
Slightly.
For anyone who needs offline access to their email (pretty much anyone on a laptop or that travels) then non-webmail access will remain a necessity. These aren't necessarily "power" users; just people who won't always have Internet access (like on a plane, or at a client's site).
I guess new folks who grow up with reliable, always-available internet might find web-based email as "real" as a local email client. But I, too, prefer a local email client. I guess it boils down to a trust thing. I like to get my emails off of someone else's server and onto my computer as quickly as I can, so that the email is in MY hands. The idea of being at the mercy of some other corporate entity to get at my email just bugs me. Privacy, data integrity, storage size limitations, security, DRM, fear of price changes for the service - all of these things bug me when I leave my email on someone else's server. Granted, most of the issues are still present once I get the email onto my own computer, but I just feel more in control with it on my own computer. I only use webmail as a last resort.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users."
Small businesses may be willing to switch to webmail. Large businesses will not. They just won't put their mail on someone else's servers, for many reasons -- security, legal requirements, contingency planning, etc. Nor are they going to develop their own webmail solution when Notes or Outlook or whatever already work with current business processes. Email clients are important and will continue to be important.
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
it's built into exchange.
it's HAPPENING
(I bought my own Small Business Server box for home)
I have webmail, and webcalendars, and contacts, and remote desktop, all from one HTTPS login... anywhere I can run an IE browser. and it syncs files, email, and scheduling with my PDA, home PC, and work PC, near flawlessly- just some features I want seem to be missing)
Without IE, but a browser- I still have it all except remote desktop- just not as pretty.
Consider.. for a 600$ software purchase, I have
email. file sharing. calendars. shared contacts. remote desktop. web serving. internal webserving. security tools. all with the same interface, readily supported and easily understood.
whats my ROI if I have to supply each of those with OSS which includes research, support, interoperability, down time, configuration- on each application with it's own UI?
my life is rather simple with SBS.. and when I'm stuck, answers are readily had.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I forgot one, I have not implemented it as yet.
it has it's own built in NNTP server as well.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
haven't these people heard of -GMail-? Sjees, savages.
While it's sacrilege on /. to say something good about a Microsoft product, Outlook (not Outlook Express) is quite powerful when used with their Exchange server. I would like to see an OSS product that can do all that Exchange can do with the ease of setup and integration. I've seen some that come close but they don't integrate easily and/or are a pain to setup.
Both run on Suse. Just saying.
"I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users."
You've got to be kidding.
Groupwise on Linux is superb to everything I've used before. I've also suggested to others Scalix, but I do not think it has a current client side application. (web only for Linux at this point, me thinks). Just now I checked their site for an update... appears they have a community edition now.
m l
http://www.scalix.com/products/compareeditions.ht
Might be suitable for a small business. Secondly, it can integrate with eDirectory (another excellent application fron Novell).
Offtopic, but did anyone else notice that Fedora Directory Server 1.0 was released today?
This is completely true. After evaluating all of our groupware options where I work, the only criteria that we found Outlook/Exchange didn't support is "don't use Outlook/Exchange". I'd love better integration with Apple Mail for our Mac users, but Outlook 2k1 and Entourage work just fine, and Apple Mail works well enough for the users who can do without calendar functions.
Anyway, email is the easy part. Shared calendars, public folders, directory services integration, plus support for multiple protocols work very well in Exchange! When Thunderbird/Sunbird supports delegates and tie-in with authentication services like AD or Kerberos, then we'll think about switching.
Exchange is the only reason we even have an AD domain here! Everything else runs on OpenBSD and Xserves. You can hate Microsoft all you want, but Exchange simply gets the job done. An OSS alternative will need to do all of the above and integrate with Exchange if they want us to switch over.
Isn't E-mail only for old people? At least in Korea......
I mean would you rather just buy an email system, or an email system, AND 2200 copies of windows?
http://www.scalix.com/index.html
--Michael
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
I'd say the probability of a catastrophic failure that results in data loss usually is much more likely at the client side. How many home users make daily or even regular back-ups, use redundant storage media and buy high quality hardware?
Of course, downtime is still a problem.
This particular story addresses a big weakness below "IBM level" PR. The writer doesn't have a Kmail/sylpheed/whatever PR rep to call. That might have balanced the story.
Right now, there aren't too many Linux companies that can afford to pay the big-bucks PR people to run their side of the story for a single application, much less a whole distro.
I think that actually stands to benefit Linux in many ways by driving the feature set forward instead of focusing on spinning features and competitors.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The real shame to this is that it will send OSS developers off to develop a new Outlook lookalike (as if PIM and Evolution weren't enough) resulting in a missed opportunity to really out-do what Microsoft has to offer in this realm.
How about a totally free server-based program where people can use a central client to read email, chat, make appointments, share calendars, swap files, manage document revisions, publish sales charts, manage project teams, maintain journals or blogs for employees, etc...
Unfortunately, linux will respond by trying to copycat instead of innovate.
Oh yeah, and OS X Mail isn't great either, but that's not holding them back. The real meat of the article is:
A lack of application support is also holding back Linux, according to the survey of over 3,300 users. This was cited as the most serious hurdle facing Linux on the desktop.
Email is just "crucial".
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
Email can be taken for granted these days. However almost everyone relies on it to complete their daily activities. Speaking of evolution i have been using it for wow 3 years now and it's come along way. It's not outlook and for that i am glad. Filtering Works Great! Being able to manage my email is most important to me. The Whole Just throw it in an archive Gmail aproach doesn't work for my style in the offie or while working but for personal it's fine. Evolution in my eyes could be the next outlook.
I use Thunderbird on Windoze because it's the least broken email tool I've found there. But when I'm on Linux, nothing beats KMail. Or Kontact if you want calendars etc. too. Far better than BleakOutlook.
The key problem to mass adoption of a linux desktop is the lack of proprietary apps on linux.
Pardon? You want progress through moving backwards?
The goal is mass adoption of Linux desktop ***WITHOUT LOSING ONE'S SOFTWARE FREEDOMS***. Not mass adoption at any cost.
That makes your suggestion pretty irrelevant. You might as well just use Windows.
It's got little to do with actual functionality and everything to do with the perception that you need an Outlook replacement for email.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Anybody remember Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation and their flagship product, Chandler?
It was supposed to be the personal information manager and groupware application that would trump everything, be free and run on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
http://www.osafoundation.org/
It was supposed to do everything that Exchange/Outlook and Evolution could do, only in a much more intuitive and user-friendly fashion.
Where is it now?
They don't really mean email. They mean a lot of extra stuff, including things I would never guess is email-related, such as calendars. Well, a todo list isn't "email!" They should have said what they really mean: that the platform is weak on "groupware" or something like that. That may be debatable too, but at least then they would be saying something that isn't completely stupid, misleading, and insulting/flamebait.
As for webmail, webmail is something I'll never take seriously, because you can't have privacy with webmail. Cryptography must be performed at a trusted endpoint, not a remote server. Webmail is a technological step backwards for email, simply one of those bad ideas left-over from the dot-com era, whose flashiness and "coolness" has allowed it to survive in spite of its fundamental flaws.
It's only a matter of time until some well-written news story breaks where some government gets caught red-handed drift-net-fishing through lots of innocent people's email (maybe combined with the realization that someone's robot is reading your email to decide what to advertise to you). When that happens, more people will wake up to the fact that having email be unencrypted is just plain dumb. How many times that can happen before critical mass is achieved, I have no idea -- but the day is coming, and it will be death to webmail.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I run a mail server and have a 100Base-T connection between my mail server and IMAP client app (Thunderbird) and found a little while ago that Gmail operates much faster than this setup so I just started forwarding all my mail to Gmail. One thing I've found is that when I give people Gmail invites they don't understand how to use the labels and just use the thing as a single inbox. I've found that the power of Gmail is the labels and filters, which really set it apart from all desktop email clients that I've used. If they added a group calendaring function it would be an absolutely killer app.
A desktop email client is NOT the "killer app" that hindering linux acceptance to the desktop for NON-enterprise environment.
There is a very real difference between personal and enterprise desktops.
It really is a good idea to use web-based email clients for virtually all personal users. For enterprise users, you may need interoperability and certain features like calendar, but even so, linux apps are closing the gap in that area quickly.
Email and Calendaring and calendar sharing and meeting, scheduling, and other Lotus Notes db type stuff IS important to many companies. Why force every person in your 20-person meeting have to individually update their own calendars when a simple email to notify them of a change would do the trick with almost no further user intervention?
Yes, I really like Thunderbird and use it at home, but I simply have too much to keep organized to just do away with Lotus Notes (or Outlook w/ Exchange) at work. And yes, both those applications can suck at times, but they really do make life a lot easier despite the sometimes annoying interface or bugs that they still contain.
i use GNU emacs for mail reading (and other things). works fine.
I think webmail is the future - I've used Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. They all just end up being another resource hog running on my system. If something breaks, I end up having to copy all types of files just to keep my old emails - and I can never find the archived data files, it's just a mess.
With webmail I can access my email from ANY computer I wish to, and those features are all available to me from that machine. If a new feature is introduced, I don't have to worry about upgrading my machine using a 100MB service pack. I have my email open in a tab in my browser and it's available for me just about anywhere. If I really wanted to view off-line, I can setup some procedure to backup/copy my email locally.
I'm not saying that a solution fully exists today, but I see nothing that would stop webmail from becoming the full solution. I use yahoo webmail now with the "Plus" option - which allows me to check a few different email accounts from the same account, send email as if I was writing from those accounts, along with address book, calendar, and notebook. I'm not saying the system is perfect (I wish it would integrate more smoothly with my Palm, and allow for some shared calendaring and address books), but it is an example of a system that could handle all the features of Outlook in a web-based application.
Yeah, but he can't be pulling teeth (and making money) while he's writing those tools, now can he :)
-everphilski-
look into OWA
it's included in exchange, it's a webmail client, and provides via the web 90% of the functionality a user gets sitting to outlook on their work PC
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I don't see web mail ever replacing the current 'fat MTA and client' model for anything except personal mail. I myself have a Gmail account which I use for personal stuff, but like every other org with more than 10 employees. Webmail will never be acceptable for any but the smallest organisations. Just to pick one reason from the dozens, what happens when your employer gets sued over some dodgy deal and the litigant's lawyers demand access to all your internal email? "Sorry, we don't keep any mail." Whoops, go straight to jail, do not pass Go and so on. Archiving and retention of mail is increasingly mandated by standards and (these days) legislation, especially in the US. (SOX, Gram Leach et al, I think HIPAA has something to say on the subject, not to mention the voluntary certifications and standards like ISO17799, NIST, SAS-70 and the rest.
Thank you, when I read that I was shocked.
.mac account I toss out at times. With an email client I can check them all at once. With web mail I can't. I'm no power user, same situation goes for people with a home and work account who aren't power users.
Webmail blows, its a pain in the butt to deal with attachments and folder management is also a pain in the butt, not to mention the local issue.
I have three email accounts, my Campus mail, home mail and a
I think webmail is far from being a solution for the majority of people.
Take the example of a meeting I just got out of. A multi-departmental shareholders meeting with over 12,000 people in 70+ countries all in different time zones. It took 72 hours to set it up so everyone could be available. It all coordinated automagically via Exchange calendering. This is not an uncommon occurance although 100 people is more the norm for project or department meetings. Until you have actually worked for a large (think 10,000 or more employees) organization that has a high need for communication (which would be about any company), you wont get how essential this type of communication is. Also, remember it's not just people you are scheduling, but satellite or circuit time, rooms, video teleconferencing equipment, laptops, etc.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Try it.
Regards;
LDAP and iCAl support on the backend would go a long ways to allowing integrated clients.
I'd love to see 100% clones of Outlook and Exchange, so all-MS shops can slowly migrate, replacing a few Exchange servers at a time and a few Outlook clients at a time.
"I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users."
There are businesses that rely critically on email and to put something that critical over the internet does not always make sense. If you lose internet for whatever reason, business stops. If email is hosted in-house then it doesn't and the company has total control over running and maintaining it. If it goes down then the company can fix it instead of having to wait for some other company to fix the internet connection.
I'm all for web based applications but until the internet becomes just as reliable as an in-house network I can't see it happening for critical applications. I can see myself at home using gword to write documents and gsheet to whip up a quick budget, but it's uses are not unlimited.
Oh no! A power outage! Good thing we have those generators so we can...oh crap all our apps are web based and there's no internet!
It's just a very bad idea in some cases.
Resource hogs...
Right now Firefox 1.5 - Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5 uses more CPU, Real Memory and Virtual Memory than Microsoft Entourage.
So if we are measuring resources as a measure of what to use, Microsoft Entourage is the "thinner" client for email when compared to Firefox.
Agreed, but I think that applications in the corporate environment are heading toward (back to?) a server-based environment. Look at Outlook Web Access (OWA). This app, combined with IE is so good that it feels like you are using Outlook. Yes, you are missing the "offline" mode which can be important for power users, but for the most part, this does not matter to the other users.
Actually, I see this as the best way for the Linux Corporate Desktop to make its inroads. Continue making Evolution & thunderbird, sure, but focus heavily on Mono and other cool server-side technologies to make really nice web-based applications for e-mail, contacts, and scheduling. I think that if you make the desktop a little less important, Linux becomes a much more attractive option to some companies.
In Vino Veritas
I was always convinced that Evolution was mature enough for all users, until I actually tried to push it forward in out company.
We are already on IMAP, so it should not be a problem, I thought. Unfortunately, Evolution's IMAP backend does not even support overriding the IMAP root subdirectory (which is NOT the same as a namespace), and because our Windows-based Outlook clients do use this feature, that made a smooth migration impossible. Also, the IMAP backend author in GNOME's bugzilla regulary confused this with namespaces. At this point I stopped bothering to file bugs. The expierience was an embarrassment, and I sure won't try such a thing again.
There were also other problems, like Evolution popping up interesting IMAP error messages with text like "Error: Success." at least once every five minutes. Also, depending on which server we used, only one of the three IMAP backends included with Evolution would work.
Or Evolution requiring to enter Emails seperated by "," with ";" triggering random weird errors. This was considered "not a bug", because the protocol RFC is specified that way. (WTF? Yes, the protocol is exposed up into the user interface.) Now try to educate all users never to use the ";". It is even worse because with some email client applications, when forwarding mails they copy the list of recipients into the mail body, seperated by ";". So users can not even c&p recipient lists anymore.
I also tried Thunderbird, but it randomly forgets the content of emails sometimes. It also often crashes and has no recovery.
In short, I agree with the article. For the regular home user it is very much good enough though.
Okay, what is needed is Outlook/Exchange features in an open source package. Many are trying to do this. Others manage to by pulling the right tools together. The problem is that many have this perception that Exchange is the end-all to email. It is tough to be but ultimately Exchange is a shit-fat email server. Personally, I wouldn't run it. I'd go out of my way not to simply because I can save so much money NOT running it. The real way to kill it is to have IBM or Novell build something (besides Groupwise). Even if Novell had to revamp Groupwise to do it. The perception is that Groupwise is specialised and passe' so people just aren't going to move to it. That said, an email client for Linux that would seamlessly connect to Exchange and work would go a long way to helping Linux adoption. I think that point is well founded.
So what ever happened to Sunbird? They apparently released their first official release, Sunbird 0.3 alpha1, on November 4th, and I don't remember even seeing a blip about it anywhere.
If calendaring is so important, why does no one support or pump this project?
Granted, Evolution is the obvious direct replacement for Outlook, but I personally like having one app that does a single task, but that can interop with my email, address book, etc easily. Considering the general trend of splitting the mozilla and open office suites from monolithic to standalone programs, I'd guess I'm not the only one.
misleading there. Perhaps "Specialized" would have been better, albeit, specialized software tend to be proprietary, too. What he means is that the industy-specific software for his situation and, indeed, most analogous ones, is written for Windows. That is true in my industry, too.
Because software packages like this are written for a focussed and relatively small audience, they are unfortunately, by nature, proprietary as in not free in either the beer or libre sense. I'm afraid that the incentives just aren't there for the FOSS effort to materialize yet. The lack of a Linux accounting package comparable to Quickbooks is a good example. Not saying it never will and, as Linux continues to make inroads into the general purpose desktop business market, then the incentives for software producers to port to Linux will increase. It's going to be a slow process, but the flow is now starting to move in that direction. As much as some people would like to have all software FOSS, I doubt it's going to happen any time in the near future. There will always be a need for some special purpose, custom, software.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Take a breath and read this before you Notes haters start slagging. If you really want a chance at removing Exchange for Linux you need to look at Domino. And don't bitch if you haven't seen version 6.5 or later.
The reasons businesses deploy integrated e-mail is that they don't want to deploy multiple products or immature products or both. Domino is regarded by admins as far superior -- it's much more secure, scalable, reliable, runs on all sorts of different hardware and OSs. It just does. Companies run it on Linux (RH, SUSE, and zSeries Linux) with the same never-touch-it reliability as your Apache Web box. It's got all the policies and admin capabilities that you need to manage distributed organizations. I know a lot of people don't love the Notes client but it does a hell of a lot more than Outlook -- you can't live in Outlook if you've figured out Notes. BTW Domino also supports Outlook and a very nice cross-platform DHTML Webmail, supportied on IE/Firefox and Win/Linux/Mac.
Sorry, if you are going to propose POP/IMAP and LDAP and iCAL as an Exchange (or Domino) alternative you will lose. Period. Each of those vendors has sold over 100 million seats. Even if you win 100 conversions, that's still over hundreds of thousands of customers for each of the two leaders.
The real problem you face is that it's tough to get ANY enterprise messaging system replaced once it's deployed. The problem with Exchange is that all the users THINK they love Outlook because that's what they know, or worse, confuse it with that free Windows abomination known as Outlook Express.
The only way to get Outlook and Exchange out is to create a client that is identical to Outlook (which is what Evolution and others attempt to do, with mixed succes), but more importantly works as well against Exchange as Outlook. Problem there is MS will immediately change MAPI so that it breaks.
Look I'm with you guys but you're being impractical. Enterprise e-mail is unbelievably sticky. It can't break and it's got to have all the features people are used to. Exchange 2003 sucks a lot less than older versions -- if you use all of MS' other software and big horkin' machines, you might just get more than 250 users on a box (as opposed to Domino 7 on Linux which will easily get 1000+).
I'm looking over the wall, and they're looking at me!
What's with all the pro-Microsoft, anti-Linux/OSS troll articles posted lately? There seems to be a greater number than usual. Is Bill bored lately? Can't get it up anymore for Melinda so he gets his jollies off spreading this stuff? This one is just so far out in left field, as it points at email...when they mean groupware, and Linux does have good groupware avaliable.
Yaknow... Zealots are always the first to toot their ubergeek horn, touting their technical prowess. Yet I keep running across these same Zealots whining about stability in Microsoft products. My company supports ~200 client companies with everything from Apples to BSD to Microsoft shops. When a Windows box is setup and utilized properly, we see excellent stability and reliability out of those systems. Everything functions in a straightforward manner and generally interoperates well. The issues with stability that we run across are generally user induced or shoddy third party packages. It seems to me if an ubergeek can create and maintain a stable Linux environ....surely they can do the same to a 'dumbed down' Microsoft environ?
Generally the clients we have the most issues with have developers on staff that seem to think that regular tweaking and testing on production servers is an acceptable pastime. Funny how that works...
There are a lot of users who travel, and need their email to be on their laptop when they're in the air, and who don't always have high-speed internet where they happen to land at any given time (e.g., in a sales situation where the place you're visiting doesn't allow you on their network). So I don't think webmail is going to supplant regular email anytime soon. Also, consider that you really can't do business with your gmail account - you're entrusting someone with your confidential information who hasn't promised either to keep it safe from loss or to keep it safe from eavesdropping.
As for email/outlook functionality on Linux, it's not there. I've been trying all the email agents on Linux in succession. None of them are ready for prime time. They work, don't get me wrong, but Evolution crashes, and the UI is lacking some really crucial functionality. It really needs a usability makeover. KMail is somewhat better, but still needs a drastic makeover, and KMail in KDE 3.5 has this new namespace support, which means that you have to be an expert to configure it. Plus it crashes randomly. Sylpheed-claws is too slow to be usable, although it's got the best UI of the lot.
Then there's the problem of integration. Everybody has their own damned calendar system and their own address book system. Why? If I switch from one to the other I lose _everything_. There is some support in Evolution and KMail for interoperating with Microsoft's products, but if you have a Mac, you're SOL - there's no migration path at all.
Bottom line is that the article is correct in saying that email/calendaring/contact management really isn't there yet, and it is really, really important - email, calendaring and contact management are three of the main killer apps for the average computer user, and if they don't work better than the Microsoft and Apple alternatives, people who have a choice simply aren't going to switch.
I'm not sure about its applicability to business accounting, but gnucash works fine for my personal accounting. I had a couple of user interface issues, but once I worked them out it has done the job for me.
Here are my notes about the issues:
You *can* get a report of the total activity in an account in a time period, it's just done in a weird way. You select the report (I think it's account summary). It will instantly do the report, with no choices about the dates. *But* then you can click the Options button on the toolbar and customize it to a date period. This is something that belongs on their FAQ IMO.
The other issue was that there is no way to assign a category to a bunch of transactions at once. That's still true, but you can tab from one field to another to enter data, and it will auto-complete category names if you type them in the right way, and you can hit enter to save your changes instead of having to click another row and then click yes on a pop-up.
Great ! Where are they ?
*an infinite number of monkeys wrote this sig
Yeah I am not buying the using email offline is a power user function argument. That is insane. In a corporate environment you are constantly bombarded with attachments for various tasks. For people that travel frequently, webmail would not work. Once offline, they have no access their email or more importantly their attachments. I would hardly call this type of user a power user...
Webmail is simply a connector to an email provider. In the office that can work great. but it certainly is not a solution for all users, all the time.
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
My wife actually got yelled at by her former boss because she made a calander event. She was told that it confuses the other employees, and that she was never to do that again.
Evolution and Thunderbird are the obvious choices. There is also mutt and pine for special requirements.
even though i've been using compuers since the z-80 era when it comes to e-mail I'm not a power user, which is why for the past 6 years the Only e-mail account I've used on a regular basis is one I have set up through yahoo. Sure I _could_ set up sendmail(editing the config by hand), and have a zillion little @someurl addresses, that i could access with pine or something a little more modern like thunderbird... but screw it, much easier to just have a webmail account.
And even though i don't use it i Love gmail. Hotmail and yahoo had set their grounds for what should be 'given free' in quota, and yahoo was loosing ground fast. then google threatend to enter the space. with a full gig of storage per user for free. Now i have more space on yahoo that i'll use in my lifetime. like i said not a power user, once yahoo made 'spam mail' not count towards quota, well i never had another quota problem with 6 MB.
And don't forget that cell phones can now be used to access webmail too, and set to alert you when you recieve new webmail, and integrate with your IM buddy lists...
'normal users' don't even ask for nntp access anymore, and for the most part they don't care about e-mail accounts with isps..
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Gmail's pop access is incredibly unreliable too, half the time their pop services do not respond. It's forgiven because its still "beta"
I have tried Evolution 3 times: a month ago, a year ago, and two years ago. Evolution sucks. It has 2GB mailbox size limit under any file system. It routinely breaks its index files. These two bugs are reason enough to stay away from Evolution. If you start using it now from blank table, it SEEMS to work fine - if you import all your mail from 1994 onwards in Evolution, it just breaks. Mutt and Thunderbird for me, thank you. Thunderbird has bugs of its own, but I have yet to experience data loss.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Evolution has recently gone from being my favorite mail app to some bloaty monstrosity that spawns servers in the background, ties up over a gig of ram all of the time, and goes for long naps on me... I figure either it's Novell adding "enterprise features" or they've finally starting cramming that mono junk into it. Either way, thunderbird - and more and more lately, mail.app - have replaced it on my desktops.
But they have removed it. They have read the mail and okayed/deleted it locally, either way it's gone from their inbox. The fact that copies are still on the POP3 server because the email client never deleted it is not easily understood. (And really, the email client should just delete it from the server by default.)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
For the time being, that's true. But being online everywhere, all the time isn't very far of, at least not in urbanised, rich areas. I'm pretty sure that in one or two years prices for 3G internet data flatrates will have gone down far enough for me to get one. It's won't work on airplanes, but maybe by that time, they'll have fixed that, too.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Holy Stereotypical AC Zealot Troll Batman.....
Q. - I need to do $foo at work. Can I do $foo with Linux?
A - Why the FSCK do you want to do $foo? Are you FSCKING retarded? Nobody should ever want to do $foo ever.
Thank you so much for the helpful reply.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
this means EXCHANGE COMPATIBLE. and that ain't ever gonna happen with linux. ever.
Until even the mundane tasks can be accomplished by people like my mother, a bright woman in her own right, as well as the fancier features, people will not even look at Linux. I would wager that , of the non-geek people who have even seen the word before, they would never even think of playing with it, as it seems to hard to master. IMO, anyway.
It's spelled E-U-N-O-C-H-S.
and delivery confirmation too. Recall message should not exist on any mail system. Once the mail has routed into someone elses mail box it isn't yours any more. You can't read it or delete it just like any other mail that doesn't belong to you. If someone posts a letter through my front door I don't want them poking an unwrapped coat hanger through the letterbox to try to hook it out again. Same goes for email.
"I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users"
Webmail will be replacing client-side readers for all but LOW-power users. I dumped email clients years ago because I want my email, all of my email including archives, accessible to me at all times from all locations. No client could do that.
Low-power users will just use whatever email client AOL, Comcrap, or Ma Bell loads on their machine and will have no concept that they could access their email from anywhere other than their "Peecee" sitting in the corner that they power-on twice a week.
Meh.
I hate mail applications, really. Most people tend to want access to their mail from anywhere. Webmail is the best solution ever for that purpouse. Webmail is also cheap, easy to administer and demands very little hands on work on the clients. Calendaring and meetings is not something everyone uses or even needs if they attend meetings. Its like hand computers, its fun for a while but gets stuck in the cradle after a couple of months for most people. I would really like to see a split between collaboration apps and mail apps. When you send someone a letter you dont send them your planner do you? While its nice to have functions to send appointments through mail i dont think you should mix mail with everything else. Mail is the transport, not the application.
HTTP/1.1 400
SCHEDULING is the primary function at my Corporation
I wouldn't consider any of the descriptions of the outlook/exchange to be scheduling, to me if it's scheduling software I should be able to have the software search the calender's of all parties involved and present me with a list ordered by best fit with minimal impact, If I'm the VP of Software Development, I sould be able to override events in my progamming and QA Departments because I'm the boss.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I almost hate to point this out, knowing Slashdot's general attitude toward Lotus Notes, but the new version (8) is going to have a native Linux client. IBM says they're commited to releasing full-featured clients for Linux and OSX as well as Windows. That gives about 45% of the corporate world a valid option. This new version is based on the Eclipse platform and seems to be a complete rewrite of the Notes client. Looks pretty shiny: http://edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/hannovers creenshots.html
Let the flaming begin....
Why does a browser based email client imply the internet?
If you're on a generator, and you're hosting your mail on your IN-TRA-NET, there's nothing stopping you from continuing on. Of course, mail in or out may not work, if your upstream provider is down, but you can still read the latest attempt at relevance from your marketing department.
but the most important reason is the first top inhibitors for adoption, see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169728&cid=141 45789.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
see http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1893639,00.as p
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
Email isn't the problem, its supporting a collaborative groupware sort of thing..
And is it really a problem? I do remember several open alternatives for this, such as Kolab, citadel, e-groupware, and many more..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
All that is need is packaging.
Ical servers. Normal mail servers all linked to ldap. Ie packit sell it no problems.
Don't worry the clock is ticking verry quickly on this one.
Missing feature is accountancy setup ready to go.
Curently in the setup of a complete linux only office. Its the config of the accountancy package that as taken the most time.
Email and Calanders... are the simple bit. Give me 2 days work one day to install 1 day to test and retest the systems before they go under load. And you will have a better system than Exchange. Double server strong as heck and all you paid me is the same money it was going to cost it have one server.
Accountancy is the true problem. No business can operate without books.
I attempted to roll out linux desktop's in my organisation but one thing stopped us going the whole hog and removing the windows machines from many of the users, what was that? Calendering, most organisations which grow beyond a certain size need more than email they need groupware, the ability to effectively share info and book meetings.
My organisation uses Exchange 2000 (and typically once that's in there's usually no getting it out) so the first requirement was to integrate Ximian Evolution into it, so we dutifully used the evolution connector which works well but can not be guaranteed 100%, we had problems with people re-scheduling meetings i.e. those with Evolution had problem when organiser rescheduled their meetings, many times it would not update and sometimes the meeting disappeared altogether. When you have a few high-level managers blaming you for members of their teams not missing meetings because they are using evolution you soon find a way to ditch it pretty damn quick, I'm hired to allow people to work together effectively and manager just want solutions to just work.
Another problem was that some emails sent from evolution could not be read (or even easily deleted) by outlook clients due to them having "invalid active content" these problematic emails could only be deleted by holding shift and delete at the same time.
I thought the situation would improve when we moved from 1.x to 2.x version of Evolution but I couldn't even access the calendar properly.
Now all these issues combined with the fact that evolution causes OWA on exchange to produce a lot of web temp files that tend to fill up the exchange server's hard disk forced us to abandon it.
If I had the chance to start from ground zero this would not have been a problem I would have used postfix and cyrus imap amd I would also have used thunderbird since it's got a smaller footprint, is faster and is more extendable (in my view e.g. check out enigmail and other plugins)
What Linux really needs is either an open mapi connector with client which is 100% compatible with Exchange or a full featured groupware application with calendaring which has a free linux and windows client that can interface with AD & LDAP and other exchange systems e.g. handle ics/vcal/ical files from other systems, show and share contact info and integrate with other productivity applications e.g. word, saleslogix, excel, openoffice, etc.
I love Linux, and I despise Windows. I think Windows is to the operating system, what a crap ass plastic dashboard in a GM car is to auto interiors -- ugly, feels crappy, is only nominally usable, and, o yes, will fall apart.
This side of a papal bull, a fatwa, or some way to equate Windows with gay marriage, mass conversion to Linux isn't gonna happen.
Linux may make substantial ground in a circumstance where Windows use is untenable or in certain end-user niches. The $100 Linux laptop is an example of the first. A light-weight Linux, with light, robust word processing and spreadsheet, etc that will run on cheap hardware that Windows would take a week to boot on would be good. But it would have to be w/o any geeky configuration shit (no regular expressions, no config files, no need to know anything at all about the /etc directory). And, horrors!, you'd likely have to do it like Apple: write the distro for specific hardware and sell both together in order to keep size down and maintain quality. You could, for example, bundle a specific cheap wireless card with a laptop, and provide a driver for that card alone. This approach really takes advantage of Linux's reputed best features: cost, efficiency, flexibilty.
Alternatively, a Unix/Linux end user software that is best-in-class of its type could work as well. It's got to be as good at what it does as Apache is, but easy enough for any motivated professional to use and configure. People will pay for such a thing. When I can afford it for myself, I will buy Photoshop and stick it on my Powerbook (also not yet bought). Say what you will about the Gimp, I do not have the time to learn how to get from it what I can get quickly and easily from Photoshop. It's perfectly reasonable that people should pay for such software.
The idea that Linux is going to replace Windows, in the way that's often envisioned here is a non-starter. The let's-make-Linux-whatever-Windows-is approach is garunteed to leave behind a dinosaurs' graveyard of open source software. I think that any serious in-roads into the Windows desktop will have to be accomplished by centralized, focused -- very focused -- projects. Such a project would be focused at an OS market excluded by Windows or by delivering a very specific application or set of apps that work only on Linux.
Back in the day when Sequent was steam rollered by IBM, I remember IBM's battle cry "Everything Linux" or something similar. Soon after, the Notes Server appeared for Linux, but alas and alack, there wasn't a Notes client for Linux.
But, hey, development takes time. So I waited and bugged one of the Websphere folks when they were pimpin' their Apache-Tomcat bundle - so, where's the Notes Client for Linux. That was about 3 years ago - no notes client.
So, I have to ask again - and it's been about 6 years: does IBM have a native Linux notes client?
Taco is wrong. Webmail sucks. People who actually use it and use something else are very aware that it sucks. It shouldn't replace real mail and I don't see that happening.
I thought one of the major complaints about desktop Linux was its inability to back a single pony, so to speak. That there were so many alternatives and competing products that the whole landscape suffered. That used to be the line, at least.
Now, apparently, it's the fact that there aren't enough choices. Well, guess what? That's wrong too. You've got the big names, the Outlook killers: Evolution, Thunderbird, KMail; and the smaller, more specialized ones: Sylpheed Claws or one of the eleventy billion other clients on Freshmeat; and if you need Real Ultimate Email Power more than anything, there's still nothing around that even comes close to the flexibility of Procmail+Mutt+Vim or Gnus.
Truth is, though, that none of this matters. Huge companies are willing to give email away for free, make it highly available, and give you more storage capacity than you'd get if you were willing to pay (my Exchange account at work is limited to ~100MB, Gmail gives me >2GB). You get collaborative spam filtering, virus scanning, keyboard shortcuts for nerds like me who want to blow through mail, some of the best search algorithms in the world with near-instant speed, universal access from anywhere, and now hot new drag and drop UIs.
In fact, probably the first thing AJAX will kill (and I'm not even *that* big on AJAX) is traditional email. Email has long been a pain in the ass, and offloading it to companies who can deal with its site-by-site issues in bulk (blacklisting, storage, availability) is a huge win for people without the resources of a Fortune 500 company. The day Gmail lets you point your own domain's MX record at their servers and deliver mail for your own domain to your Gmail account (making this a cheap, but for-pay feature would be a fabulous way to make money on the service) is the day I take my SMTP server down for good.
Email client? Hah. I'm looking for ways to get email software and traditional email infrastructure as far away from my computers as possible.
Game... blouses.
This is more fud in a way, there are several choices in linux; Kontact, Evolution and Thunderbird all offer much better email functionality than Outlook. Where there is a difference is in providing exchange functionality and that too exists on several fronts, Kolab, OpenExchange and Zimbra all provide Exchange functionality and Horde/Kolab and Zimbra both provide compelling web interfaces that are equal to what is provided by Exchange in terms of shared calendars and shared addressbooks. I think the only thing not provided yet is the ability for mail rules to be seamlessly migrated from the mailclient to the server so you don't have to setup your mailrules/filters twice. Thunderbird needs solid calendaring, this is true. This is probably the biggest problem out there because in doing windows to linux migrations you ALWAYS want to migrate them in a staged format by getting them onto the apps they will be using in linux while still having them on windows and thunderbird is the only one that is crossplatform. Unless you migrate them to web based solutions like Horde/Kolab or Zimbra. Personally i use Horde/Kontact and love it although i will admit Zimbra is pretty sweet looking having been done in AJAX. http://kolab.org/ http://zimbra.com/ http://www.openexchange.com/
Sorry, I've just come form a beer festival, but, Bollocks! Firstly, evolution is a great email client, it's my favorite by far, and I've used a few. This is my job in a large Russell group University, so hopefully I know what I'm on about. The issue is probably more about colaborative working and client compatibiliy. Within my environment, one of the key drivers for a groupware solution is cross-platform compatibilty, it's got to work with Windows, Mac and Gnu/Linux (any distro) or it's just not good enough. Web access is fine if it delivers the features however. This is a matter of perspective, and if people don't belive that a Gnu/Linux desktop does the job, then that's what they'll believe. However, if your look at it from the other side, then you start to see it as a failing of the mail/collaboration suite vendors, and not that of GNU/Linux.
hmmmm.....
f tware_envelopment
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawinski's_law_of_so
Which POP3 client leaves mail on the server by default? Leaving it there is an option in pretty much any client, but I've never seen one set to do that by default on any platform.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
when Slashdot said that a web browser was critical for the success of Linux on the desktop. I got involved in the Mozilla project as a result (yes, Slashdot caused something good to happen), but ironically I still don't use Linux on my desktop or laptop.
The shareholder is always right.
A good calender app (there are dozens) and a good email program (there are hundreds) completely replaces the dodgy free email client thrown in with the OS or the free email client thrown in with the word processing software.
As for Exchange - I suggest replacing it with email. The disaster recovery procedure alone for recovering an Exchange server from good backups onto a new machine is very difficult and time consuming and probably violates your software licence. Every admin who may have to recover an Exchange server should do it at least once and take a lot of notes before they have to do it in a time critical situation - I found it scary enough with plenty of time when I just did it to test disaster recovery. Other email servers generally just have to be told a few simple details in a configuration file and do not care which machine originally held the mailboxes, you do not have to set up a whole new server that pretends to be the old one - and if you just need to get one email from a backup tape even a text editor will do the job.
Microsofts obfiscated email formats are counterproductive - the stuff you want left accessable should be accessable.
I currently use Mandrake 10.2 for many of my office needs and will say that when I first started using my linux box as my primary office machine, I had some NASTY problems. Before I go into them, I should mention that I am going to migrate to the latest version of mandrivia when I have a few hours to be a geek instead of a business dork, but WHAT ABOUT EFAX?!?! I have to get wine to work to view efax files? Sure, I've done so, but, again, I had to take a couple of hours to be a geek --- what about all the business dorks out there who don't have time to be geeks? I agree strongly with this article. I get anywhere between 15 and 100 emails every day that require my attention. Being a Linux user for about 8 years, I had some problems I had never encountered --> I wanted to (from time to time) export emails from linux to an xp box and thus used Netscape mail. After about a month, my inbox got corrupted somehow and anytime I opened Netscape Mail, KDE would crash the xserver. The problem was fixable by recreating my profile, but I could never retreive some of those old emails; not even on my XP box. MAN was it all a huge pain in the ass. I now use KMail, and only use Linux for my office needs. I wish it had as many capabilities as the latest version of outlook.
It's only easier than any other mail server software if you have to learn how to use the other software first. Sendmail configuration is a pain - but no weird registry hacks - it's all easily found if you need the same setup on a different machine, and it doesn't care even which OS is on the thing let alone same patchlevel of MS whatever and same hostname. Other mail servers are much simpler.
Some of the advantages listed above are not always so - seperate components that can be replaced are a bonus now that antivirus, spam, webmail, contacts and faxing can be handled by a mail server and the clients can have whatever wierd mail client appears anywhere (desktop email, desktop web browser, phone email, phone WAP webmail, PDA) and it will work becuase they all handle simple standard email.
Exchange only makes sense in the short term in a controlled situation - the people in your organisation will disrupt that control by wanting to use email in situations Exchange was not designed to handle - and some of those people will probably be trying to do it to improve business practices or may be your superiors. Adding another small well tested feature is a lot easier than an upgrade to a new version of monolithic software six months after the requirement was identified.
I heartily agree with most of this. Apart from:
but so many people consider their internet connection a permanent fixture and don't worry about the negatives of downtime or a possible catastrophic host failure that deletes all their archives.
Most users in the category you describe are going to be better off using a service provider's storage, the chances of failure being much lower than on their home administered PCs. At least with a webmail provider there's a good chance of some sort of backup regime being in place (in the case of google a cool replicating distributed filesystem across multiple datacentres).
Not so sure I'd want google's huge cluster analysing my email archives though.
I run Windows. I use Gmail. I also use Thunderbird. I don't use outlook, outlook express, Eudora. I am very pleased with gmail in the browser and Thunderbird for downloading and storing that e-mail. All this works the same on Mac, Linux and Windows.
I think Linux is suffering more from difficult configuration, not supporting fully the latest hardware and inconsistent user interface between applications.
A user interface guideline that was followed closely would go a long way towards helping Linux gain acceptance.
Why aint nobody talking about Zimbra.
Isnt it meant to be an Exchange killer??
You mean Power Users, like corporations who barely use their computers for anything other than Email and Word Processing.
First let me clarify that I would like to see desktop Linux succeed as much as anyone on Slashdot but do we all have our heads in the sand or what? We all rave about how great Firefox is yet compared with the Windows and Mac versions the Linux version is just plain ugly. I'm looking at a website I designed - www.trans-siberiangold.com - and in the Linux version of Firefox it is lightyears from what it should be. Line spacing is too wide, javascript menu text is misaligned. Christ, Firefox on Linux can't even draw a 1-pixel border round an image without converting it into a dotted line. Image text which appears smoothly anti-aliased on XP and OS X is abominably flaky on Fedora 4 and, yes, I do have X configured correctly. The site's text is standard Verdana but you wouldn't know it looking at it with Firefox on Linux. The site just looks awful. If my main client was using Linux/Firefox on the desktop I don't know what workarounds I'd have to use to make the site look decent. Until Linux, or at least Linux browsers, gets a half decent graphical rendering engine I don't see users warming to it for a long time.
I'm amazed nobody's said anything yet.
My biggest problem with Evolution is slowness. The problem I noticed the most was fsync performance. Following a thread on the Reiser4 development list, we find that someone's horrible performance in Evolution, doing things like resizing columns, was obviously (sarcasm) due to Reiser4's horrible fsync performance, because as you are dragging the column, it's fsyncing... something. Apparently, Evolution considers it of utmost importance that your column widths be synced to disk right away, because God forbid your system should lose power mid-drag and your progress on that particular click'n'drag be lost.
As far as I'm concerned, while Reiser4 fsync performance shouldn't suck so much, that bug belongs more to Evolution than any FS.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Gmail is nifty in that it lets you send mail using another address (not just a reply to). Personally I just forward my other e-mail accounts to gmail. Other webmail services (Yahoo at least used to, I assume it still does) will let you set up pop3 collection for your other accounts - no differently from Thunderbird really.
I was just thinking to myself, won't someone PLEASE tell me what's holding back Linux on the desktop!
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Massachusetts government is moving from Outlook and Notes to a webmail solution
Kolab is a Free Software Groupware Solution. From version 2.0 on it allows full seamless support of mixed clients environments (Outlook/KDE/Web). This is because the Kolab-XML storage format is fully open and avoids MAPI/TNEF.
www.kolab.org
This statement is false.
I'm lost on this one. Virtually most Windows users I know use Thunderbird (Mozilla), which works equally well on Linux. Sure, I use Evolution on Linux, but use Thunderbird happily on Windows, and honestly can't decide which one is better. I've often questioned why I don't just use Thunderbird on both OS's. I use SSL IMAP on both, with great filtering, spam control, and equally well multiple-account handling. I will say this though: the best news reader by far is PAN!
Open Standards Portal
It's a surpringly long standing problem and makes no sense at all in the days of broadband communication and large attachments, but that's what you get with the free software bundled with the OS - software that is developed and then abandoned since there is no financial incentive to improve it for changed conditions.
Due to the above problem and the continuous virus threat I have little recent contact with Outlook Express and Outlook - also in a heterogeneous computer environment the last thing you want is a mailbox format you can't get anything out of without setting up a new machine for the purpose. If you use email, there's little point in using Outlook - if you use Exchange instead of email (nasty thing to admin) then it may make sense.
Please another uninformed article (and same level of prises of Outlook).
Outlook and Exchange "sucks" in my point of view (no offence, but I have used them very heavily, so it comes from my expierence). Yeah, they are feature-wise, but in everyday life their deployement is nightmare (they are my definition of Microsoft software being extremely *buggy*). Evolution beheaves far more predictable, and, however, it doesn't have all super duper features of Outlook yet, I still prefer it and would like to see it grow.
What I see as wrong is to say that most of functionality isn't aviable for Linux - It IS. Yeah, i know, Groupwise is not for free, but Evolution and Linux desktop is. And AFAIK Groupwise is in same level in features as Exchange. Also I can agree that integration - not Microsoft style, but anyway - is little bit lacking, but we are getting here.
I agree, positive expierence and success stories for Groupwise/another aviable groupware server for Linux are lacking and so people thing that nothing works in "our" world. Which is clearly wrong.
I wonder why Novell is so shy about Groupwise?
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I work in a laptop environment, usually from home, sometimes from customer locations or random places on the road. At home I have DSL and a VPN, so I'm connected to work, but webmail's pretty lame in that environment, especially since MS Exchange encourages people to send mail in bloated formats. I'd rather have the mail on my PC, except of course when it breaks. When I'm on the road, webmail is even less useful.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My company gave up on central mail storage for most users years ago. That's partly because we work in a laptop environment, so you need your mail to be portable, but it also makes it much easier for the IT department to manage mail storage space - if you're storing it on your laptop, how much you keep in your mailbox is your problem, while if you're storing it on their server, how much mail you keep is _their_ problem. Microsoft Outlook encourages people to send mail in whatever most bloated format is available (:-), and my work mailboxes are always an order of magnitude larger than my home Eudora mail, even after accounting for Powerpoint attachments. Sure, disk space is cheap these days, but redundant high-speed high-capacity disk space costs a lot more than cheap space on laptops (especially if your IT department's attitude about backups is that your laptop has a CD burner so you should do them yourself.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
KDE, kmail, korganizer... and so on. Do tell me, what is wrong about those?
my oldest account is like 8 years old! ... ...
no spam at all
anyway, i switched to webmail
because of one reason: i can't get a
static ip address. as soon as everybody
can get a static ip addresse (ipv6?)
and someone can send a email directly to me,
then maybe i'll ditch webmail
Evolution, Thunderbird, Columba, Slypheed, KMail (Not forgetting Pine & Mutt)... ...And if you get really bored you could always run Outlook using Wine or Crossover.
but no word about chandler. When it matures, it should be a killer email application.
The project you are looking for is called Kolab. http://www.kolab.org/ provides a complete exchange replacement with Outlook and KDE client. All requested features like calendars, contacts, tasks, PDAs,... simply work in a platform independent way.
Technically it is build around IMAP, LDAP and XML.
The # of users of Kolab is currently in the number of some hundred thousands especially in Germany and northern Europe.
Kolab is designed with scalability and security in mind. The major goal was 100% Outlook and Exchange compatibility.
Have you seen the new Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g Web Access Client? It's better than a poke in the eye: http://www.geocities.com/dont-like-junk@sbcglobal. net/oracle_web_access_client.jpg
Real email addresses have been blurred to protect the innocent.
That looks decent... but Oracle itself doesn't use that, so I have to assume that it's a long way from release.
;)
The current Oracle Webmail interface is just like the GP poster said -- horrible. And OCS Outlook Connector isn't a great deal better. If Sunbird/Lightning worked then I'd use Thunderbird on my work desktop instead of Outlook + Outlook Connector. As would many of my coworkers.
Posted anon to protect myself from Larry!
The new webmail client was released months ago in OCS 10.1.1, but Oracle has been slow to roll out this upgrade in-house. If you're in the ST division, you get to use the new OCS including the cool Webmail client. Otherwise, you have to wait.
It shipped as part of OCS 10g in August (2005). Global rollout within Oracle will be completed by the end of the year.
OCS (Oracle Collab Suite) is the biggest piece of crap I have ever, ever worked on....
I have been reading and reading these posts bash Exchange/pro-Exchange
bash of what OSS has/doesn't have
hey I would kill to get Exchange 5.5 back over this OCS crap we run right now
examples:
first example my old Exchange information store Database was less than 15 GB
current OCS information store database over 160 GB
my old 5.5 machine was in place for over 4 years (not up, but in place)
in the last two year before I downed it after the OCS migration it crashed once!
and this was because of the Outlook 2003 client malformed a server side rule, that stopped the Informatin Store, M$ had a hotfix for it, under a day it was back stable and happy....
our OCS is a three tier install, three RedHat AS 2.1 hosts
these are $1200 each/annual paid Linux OS because Oracle will not support its app run on a "free distro" (way to go RedHat very smart)
now we have run this install for a year and a month, and Oracle has had two major patches, and has now obsoleted the version. i HAVE TO!! completely upgrade an product that is less than 2 years old, M$ isnt even that cold
in this last year i have opened over 20 TAR's with Oracle because of all in the issues i have had with the systems
more than 6 of these have had the Oracle engineers completly stumped the rest have been over come, 4 or 5 very went anywhere at all and the issues are still broken, but now i am running an un-supported version (a supported version when the TAR was open, yet all the same un-supported now)
I know one of my issues was fixed by a stop of the Application services and reboot of the Host OS, reboot Linux to fix an issue with an App wtf???
my Postfix + Anomy + Spamassassin + ClamAv on Fedora Core 3 has not had to have the host OS rebooted for over 8 months, and about 8 months ago we have a power failure, so i bet that OSS Postfix box would have been up for over a year had that not happend
dont, dont, dont bring up any part of the OCS, and may it fail and all customers have their money returned and their asses kissed by Oracle for such a shitty product, i hate it!!!
it sucks ballz and i would rather run Exchange 5.5
up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, select, start