I said:
"there is nothing else that can do this - and do it in an offline manner"
silly me. I must have been drinking to say a thing like that. Hrm, that was asking for flames. My bad. And your correct, I didn't know Domino/Lotus had offline support though. It looks really quirky though, I just d/l'ed Lotus Notes and Domino 6 release canidate...looks like a have to learn their own subset of functions to get grouping views. Figured out how to get the custom properties and such...looks rather good. Too bad it doesn't integrate with Office though.
What I don't see however is being able to create a public 'folder' that is for contacts which can be added as an addressbook for resolution in outgoing mail. Of course, it can probably be done, I haven't found it yet. Either way, we need this in an open source solution;) If we did, Microsoft and Lotus/Domino would have little choice but to follow. They're moving everything into an SQL server anyways though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. (Oracle wants everything in Oracle, BEA wants it all in BEA, and Microsoft wants it all in MSFT SQL Server). Should would be nice if I can setup offline syncronization with offline forms that query using an SQL syntax and HTML in a asp/cf/php or jsp like offline way.
Your also missing one of the other not-mentioned strong points of the Microsoft Exchange/Outlook combination. The system supports Offline access. The US is by no means 'connected' when it comes to people in the field. Not only do they support offline access, but they also support things like Custom forms (Look at the Active&Bidding field) and Custom Views that take advantage of the data provided in the "Custom Forms". A rather ahead-of-it's-time technology considering there is nothing else that can do this - and do it in an offline manner. So, not only do you get the shared calendaring, you also get easy to create custom forms (which are basically HTML forms w/o the HTML), public folders which can have custom attributes and properties for them (very easy to create, just like a dbms table), custom views on the public folders to group by and/or filter by builtin or custom fields or folder properties, AND all of it works offline. (And it has a system for dealing with conflicts when there are conflicts between offline changes and changes made to data by online users). Suffice to say, there is way more to exchange than calendaring, and MAPI. Oh yeah, almost forgot...you can also create a Public Folder for posting 'Contact' forms and use it as a huge public contact management system, which can be used for sending outgoing mail (and it will recognize the name based on the contacts in the public folder). You can also set filters on document properties for the offline settings in outlook. That means that if I've got 6000 documents in a public folder, all of which have a field called "Job Number"...I can tell Outlook to only syncronize for certain Job Numbers. Thus, the user doesn't have to syncronize all 6000 documents for offline access. It's quit a solution for $240/user (5 user) or $192/user (25 user). See this buy.com search. Exchange is not expensive for what it does. And of course, what MSFT usually doesn't tell you is that an Exchange Client Access License also covers Microsoft Outlook...eg, for every Exchange CAL you've got, you've also got an Outlook 2000 or 2002 license.
I admit though, if Exchange/Outlook didn't have the offline abilities it has, I wouldn't use it. I'd develop a suitable browser-based application using jsp, php, mysql, oracle and linux boxes (which i've done before). BUT, I can't interact with dynamic data through a browser while offline, so for now, I'm stuck with the only thing that can do it. Of course, I'm working on a solution that let's me do this through IMAP, but so is everybody else and I've also got a company to run, so the chances of it getting finished are slim and none. I wouldn't mind paying for an open source solution that does all the above. Maybe I should hire some programmers to code such a thing (I've thought of it many times)...but that's a whole other slashdot post in itself ("Building the Exchange Killer")...which hasn't been posted yet.
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I said: "there is nothing else that can do this - and do it in an offline manner" silly me. I must have been drinking to say a thing like that. Hrm, that was asking for flames. My bad. And your correct, I didn't know Domino/Lotus had offline support though. It looks really quirky though, I just d/l'ed Lotus Notes and Domino 6 release canidate...looks like a have to learn their own subset of functions to get grouping views. Figured out how to get the custom properties and such...looks rather good. Too bad it doesn't integrate with Office though. What I don't see however is being able to create a public 'folder' that is for contacts which can be added as an addressbook for resolution in outgoing mail. Of course, it can probably be done, I haven't found it yet. Either way, we need this in an open source solution ;) If we did, Microsoft and Lotus/Domino would have little choice but to follow. They're moving everything into an SQL server anyways though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. (Oracle wants everything in Oracle, BEA wants it all in BEA, and Microsoft wants it all in MSFT SQL Server). Should would be nice if I can setup offline syncronization with offline forms that query using an SQL syntax and HTML in a asp/cf/php or jsp like offline way.
Your also missing one of the other not-mentioned strong points of the Microsoft Exchange/Outlook combination. The system supports Offline access. The US is by no means 'connected' when it comes to people in the field. Not only do they support offline access, but they also support things like Custom forms (Look at the Active&Bidding field) and Custom Views that take advantage of the data provided in the "Custom Forms". A rather ahead-of-it's-time technology considering there is nothing else that can do this - and do it in an offline manner. So, not only do you get the shared calendaring, you also get easy to create custom forms (which are basically HTML forms w/o the HTML), public folders which can have custom attributes and properties for them (very easy to create, just like a dbms table), custom views on the public folders to group by and/or filter by builtin or custom fields or folder properties, AND all of it works offline. (And it has a system for dealing with conflicts when there are conflicts between offline changes and changes made to data by online users). Suffice to say, there is way more to exchange than calendaring, and MAPI. Oh yeah, almost forgot...you can also create a Public Folder for posting 'Contact' forms and use it as a huge public contact management system, which can be used for sending outgoing mail (and it will recognize the name based on the contacts in the public folder). You can also set filters on document properties for the offline settings in outlook. That means that if I've got 6000 documents in a public folder, all of which have a field called "Job Number"...I can tell Outlook to only syncronize for certain Job Numbers. Thus, the user doesn't have to syncronize all 6000 documents for offline access. It's quit a solution for $240/user (5 user) or $192/user (25 user). See this buy.com search. Exchange is not expensive for what it does. And of course, what MSFT usually doesn't tell you is that an Exchange Client Access License also covers Microsoft Outlook...eg, for every Exchange CAL you've got, you've also got an Outlook 2000 or 2002 license.
I admit though, if Exchange/Outlook didn't have the offline abilities it has, I wouldn't use it. I'd develop a suitable browser-based application using jsp, php, mysql, oracle and linux boxes (which i've done before). BUT, I can't interact with dynamic data through a browser while offline, so for now, I'm stuck with the only thing that can do it. Of course, I'm working on a solution that let's me do this through IMAP, but so is everybody else and I've also got a company to run, so the chances of it getting finished are slim and none. I wouldn't mind paying for an open source solution that does all the above. Maybe I should hire some programmers to code such a thing (I've thought of it many times)...but that's a whole other slashdot post in itself ("Building the Exchange Killer")...which hasn't been posted yet.