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Mozilla The Internet Software

Mozilla Lightning to Challenge Outlook 553

Posted by michael from the stormy-weather dept.
MS IE Bug Finder writes "Although Microsoft is dismissing Mozilla Lightning, the article indicates the combination of Thunderbird (mail) with Sunbird (calendaring) should be a worthy opponent against Outlook by the middle of the new year." Reader EvilStein adds a link to the Lightning Q&A.
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Mozilla Lightning to Challenge Outlook More

Mozilla Lightning to Challenge Outlook

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  • They missed the boat (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They should've called the project SHAZAM!
  • Sorry, but this time Microsoft wins. Sunbird is not even a complete piece of software. Last time I used it, not all the menu buttons even did anything. (This was a known problem.) I imagine on a Windows system, where one app crashing can bring down the system, it is a lot more annoying.

    I hate Microsoft Windows as much as the next guy, but Outlook has them beat. If only it worked on Linux.

    • Re:It's not a worthy opponent (Score:4, Informative)

      by SillyNickName4me ( 760022 ) <dotslash@bartsplace.net> on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:28AM (#11168101) Homepage
      You said:

      > Sorry, but this time Microsoft wins. Sunbird is not even a complete piece of software. Last time I used it, not all the menu buttons even did anything.

      The article said:

      > should be a worthy opponent against Outlook by the middle of the new year."

      Now... first of all, what was the last time you tried Sunbird? yesterday? 6 months ago?

      Then, middle of the new year is kindof like 6 months from now...

      I do not know if Sunbird is a good alternative or if it ever will be, but as you can read (or can you? past experience makes this a bit doubtfull) the claim was not that it is a good alternative now, but that it is growing into one and should be there some 6 months from now, so what exactly was your point besides wanting to be dismissive without having an argument?

      • Re:It's not a worthy opponent (Score:5, Informative)

        by arivanov ( 12034 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:44AM (#11168249) Homepage
        1. The poster is right. I am following it closely and plenty of things do not work yet. Most importantly - at least as of last month there was no event organizer/owner/user capability even if reading from a server. This makes it completely useless for anything but personal calendaring. In fact if you look at the roadmap this feature is not due in 6 months so there is no way it will be there in 6 months.

        2. Even if it did not have the features it would have been useable if it did not screw every single other implementation that has. The biggest falling of Sunbird is that it wipes out all fields it does not understand when processing a calendar record. As a result you cannot use it in groupware mode as anything but a read only client (as of last month).

        In fact even korganizer is a few years ahead of Sunbird.
        • If Korganizer has all these features already, and I'm guessing Evolution does too, isn't it easy to simply port a lot of that code into Sunbird? Of course all the GUI stuff would be useless. Or is the Mozilla license not compatible with the GPL?

    • Re:It's not a worthy opponent (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      and is it really surprising considering how immature it is at the moment?
      I quote:
      "As Lightning is still early in the design and prototyping stage, there is no firm availability date yet. The developers of Lightning are currently targetting a first general-user release for the middle of 2005."
      From what I remember firefox wasn't that wonderful at a similar stage in its dev cyle but look at where it is now its reached its first release.
    • There is currently a ton of work being done on Sunbird. The backend is being rewritten to allow multiple calendar type providers, and the frontend is being cleaned up to match the new backend. Check out the calendar portion of: Mozilla Wiki [mozilla.org] for more details.

    • What's this about "worthy"? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mike Shaver ( 7985 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @12:43PM (#11168833) Homepage
      Sorry, but this time Microsoft wins. Sunbird is not even a complete piece of software. Last time I used it, not all the menu buttons even did anything. (This was a known problem.)

      Indeed, Sunbird has yet to release its 0.2 version, and has never claimed to be a complete piece of software. The developer resources applied to Sunbird and the Mozilla calendaring components in general have grown materially over the last months, during which we've seen important refactoring work to support multiple calendar protocols, rearchitecture of the UI to handle async networking, implementation of initial CalDAV support, improvements in several pieces of the UI (including, you'll be glad to hear, a rationalization of the menu system), and many other smaller fixes. Attachments, attendee management, a sqlite-based local store for improved performance; I could go on, but it's more interesting to read the checkin logs for yourself, I assure you.

      Now, as the Wiki indicates -- would that you could get to it! -- competition with Outlook is not a primary goal of Lightning at this point. To do calendaring in the year 2004 requires that you compete with Outlook in some sense, because they really own that market pretty completely, but knocking off their feature set isn't what we're after here. A lot of people have been asking for Sunbird's calendar capabilities (and more) to be integrated more tightly into the Thunderbird mail interface, and that's what Lightning is all about.

      I believe that by the summer of 2005 the Lightning project will have developed software that is useful and interesting to a large enough number of people to warrant releasing it. Do I believe that people will abandon Outlook en masse for Lightning in its first release? Seems unlikely. Do I think that there are some users of Outlook who might rather use Thunderbird+Lightning at that point? I'm pretty sure there are.

      Exchange interoperability is obviously a hot topic, and rightly so; IMO it was one of the most significant features of Evolution, and one that we're grateful Novell saw fit to release as open source after the acquisition of Ximian. The new protocol architecture we've been designing and implementing over the last few months should accomodate an exchange-protocol plugin, at least on the calendar side, though nobody has yet stepped up to write it. I have reason to believe that a serious contribution of such a plugin, no doubt based on lessons learned from the Evolution connector's source, would be very warmly received into the calendar tree, and featured prominently in Lightning.

      I wish I had a local copy of the wiki's Q&A so that I could post it here, but, alas, I do not.

      Mike
    • I hate Microsoft Windows as much as the next guy, but Outlook has them beat. If only it worked on Linux.

      This is the problem with Linux programmers. Many want to reinvent the wheel, instead of trying formulas that are already known to work (see the GIMP vs Photoshop debate on yesterday's story).

      See the example of Openoffice.org vs. MS Word. Openoffice was made to replace Microsoft Office. If there were as many Linux clones of windows software, sharing the user interface but not the internals, Linux wouldn't feel as alien as it does for common windows users.

      And don't say that copying the user interface would be violating intelectual property. See the precedent in the Apple vs. Microsoft case regarding the GUI named "Windows".

      So, why don't people do it? Why won't Linux programmers make "a better Photoshop than Photoshop", or in this case "A better Outlook than Outlook"?

      Quoting a sitepoint.com article: "Good designers copy. Great designers steal."

  • Outlook? No way. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xabi ( 620010 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:20AM (#11168019) Homepage
    Think about this:

    - Security
    - Remote image blocking
    - No IE core
    - RSS reader
    - ...

    Conclusion: Thunderbird rocks.
    • - Undiscovered security holes
      - Netscape invented Javascript and HTML e-mail, remember
      - Buggy Mozilla core instead of buggy IE core
      - Undiscovered bugs in RSS reader
      - ...

      Conclusion: Same insecurity, different pile.

    • Re:Outlook? No way. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BradleyUffner ( 103496 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:48AM (#11168301) Homepage
      Think about this:


      - Security
      - Remote image blocking
      - No IE core
      - RSS reader
      - ...

      Conclusion: Thunderbird rocks.

      -no exchange compatability
      -no calander sharing
      -no contact sharing
      -no sharepoint integration
      -no office integration
      -no PocketPC syncing

      Conclusion: My company needs outlook.

      If you use more then email then you need outlook, plain and simple. There is no single app that can replace everything that we use outlook for.

  • This one is harder to switch (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Prince Vegeta SSJ4 ( 718736 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:21AM (#11168026)
    Even though I would welcome a viable alternative to outlook, the main benefits here are with syncing (sp?) capabilities not only with individuals, but with corporate users as well.

    If it is readily compatible with sync apps for a handheld, etc, I will surely give it a try. However, it still needs the ability to sync wirelessly/over the internet/etc like exchange server can, in order to have a chance on a large scale.

  • Not unless it syncs with a PDA... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Daniel Ellard ( 799842 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:21AM (#11168028)
    The killer app for Outlook -- or, more accurately, the reason why many people install it in the first place -- is because it's the only easy way to sync with PDA's such as an iPaq and/or sync with other folks in an organization. Get PDA integration right and it'll be a hit.

    • I'd have to agree with this. I use an iPaq, and although I'd love to get away from M$ as a client, at the moment I find there is no real viable alternative that has all the equivalent synching functionality. Of course, the PDA is the only reason I use Outlook at all.

    • Re:Not unless it syncs with a PDA... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bogie ( 31020 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:34AM (#11168154) Journal
      Yes, I've been blabbering about this since Thunderbird started.
      But even then compare what say Evolution offers compared to what Thunderbird offers. See the difference? Thunderbird plus an available addon Calendar which doesn't do half of what Outlook can isn't an Outlook alternative. Its an Outlook Express Alternative that just happens to have a Calendar. Without the back-end server to allow for all of Outlook's features I just don't see the point in calling it an Outlook killer. That's just wishful thinking for people who know nothing about the business world and Outlook/Exchange installs.

      I do think that an Email client that allows you to see other peoples calendars and make changes etc would be nice. No doubt basic email and very basic scheduling would be nice to have and find a home in some small offices. But for people who are already using Outlook/Exchange I can't possibly see them dumping that for this solution.
      • If Lightning can interact with the Exchange Server like the Outlook client does, then it is, indeed, a threat to outlook.

        If you can untie businesses from Outlook, then there will be fewer reasons for them to use MS Office (which includes Outlook) instead of OpenOffice.

    • agree (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cryptor3 ( 572787 )
      Ditto. I've been using Calendar for the past year+. I just got a PocketPC and I'm hoping someone will bust through with some sync software so I don't have to switch to Outlook.

      If they get a sync feature running, I'll try it in alpha testing. Heck, I might even file bug reports. :)

    • Missing it entirely (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:44AM (#11168250)

      Not unless it syncs with a PDA

      Repeat after me. Calendaring. Calendaring. Calendaring.

      Only the execs rally care about syncing to their PDAs/Treos/whatevers, and that CAN be done server side these days. What is much more of a deal-breaker is Outlook's meeting scheduling. Everyone I know in the company here uses it. Everyone in every company I've ever worked at has used Outlook to schedule meetings and confirm people can make it.

      I have never understood what is so mind-bendingly complex about it. When I used to use a POP/IMAP client to get my mail, meeting invitations from an Outlook/Exchange user looked to be a set of key/value items, one per line, with all the data necessary for a client (such as Mozilla with the calendaring plugin) to parse it handily, ask the user if they want to add it/see their calendar/whatever, etc.

      I honestly think that open-source developers resent Outlook so much, they can't bring themselves to do what those of us trying to use open source in corporate environments have been dying for- interworking with Outlook's meeting notifications and some form of well-integrated calendaring.

      • Sometimes, Outlook invitations are sent using vCalendar (or iCalendar, I forget which) format, which is an open standard. When they are, any open source program can read them and parse them easily. Other times, they are sent using TNEF in those pesky WINMAIL.DAT files that a program will have to decode before being able to parse the invitation. There is supposedly an Outlook setting to say "Send invitations across the Internet in iCalendar format," but that doesn't seem to have an effect on invitations s

  • Also Needed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rshol ( 746340 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:21AM (#11168031)
    Thunderbird also needs more robust address handling, and the ability to sync with palm and other handhelds before it can adequately compete with Outlook.

  • MS shoud be worried (Score:5, Insightful)

    by saterdaies ( 842986 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:22AM (#11168043)
    I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly if I were Microsoft. With the code for connecting to Microsoft's exchange servers GPL'd from Novell's Evolution, that could (possibly) be integrated into Lightning and Lightning would also be free rather than part of a very expensive office suite. While Lightning isn't here yet, if it can duplicate enough of Outlook's functionality, a lot of people might switch to it to avoid the high cost and security holes. It's a much easier sell than Firefox, in my opinion, because Outlook costs money while Internet Explorer doesn't.

    Worry Microsoft! WORRY!

    • Worry Microsoft! WORRY!

      No. Don't worry Microsoft. Your monopoly is secure. All is well. Go back to sleep.

      [cue sinister laughter]

    • don't forget (Score:5, Interesting)

      by anomaly ( 15035 ) <tom DOT cooper3 AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:48AM (#11168303)
      That an important part of the licensing cost for Exchange is the Client Access License (CAL) - this means regardless of what you pay for the code that runs on your desktop, you still need to pay Microsoft a non-trivial amount of cash for the privilege.

      The fix is to provide a seamless migration to a non-exchange server with a calendar-sharing mechanism.

      Now that I think of it, when MS was looking to de-throne NetWare, they created a utility that allowed Windows users to see NetWare shares through a single login account on the NetWare box.

      This meant that customers could 'upgrade' to Windows and not need to but any more client licenses for Novell.

      I wonder if we should find a way to enable calendar browsing via some sort of mechanism that exploits only a single CAL so that uses of the free server side could see Outlook/Exhange calendars without paying CALs for all of the free server users.

      Just like the Microsoft mechanism, this needs to be seamless and transparent - to make migration to free software easy and painless.
    • No, no, no! Microsoft shouldn't worry until it's too late. Let them ignore us while we catch up!

      To Microsoft:

      (Waves hands) This is not the competitor you're looking for....

  • Outlook/Exchange Integration (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Schweg ( 730121 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:23AM (#11168055)
    There needs to be a project initiative similar to what Samba has done for SMB, namely reverse-engineering the protocol used between Outlook and Exchange. That way, full integration without additional drivers would be possible.

    Although there is the MAPI protocol for communication with Exchange, it appears that you generally need a connector on the client side for non-Outlook clients. That's convenient for the user and administrator, and a strike against third-party email clients currently.

    • The reason why a lot of people use outlook because it works with Exchange, And people stick with exchange because everyone uses outlook. The way that opensource projects seem to really take over is by making them compatible enough to work quitly in the buisness infrastructure untill one day they realize that they are using more then they thought. I rember back in the late 90s when Linux just started to become notices as a professional OS. It was an Issue where the CTO sware that they are a Windows Only S
    • Although there is the MAPI protocol for communication with Exchange, it appears that you generally need a connector on the client side for non-Outlook clients.

      Sorry, maybe I'm being dumb, but what do you mean by this? Doesn't MAPI give you full access to all of Exchange's objects and properties? What else is there?
      • Unless they are using some other method I'm unfamiliar with, third party Exchange retrieval stuff uses IMAP and requires that the Exchange server be running OWA.

        That's what Ximian's first Evolution Connector was based on. It's all IMAP based. Outlook pre-2003 (and maybe post) both use RPCs and MAPI stuff.

    • Server: Novell's OpenExchange server [novell.com]

      Client: Novell Connector [novell.com]
  • ... then perhaps numerous small, semi-autonomous departments will be able to pull it into their part of the enterprise without too much disruption.

    Is it going to be able to do that? That would be a great way of gaining a toehold. For instance my previous company (before I joined a rather prominent big-ass software company) would have really benefitted from being able to put a few desktops onto Linux with good Exchange integration - RPC connections, y'know. server-based rules and all that jazz.

    Toehold. tha

  • TNEF. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ideatrack ( 702667 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:25AM (#11168075)
    We're just in the process of migrating most of our users from Outlook to Thunderbird and I have to say, natively being able to read the MS-TNEF format (i.e. anything in Outlook Rich-Text Format) would do a lot to help here. Someone write an extension, or even better something server-side for Exim!

    And yes, I know that you can get convertors which take the winmail.dat file and sort it for you, but that's not the best solution.

  • Evolutions needs to go cross-platform (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Looks like Thunderbird is going after the same people as Novell's Evolution. Maybe this will serve as the incentive for Novel release a Windows version soon.

  • Unless there is going to be a Sunbird server... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by macz ( 797860 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:28AM (#11168103)
    In a pure Outlook versus Anything Else contest it would be possible to eventually give a richer client experience than the Microsoft product, it would take a long time, because Outlook is remarkably mature, but it would be possible.

    But the thing that makes the Microsoft offering so strong is not Outlook by itself, but the combination of Outlook and Exchange Server.

    You could cobble together an IMAP server and some other OSS pieces and approximate the Outlook/Exchange experience, but since they are not all seamlessly integrated, you would have an administrative nightmare if you ever migrated to another server, found a security hole in one of the pieces, or had to change any piece in any way.

    Make Thunderbird and Sunbird (and something that intelligently managed tasks, workflow, and sticky notes) 100% compatible with Exchange. THAT would be an Outlook killer. Though all MS would have to do is break it in the next patch.

  • Shared data stores? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bucketoftruth ( 583696 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:32AM (#11168135)
    If it doesn't allow users to share contacts then it's no competition. My customers could care less about shared calendaring. What people need is an alternative to the simple shared contact database that Exchange provides.

    There are three components to the holy grail of exchange destroyers:

    1. Shared mail store
    2. Shared calendaring
    3. Shared contacts.

    I've got 1 and 2 covered (Courier IMAP and Mozilla calendar with WebDAV backend). There is still no uniform contact database backend... and don't start talking LDAP. LDAP only allows me to read from a directory. People have to be able to add/delete/change records and share entire directories just like in Exchange. *AND* it has to be a cross-platform accessible format so that the I can write a plug-in for any interface (web, mozilla, etc). I was thinking something similar to WebDAV that I use for calendars.

    People need their personal contact database and shared db's in their organization to be accessible from anywhere, anytime. I can't believe MS is the only player in this court. Groupwise doesn't count because it's still sucks. Opengroupware and it's clones only work with outlook. The point is to get away entirely from the crushing thumb of MS.

    rant over.

    • Re:Shared data stores? (Score:4, Informative)

      by MikeBabcock ( 65886 ) <mtb-slashdot@mikebabcock.ca> on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:47AM (#11168300) Homepage Journal
      LDAP is not and has never been read-only. LDAP is fully read-write capable, its simply up to the client to support write access and the server to have correct permissions.

      Read-write support for LDAP in Mozilla would make me very happy (bookmark storage, contact storage, settings, etc.)

    • Re:Shared data stores? (Score:2, Informative)

      by jdonnis ( 115371 )
      Very interesting to see other views.
      From the experience at my job, shared contacts is not necessary for us at all. Hell half the people don't even use the existing LDAP services.

      For us integrating thunderbird and sunbird (while improving the shared calendar via ftp/webDav to be less buggy) would be THE thing.

      Being able to add outlook-meeting invites received by email into the calendar would be very nice too.

    • Re:Shared data stores? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Ageless ( 10680 )
      This is my biggest gripe. I recently switched to Thunderbird from Outlook Express and thought it would be a good time to get my contacts in order. I regularly use three computers. Work, which is a Windows XP machine and my two home machines, a Windows XP box and a Powerbook. I run Thunderbird on all three using IMAP for central mail storage. I thought I would set up a LDAP server and use that for central contact storage. Thunderbird's LDAP support looked like it would be great. Imagine my surprise when I fo
    • Having worked with Outlook in both large and small offices, I can tell you that it will take more than shared mail/contacts/calendars to bring down Outlook.

      Here is my list of features that would be needed for a true Outlook killer:

      1. Shared mail store
      2. Shared calendaring
      3. Shared contacts
      4. Shared Tasks / To Do lists
      5. Journal / History
      6. Scripting / Database intergration
      7. Third Parts Add-ons

      1 - 4 have been widely discussed and I will leave them alone.

      5 - This feature is widely used by small offices.
  • than anything else so far. Office is their bread and butter.

  • Not calendar, NOTES (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MadChicken ( 36468 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:34AM (#11168155) Homepage Journal
    I'd love to see an integration between some kind of OneNote (or WebNote [aypwip.org] [bright color warning - shield your eyes]) replacement instead of a calendar.

    Free-form notes, easily sortable and searchable would be a killer app, not another dumb calendar. Maybe a calendar tied in with THAT would make it the ultimate?

    Is there any thought (or already some kind of .xpi) of an app like that?

  • An IDEA for GNU or other OSS orgs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by beforewisdom ( 729725 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:37AM (#11168194)
    The only reason I am not using sunbird, or another OSS Personal organization tool is that yahoo doesn't support iCal ( I have written to them suggesting it:
    http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/my/cgi_feedbac k).

    Even though I like downloading my email I use yahoo because the convenience of getting to my information anywhere is compelling.

    I even pay ( gladly ) for pop access

    I would love to use the sunbird client and the other OSS PIM tools in combination with yahoo so that I could download ( and update ) my PIM stuff anywhere.

    Even more, I would love to pay GNU or some other OSS org for this rather then paying yahoo.

    If GNU or another OSS org implemented this kind of yahoo-like service ( using all OS software ) it would kill 4 birds with one Free(dom) software stone.

    1. I get the services I want

    2. GNU gets money, which it always needs

    3. GNU employs programmers to build an maintain
    GNUYahoo ( GNUwho ? ) -- a worthy thing these
    days in itself

    4. Free(dom) & OS software gets showcased and put
    into use.

    Almost Geeks have some sort of webmail account and would love to support GNU or another OSS org rather then ________, especially if they implement featurs geeks want like better spam filtering.

    If these sites were made user friendly GNU would get a bonus____ giving something to ordinary people that they would like____ which would make GNU, as well as Free(dom) software relevant to their lives.

    GNU and OSS especially needs this if they want to fight and win political battles.

    Just a thought

  • Highly unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:38AM (#11168207)
    Most slashdotters just dont get that Outlook, (not Outlook Express as most here think) goes way beyond a simple mail client. Show me how to include all the synching, scheduling and work flow features available, or easily built onto of Outlook/Exchange and you might have something. Then just need to persuade organisations to deploy this shiny new unproven technology into their core infrastructure.

    As a side rant I love firefox but thunderbird is a fairly average effort at best. I almost fell off my chair laughing at a post the other day about someone saying how cool and innovative the new sorting and grouping was, features that were available in Outlook 97 (and probably other mail clients at that period). This is another reason why Lightening, same as Chandler is not going to work. Just too far behind the curve and not focussed enough on power deployments.

    • Re:Highly unlikely (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CdBee ( 742846 )
      One thing works in our favour: Opensource isn't hamstrung by the CS ethic of a yearly release cycle.

      During 2004, Thunderbird went from 0.7.x to 1.0, releases which as well as tidying up a lot of residual glitches which were never fixed in Netscape-Mozilla due to the small user-base, added serious new functionality

      Release often, build public nightlies, involve the end user in the development/testing/reporting process and you can progress a great deal faster than in a closed testing system where you ha
  • Anyone else recognize the pattern?
    1. MS dismisses competing software.
    2. MS starts FUD:ing the software.
    3. MS starts copying the functionality of the software.
    4. MS touts new features as significant new MS "innovation! Hooray!


    It is quite easy to see how successful a specific open source software package is by looking at where Microsoft places it on the "Microsoft attention"-scale.
  • I use Thunderbird in place of Outlook, and we're an Exchange shop. But, Microsoft still wins here. Unless Lightning does MAPI, it won't supplant Outlook. And, it breaks my heart to say it.

    Outlook is tightly integrated with Exchange. If you use Exchange, you won't be switching any time soon (unless you're a sysadmin like me who cares about security... but that's not going to capture my user's attention... no, really... it won't).

    Sure, it could replace Outlook Express on home systems with POP/IMAP accounts.
  • I won't switch to a Mozilla email client until they clean up the SEARCH function a bit. (Eudora's one advantage over other clients is in this area, in my opinion.)

    I still see Mozilla email search results come back with wacky date sorting like "1/2003, 1/2004, 11/2003, 11/2004". I know it's more code, but you gotta sort dates by date...

  • PDA Integration and Importing Capability is Key (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mean_Nishka ( 543399 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:44AM (#11168267) Homepage Journal
    Once you can sync a Palm or PocketPC to this thing it'll take off big time.

    The only problem I've experienced in trying to switch completely to Thunderbird is its inability to import my large (over 1 gig) Outlook PST files. This is on a P4 2.8 rig with a gig of RAM. Perhaps someone can write up an extension to read the PST files directly.

  • The only way to challenge Outlook successfully is 1> sync directly with MS Exchange, and maybe 2> run on Windows. If Lightning is good enough, and it syncs with MSE, people might switch to Linux to use it, in combination with a Linux "MS Office killer" like an improved OpenOffice.org (especially if OO.o syncs with MSE). Though a Mozilla will likely be completely cross-platform, so only the MSE sync is necessary.

    All that IT investment (licenses, training, admin staff) has vaster momentum than any feat

  • Calendar server (Score:3, Interesting)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @11:55AM (#11168375) Homepage Journal
    The sooner the open source community develops a calendar client that is fully integrated with an open source groupware server [citadel.org], the sooner we will be able to mount a credible challenge against Outlook.

    Reduce people's dependency on Outlook and it'll become much, much easier to topple Exchange. Topple Exchange and you've got a good chance at completely removing Microsoft from the server room!

  • A workgroup standard (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Twillerror ( 536681 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @12:01PM (#11168443) Homepage Journal
    What would be really nice is if someone came out
    with open standard protocols that support all the things that exchange does.

    Email is already taken care of with IMAP4.

    We need an open protocol for Calender, Tasks, Journals, Contacts, and all that good stuff.

    Then we can have a ton of clients written that can plug into any number of email server.

    We are running Exchange 5.5, and upgrading to a newer version is incrediably hard. MS screwed up big time by requiring active directory, and all that jazz to make it work. I don't understand why Exchange can't just run stand-alone or with NT security. All about making people upgrade, probably going to byte them in the but.

  • I see Evolution as a more mature option (Score:4, Informative)

    by cvbear0 ( 231010 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @12:11PM (#11168542) Homepage Journal
    Ximian Evolution should be considered the Outlook killer.

  • Killing Outlook (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crimoid ( 27373 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @12:24PM (#11168663)
    The only effective way to kill off Outlook, or even compete with it effectively is to first kill off Exchange.

    Until there is a feature-for-feature (or at least close) drop-in replacement for Exchange people will stick with Outlook. Now I'm not talking about assembling some IMAP/LDAP/SMTP/iCal monster from different parts, rather a true, pre-packaged installer that handles most if not all of the setup and configuration.

    Once you liberate the back end server you'll have no problem with the client.

    • Re:Killing Outlook (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pe1chl ( 90186 )
      Of course some companies, e.g. SuSE, have been offering this for some time. A dedicated distribution for a corporate mailserver, even with Exchange-compatible protocol, and a setup and configuration center to manage it all.

  • Outlook 2003 rocks. Period. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Smilin ( 840286 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @01:03PM (#11169040)
    I've seen nothing that works as well as Outlook 2003 for managing incoming and outgoing data and communication. I can receive a constant stream of incoming email and deal with it on the fly. No other email client works as well. Here is why:

    All incoming emails pop up a small note in the notification area. This note contains the name, subject and a few lines of the email. It will fade and disappear after a few seconds. Before it does I can bring it up, flag it (more about that later) cause it to disappear immediately, or delete it immediately.

    All emails can be flagged with different colors with a mouse click. You know how it goes when you are "catching up" on email after lunch or in the morning? You go down through a ton of unimportant messages, see a few that need taken care of and occasionally hit that one that is so important it's worth immediately breaking away from going through your mail. With OL2003 you do your "catch up" with flags. You can blow through the whole list and flag stuff that you need to go back to, red-flag those critical items, maybe blue-flag the personal stuff you'll get to on your lunch hour. You don't have to remember to get back to something or break off from email to handle something before you forget. I've not seen anything else that has this feature and it makes a HUGE difference when you are catching up. When you get something done, you just click the flag and it turns to a check box. At the end of the day you can make a quick glance to the built in search that shows you any orange-flags (for instance) that you left unchecked.

    It also integrates with messenger. If you start to send someone an email the moment their name is completed it will check their online status. You may start typing your short email only to notice that the person is online. A quick right click and you're in IM instead of email.

    Cleaning up your inbox/outbox? There are tools built in that will let you see "All the old crap that's big or has an attachment" for instance. Sure every email client lets you setup rules or already has one built in that's similar but nothing does it as well.

    There are other features that I never think about until I'm stuck on another email client. I was typing something on Lotus Notes (the suck) and without thinking, right clicked a particular word. I was expecting a list of synonyms to come up but no such luck. The polish and attention to detail in OL2003 is unmatched. With many of the other Office 2003 apps I can get by just fine in any other product, Wordperfect, Open Office etc. OL2003 though is head and shoulders above the competition right now. It's the first time in a long time that I can actually say a piece of software has increased my productivity.

    Now since I'm paying MS, oops sorry I meant M$, a compliment here it's the law that someone needs to come bash me personally or rant about M$'s evils.... Outlook 2003 is still the shit though.
    • -----Original Message-----
      From: smilin [mailto: http://slashdot.org/~Smilin/]
      Sent: Thurday, December 24, 2004 10:29 AM
      To: slashdot@slashdot.org
      Subject: Re: Re: Outlook 2003 rocks. Period.

      "I've seen nothing that works as well
      >as Outlook 2003 for managing incoming and
      >>outgoing data and communication. I can receive >a constant stream of incoming email and >deal
      >>>with it on the fly. No other email client
      >works as well."

      Hmmm. I guess that not being a mutt user, you
      >don't notice

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