Mitch Kapor's Outlook-Killer

Kent Brewster writes "In the San Jose Mercury this morning: 'For more than a year, [Mitch] Kapor and his small team have been working on what they're calling an open-source "Interpersonal Information Manager." The software is being designed to securely handle personal e-mail, calendars, contacts and other such data in new ways, and to make it simple to collaborate and share information with others without having to run powerful, expensive server computers.'" Kapor explains his intent in his own words.

sorry

[Karamchand]

But as long as I do not see at least some screenshots it is just vaporware for me.
Perhaps this is a bit exaggerated but I've simply experienced too many disappointments with software which does not exist yet.

Anyway, still I wish good luck to this project! :-)

Re:I've been looking....

[colin_n]

It would be possible to make mozilla act as described, wouldnt it?
The mail functionality is there and the calendar is getting there, although it is very basic right now.

good idea

[solendril]

Good thing. I despise outlook. I work at a tech support department at a medium sized college, and we officially support netscape (not much of a better choice) but outlook attracts email worms like a neon light attracts bugs. After the hundreth box that I had to zero or get our net engineer to block I'd love to see something more secure. I'm using Eudora right now.

Also, I'd love to see popular email programs support background encryption, something that happened behind the scenes without the users notice, so even the most inept id10t could handle it. It's ridiculous that 90% of the world is sending it's email around in cleartext. Are we just begging the FBI or the NSA to read our minds?

Why not start with Mozilla's framework?

[pcx]

Mozilla is already open source why do these guys need to re-invent the wheel when they could take the mail and news client already exists and expand on it to make it infinately more useable?

I mean isn't that the whole point of open source, not having to re-invent everything but to expand and improve on what's already out there?

Maybe I'm missing something.

Re:good idea

[Anonvmous Coward]

Don't confuse Outlook Express for Outlook 2000. OE is the worm attractor. OL2K, though somewhat vulnerable, is nowhere near as problematic as OE. It's kind of surprising considering how much more OL2K does.

OL2K is more than an email prog, it's got a lot of cool things going for it. You've got the calendar, the todo list, the sticky notes, and contact list. This may not seem all that interesting until you synch up with an device such as a PDA.

I have an Ericsson T-68. It has an IR port (and bluetooth) and synchs up with my laptop. My laptop is running OL2K and has my contact list on it complete with phone numbers and email addresses. If I update a contact with a new phone # in Outlook, then it appears on my cell phone. In other words, if I buy a new cell phone, I don't lose all my phone #'s. Pretty cool considering I didn't have to buy a $120 cable to link the two.

The todo list has been a surprisingly useful feature on my phone as well. I do not carry my PocketPC around. My laptop's not on all the time. So what happens when I need a reminder? Well, I enter something to do in Outlook, the phone grabs it and will alert me. This may not be interesting to all of you, but it is to me. Nearly forgot my gf's birthday is on Tuesday and I need to go buy her present today!

Anyway, this isn't a 'Run out and get Outlook!' post, it's a "here's why people use it" post so that it's clearer why something like what is mentioned in this article is so interesting. MS basically has no competition in this area because nobody else seems to understand the value of it. The only app I can think of that could have given OL2K a run for it's money is the Palm Pilot desktop. It had similar features, though I don't remember it having mail. (note: I'm not saying it wasn't a mail client, I'm saying I don't remember it having one.)

Until OL2K has competition, it is really hard to replace Office. Until Office is replaced, Windows cannot be replaced. (in a bidness setting...) As a matter of fact, that's why I'm not using Star Office right now. I'm too dependent on OL2K's org features. Might as well install the rest of Office while I'm there.

Sorry to be negative, but...

[barracg8]

• it's going to

• Users ... will have to wait ... to get a version they can fully use

• a small team ... has just begun writing the production code

Am I missing something, or is this story a little premature?
Why not wait until, say, a single line of code has been written before proclaiming it an Outlook killer?

I wish these guys all the best, and hope they succeed - this just feels more like anti-M$ fud than any real news yet.

I -want- a server

[mccalli]

It's the server-side of calendaring that's missing from Linux, not the client.

I want to store my calendars, to-do lists, contacts and mail messages on a central server. I want a variety of clienjs, from fat clients to web-based, on a variety of platforms to be able to connect to it.

There's no shortage of client-side software on Linux to handle this. It's the server-side centralisation that's missing.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Evolution....

[CvD]

+1 Insightful... why reinvent the wheel when there's Ximian Evolution [ximian.com], which already has a whole load of these features and an actual working product. I know it happens all the time in the open source world, but that doesn't take away my right to bitch about it. :-)

more outlook features

[Jafa]

If they're not careful, they very well could mimic outlook even moreso. Under Feature Summary:

-user-scripting capabilities

This might not end well...

I guess they can't screw things up worse than Outlook though.

Outlook sucks, Act rocks...

[aquarian]

I never liked Outlook. It assumes you're a Dilbert working for a big corporation, on a big network, doing everything by email, and going to dumb meetings. Sure, there's the half-assed Journal feature that lets you keep track of other correspondence, but it's not integrate, in any useful way. Mostly it's a hook to get you to buy the rest of Office.

Act, on the other hand, keeps track of all correspondence, whether it be email, written, fax, or phone. It assumes you're a single, self contained user, but it has network and sharing capabilities too. It has a built-in word processor that's totally competent and easy to use. It has all kinds of other contact management features, tailored to how people actually work- no need to reinvent the wheel and create your own customized application every time. For small and medium sized businesses, it's the best thing going. In fact, for administrative work, the combination of Act and Quickbooks Pro is all most businesses really need. So if you want a model for a PIM, look at Act, not Outlook.

I'd love to see this stuff in free, open source versions, but I doubt it will ever happen. Why? Because programmers are completely ignorant of what most people do in their offices all day. And software marketers are only interested in bullet points.

Re:Outlook sucks, Act rocks...

[Katravax]

I'd love to see this stuff in free, open source versions, but I doubt it will ever happen. Why? Because programmers are completely ignorant of what most people do in their offices all day. And software marketers are only interested in bullet points.

Well Act didn't just program itself, did it?

simplicity and focus

[11slashdot]

so many projects reinventing the same wheel

in this case, i-ve already got pine and ldap

simple tools that work well and don-t need to be reinvented to be "feature-rich"

and, anyway, why is something so good becuase its done "without a server"?

were all servents, or should be, and whats the harm in extra computing power and bandwidth when its all so cheap

lets drop our interest in these highprofile highfalutin projects and go where the action should be, openbios, open spectrum, and opencores

[OT] Re:good idea

[benedict]

It's not necessarily sensible to encrypt non-
sensitive material. There's a performance cost,
a risk of future unreadability, there's the key-
distribution problem, and of course the difficulty
of making everyone's implementation compatible.

There are good reasons to encrypt everything, too,
I'm just saying it's not black and white.

Re:Mitch Kapor's Outlook-Killer?

[Sivar]

No. It said, "Outlook KILLER," not "Outlook Express clone." :)

Cross platform UIs

[maunleon]

Now I'm not familiar with wxWindows/wxPython, but the problem I see is that by writing using a cross-platform library, you can't take advantage of OS-specific features. You are stuck with the generic widgets that appear to work the same way accross platforms. For example, on windows, you cannot take advantage of COM functionality unless you isolate the code and make it windows-only. Yes python supports COM, but that code will crap out on linux...

Example: one of the worst interfaces I've seen is Ethereal. Excellent program, very useful, but the interface bites.

Serverless browsing ..

[Macka]

> remote peer-to-peer browsing of others' data

And when that data is sitting on someones laptop? What then?

Macka

Frontpage news

[MadFarmAnimalz]

OK, now I know that I don't have to write a single line of code to get my project spalshed across the front page. Good. Now, what was it I was going to write...

(head scratching)

Oh yea. I remember. Hey, Taco, I'm going to invent a perpetual motion machine the day after tomorrow. For real. Not vaporware. Honest! I demand my story submitted. :-)

Re:good idea

[florin]

Don't confuse Outlook Express for Outlook 2000. OE is the worm attractor. OL2K, though somewhat vulnerable, is nowhere near as problematic as OE. It's kind of surprising considering how much more OL2K does.

Sorry, but this is just not right. Outlook (9x or 200x) is at least as vulnerable as Outlook Express, and probably more so. More often than not the MIME header, buffer overflow or Windows scripting host exploits that affect OE work just as well in Outlook too. And then it's also susceptible to malicious VBA code.

That said, Outlook isn't all bad. For one thing, few people actually have to pay for it, because MS likes to throw it at you as a package deal every chance they get (like say when you buy Microsoft's word processor & spreadsheet, or client licenses for your MS mail server, or a Pocket PC). It's also pretty easy to use - witness the abundance of Windows software that rips off its interface these days, like Evolution does as well.

One annoying thing is that it used to be possible to share information among Outlooks in smaller workgroups without having to go all the way to an Exchange server, using a concept called Net Folders. It was a bit quirky but inexpensive, unlike Exchange. And unlike Bynari InsightServer, which is currently the only way to sort of emulate an Exchange Server on a Linux platform.

More than a new (type of) client, what I'd really love to see is a free open source Exchange Server type program that would be usable with both Outlook and Evolution. Make Exchange unnecessary and let everyone use the client they're used to/like/got for free from MS.

Re:Evolution....

[Qrlx]

ALL platforms?

There's no mention that it will run on PDAs. In fact it sounds like it's not intended to. I think it should. If it's a really lightweight app, it should run on a PocketPC.

(Yeah, Microsoft, dont' feed the trolls, blah blah blah. Stay with me folks.)

The very last line of The Article says "In the era of the WEB, are PC applications obsolete?" I think, for an "outlook killer" the answer has to be yes. Not having a handheld version of a LIGHTWEIGHT, MULTI-PLATFORM PIM seems to completely miss the point of that whole "market space." Leveraging that portability onto the PDA-space would enhance this product's Outlook-killability.

You can get PDAs with 400 MHz processors and 64MB RAM nowadays, with WiFi those things are capable of playing in realtime. Why ignore that?

are we seeing the birth of the P2P PIM?

[mattbland]

If the software is going to work without a server I expect it's going to need to share information between clients somehow, so my best guess is that it's going to use P2P technology to do this in conjunction with the Jabber stuff for messaging. But without a central server for replication this is going to mean that data will get out of sync if it has to be cached on other users machines, or otherwise a user will need to keep their machine on all the time they want to share their information such as calendars, etc.

Inter-operaterability with other systems would most likely be ignored whilst prefering to encourage transistion and migration from one system to another. That way they'll be able to get you to move your data over and use it right away, but not talk with the Exchange server requiring an Evolution like connector (which is not open or free).

I wish them luck. I can remember sitting in a bar discussing the pros and cons of coming up with a competing product to Exchange and Outlook around about a week before the first time I saw Evolution mentioned, which was on Slashdot.

I hope that they can pursuade the Mozilla people to allow people to use it if it's that much better.

Re:sorry

[SensitiveMale]

But as long as I do not see at least some screenshots it is just vaporware for me.

Yup, cause screenshots definately mean a shipping product. No one has ever created a product out of Photoshop to generate revenue, grab mindshare, and create buzz.

No server?

[styxlord]

A bit optimistic. Better hope that the organizer of events never loses a hard drive or leaves their notebook at home. All the technology and specs already exist to make an Outlook/Exchange killer. vCard, iCal, iTIP are all good protocols for PDI and can be used via e-mail and HTTP (defined in iMIP). The best part (and Apple realized this by picking vCard and iCal for their OSX PIM software) is that Outlook already supports auto importing of vCard and iCal data (no if they would auto-export it then life would be great).

Re:good idea

[Anonvmous Coward]

"I'm sorry, but this seems like a Microsoft sales person's post."

err okay. I'm going to politely share something with yout: It is a pet peeve of mine to be accused of being an MS salesperson just because I see the positive sides of one of their products. I use OL2k at work because I choose to. I wish I was an MS salesman because then it'd be worth arguing with people about it. But I'm not. If you want any definitive proof of that, look at this part of my post:

Until OL2K has competition, it is really hard to replace Office. Until Office is replaced, Windows cannot be replaced. (in a bidness setting...) As a matter of fact, that's why I'm not using Star Office right now. I'm too dependent on OL2K's org features. Might as well install the rest of Office while I'm there.

Do you really think that an MS salesperson or evangelist would point out exactly what is needed to produce a competing product to OL2K?

As for the rest of your post, the arguments you make are that the features are 'not new'. I never claimed that MS invented/created/envisioned/or even innovated. What they did do was put it all together in one useful product.

"So, this is a "run out and get outlook" post that is written as if none of us heard of these things before Outlook."

I find that comment amusing. Most people here are either Linux users or stay as far away from anything made by MS as possible. At the same time, I do see comments along the lines of "Replace Outlook with some other mail client", which says to me "Maybe they don't understand what it is that makes OL2k useful." To put it another way: how could you see a good chunk of the /. community being aware of some of O2k's non-mail features?

In any case, no, I am not an MS salesman or even an evangelist. The point of my post was to explain why the article isn't talking about the development of 'yet another mail client', but rather an app that covers personal organization. I was trying to clarify what this program has to go up against.

Potentially dangerous features

[dstone]

Among the features [osafoundation.org] the email client will have are "in-line viewing of attachments" and "user-scripting capabilities". (!)
In order to displace Outlook, I suppose people will demand these features. But let's hope the OSA Foundation does a better job on securing these features than MS!

worse still Re:Serverless browsing ..

[einhverfr]

Try this on a network of any size. 2 computers means 2 computers (1 for each), three means 4, 4 means 12, and so on-- the number of possible connections gets out of hand rapidly. If you have 100 peers, you have 9900 possible connections on your networks, with 99 computers that might need to be searched at a given time!

This is why we have servers (LDAP, email, etc.) but they don't have to be expensive... P2P doesn't scape THAT well for the corporate workstation, and instead, people tend to rely on networks of servers and networks of workstations instead.

So although this might be nice for the small office, I have serious questions about its scalability.

Re:almost

[Anonymous Coward]

what we need isn't a mail client that "LOOKS" like outlook but one that functions like outlook. Something for *nix desktop/workstation that can interact and use exchange server. That would be something else... not another look a like.

Re:I've been looking....

[cscx]

It would be possible to make mozilla act as described, wouldnt it?

No. Not even close. Not trolling here, just talking reality, my friend.

Think Ximian Evolution -- but that's such a verbatim copycat of Outlook that I'm very surprised that they haven't been sued yet.

Re:[OT] Re:good idea

[dbrutus]

As a rule of thumb anything that I wouldn't be comfortable shipping out snail mail using a postcard should really be encrypted in an e-mail context. That SOP makes the vast majority of mail encrypted.

Btw: what kind of processor are you running that it doesn't have enough cycles to burn to encrypt/decrypt mail?

Don't re-invent the Wheel

[Stoptional]

If I hear that sure-fire, badge of stupidity, quoted one more time I may just roll over, die AND throw up on my shoes. Not in that order of course.

Wheels get re-invented ALL the time. It's called PROGRESS. What? You didn't realize that progress was cumulative? That everyone stands "on the shoulders of giants"? Every post, it seems, that says ANYTHING, someone drags it out "What's the point? We've done that with x?"

Bozo. You folks are supposed to be thinkers. So think.

No Wheel, no rubber tyre - no rubber tyre, no tractor - no tracter, no avocado farm - no avocado farm, no Guacamole for the masses!

And then where would we be? Mmmmm?

Okay, so I'm a _little_ off topic but at least I have my chips and dip.

Agenda was the sweetest PIM in history...

[mtec]

I've still got the dos installation disks. I could never bear to throw them out. (Even today when I'm on a Mac!)

That thing, in the the day of DOS was the most advanced information manager I've ever used. It would mine information out of the context of your notes and relentlessly track details like a bad luck bookie. Nothing I've used since has come close to the pure elegance of Agenda.
Oh, to have it back! And on a Mac!

Anyone got a small paper bag for me to breathe into?

Definition of outlook killer

[SuperKendall]

Reads and updates my calendar from the outlook server.

That is the only requirement. Anything that does not do this is be defininition not an outlook killer, in that I will still be forced to use outlook at work. Something I can just drop in frees a whole box from runnign Windows.

I have thought of using Evolution with the connector, but haven't taken a look at it yet.

Re:Evolution....

[H310iSe]

I think the point was that it would run without exchange - that's the killer part of most small-business email systems, the expense (outright and TCO) of exchange. And try to find commercially hosted exchange servers to use. Don't exist.

I'm all for anything that does an end-run around exchange.

Re:Peer-to-peer can scale..

[H310iSe]

yea but you don't usually store really, really imporant data on someone else's node on a peer-to-peer network either. How do you get data integrity (I presume you don't HAVE to leave the desktop on all the time? If you did, you'd just trade 1 big server for 100 (or howevermany) little ones, more of a pain to admin. I thought someone else brought up a distributed peer-to-peer DB on slashdot a while ago...

Re:almost

[wheany]

What "we" need isn't a client that functions like Outlook. "We" need something that feels like Outlook, but functions properly. Well, actually, "we" need a client that feels like Outlook Express, but functions properly.