Mitch Kapor's Outlook-Killer 371
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.
I've been looking.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Cool apps (Score:5, Interesting)
From the feature list, this takes care of 80% of the needs that keep business people using windows just to have Outlook calender functions. Agenda was replaced by Symphony and Symphony wasn't the simple freeform database/calendar app that Agenda had been.
Agenda was allowing complex datamining from freeform databases before the term 'datamining' existed. If this is going to be an extension of Agenda, then much coolness is ahead and many people will be interested in trying Linux just to run the new Agenda.
No server? That's not so clever... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not that I am saying Exchange server is the best solution. Perhaps Oracle (which can be used to replace exchange servers) or some other database that costs less (or no) money would do the job.
It's not Outlook you have to replace with an open source product that small and medium businesses can use, it's Exchange server!!
Re:Evolution.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Being an evolution user (and former Outlooker) myself, I was curious to see what he plans on doing. But from what I see on his features page [osafoundation.org] I only noticed a couple features that interested me. (Naturally YMMV)
Mail:
- auto-archiving of old mail
Information Sharing & Exchange- integrated Instant Messaging and presence management (Jabber)
- remote peer-to-peer browsing of others' data
- flexible security model to control access
- file and document sharing
- remote queries, e.g., look up address in another person's contact list
- automatic updating of information from remote sources: receive new contacts, changes to existing contacts automatically (publish-subscribe)
AccessEvolution seems to have all the other features already in place (although some may only be accessible via the Exchange connector). I'm sure they would be able to add the others without too much difficulty.
Apologies for the total cut & paste job.
Interesting Concept, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, it could be innocent incompatibility, but I somehow doubt it, given MS's track record.
It's a sure way to stop people from using competitive products, if most email they receive hangs their mail client.
Outlook-killer? Cool! (Score:2, Interesting)
This might not be as easy as they invision though, can could take many more years. On the other hand, this guy did develop Agenda, so he must have a pretty good idea of its size and importance.
Along wiht OpenOffice.org and Mozilla this could be the last big thing needed to make linux a serious desktop system. On the other hand, it will help WIndows and Mac, so this could make migration much easier.
First migrate from IE to Moz, then drop Outlook, then drop MS office. Now you can run your basic software on Windows, Linux, or Mac, and you have that choice. I REALLY hope this isn't Vaporware.
I wish I had the willpower to give up CounterStrike to code for this.
Re:good idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I -want- a server (Score:3, Interesting)
Ummmm (Score:5, Interesting)
So far the only info on the site are a rundown of the technologies they've "evaluated". However, they talk about using Jabber as a P2P transport - but Jabber is server based. I've not seen any demos of a p2p version of jabber either. Have they actually thought this through?
Vapor but still a good idea (Score:4, Interesting)
I may be in the minority, but I hate the Mozilla mail client. It just doesn't work for me.
I refuse to use Evolution
In fact, right now I use Palm Desktop for my PIM (even though my PDA has been without batteries for 9+ months due to inactivity) and Eudora for my email. I would love the -functionality- of Outlook including reliable synchronization with integration with a good email client.
If I had that, I would switch to Linux as my primary work machine (currently I experiment with several distributions and my off-hours machine is Linux, but my work desktop still runs Windows).
My point is, why should they contribute to projects they don't like? It's their time and it sounds like they have adopted project directions that many of us have been wanting for a long time
Re:Evolution.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Even though, I'm all for a free (as in speech) alternative. I especially like the server-free solution they're laying out, although I'm curios about how that will be implemented. I really hope someone will take the initiative to hack some syncing with palm-devices into this thing as well. I Outlook-syncronisation is one of the main features that still attracts users to Outlook..
Re:Cool apps (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking as a fully qualified geek, Agenda is an amazing piece of software and the team was thinking totally out of the box. It's not useful to think of it in Outlook terms; it's another beast entirely.
Poke around with google and you can find out much more about Agenda. Two references to chase down: 1) Agenda: A Personal Information Manager, CACM, Jul 1990, Vol 33, No. 7 (Kaplan, Kapor, others),
2) There's also a patent (5,115,504)on some of its core ideas, so that should be some good slashdot flamebait. The patent describes Agenda's internal data structures and algorithms. I have no idea how this patent influences the Kapor's current work. Presumably IBM owns the IP from its Lotus purchase.
Agenda was a complete failure in the market. It wasn't like any word processor or spreadsheet or database program, and the market gave it a collective, "huh?" No doubt Kapor knows all this and wants to take Agenda's intelligent inferencing database and make it useful in an email/calendar/browser/P2P setting.
It's a good thing.
Python (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty neat. I've been meaning to swap some books in Safari and check out the Learning Python... I guess I finally have some reason.
This whole project sounds great - but why is there no code available? Supposedly a small group of core developers have been holed up for a year designing this thing... so where's the code already? Man, I can announce an Outlook Killer and throw some html up on the web too. But then again, I'm not Mitch Kapor...
-Russ
Re:good idea (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm the guy who owns the mailserver and I have to support 20 or so people with Outlook related problems. I may be crazy, but it's well documented that I have an abundance of time to spend on Slashdot.
So there are a few possibilities here:
-I'm more competant than the guy you have maintaining the mail system.
-You're spreading FUD.
- You're uninformed about what the problem really is.
- You're using OL2k in an unsual or custom way.
- You're supporting a great deal more people than I am.
Now, listen carefully: I am not claiming that OL2k doesn't have defects. If it doesn't support SSL well, then I cannot defend that. We aren't using that here. We're not using an Exchange erver. (I've heard that's a fair source of a number of problems.)
I can tell you that the rules do work fine, but they have a few drawbacks:
1.) They ignore HTML. So if somebody sends you a mail that says 'Hamdingers' but it's bracketed with HTML tags, it won't get picked up of a rule says "delete all messages that say 'Hamdingers'.
2.) The rules wizard only sort of works in IMAP. Since the body of the message isn't downloaded through IMAP until you open it, the Rules Wizard cannot respond to any message that has a rule that applies to that section of the message.
3.) Attachments disappearing sounds more like a server problem than an Outlook problem. Lots of attachements flie around here all the time and we haven't had a case of disappearing attachments.
So take your pick. At the very least, I hope my notes on the Rules Wizard is useful to somebody. MS does a terrible job of telling you what the Wizard's limitations are.
To be fair, though: I've tried a number of rules on various clients and OL2k by far has the most sophisticated and useful. One of these days I'm going to learn VBA so I can write even fancier rules.
Note to mail developers: Anything you can do to enable scripting or programming on an email client will be a big win, expecially when fighting SPAM.
Re:good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Outlook is actually a decent program with far fewer vulnerabilities than Outlook Express. Also, since a corporate deployment of Outlook is in a controlled environment, server-side antivirus solutions are possible and make a whole lot of sense. Properly set up, Outlook can be a good solution to an office communication problem.
(Of course, I still hate Exchange, but the users don't seem to mind...)
Q. Protocol? (Score:4, Interesting)
ECCO (Score:1, Interesting)
But I want a server-based solution (Score:2, Interesting)
Go look at ecco first. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Evolution.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Without a server, clients need to simply discover each other. Rendezvous will allow then to do this, clean and without user intervention (i.e. no typing in someone's computer name or IP). The protocol of transer will be TCP/IP, however I believe you're refering to the structure of the datagram, i.e. what goes into each packet that is sent, which is entirely up to the designers.
I don't think Rendezvous is overrated at all. I think it's the way things should have been done 10 years ago, and it's almost sad that it wasn't.
Peer-to-peer can scale.. (Score:2, Interesting)
If you can have hosts that don't go up and down all the time, and you don't care about anonymity (which you really shouldn't if you're looking up addresses in other people's contact lists) then peer to peer can scale in a way which is competitive with client-server. Plus, nobody needs to invest in a massive server (or server farm).
The guy I heard talk about this has a paper up [byu.edu] (sorry, it's postscript).
Re:I've been looking.... (Score:3, Interesting)
But then again, Evolution is meant to be an alternative to Outlook, with the least user training required to transition.
But like I said, I'm surprised that they haven't been sued yet. Maybe cause it's freeware.
Re:Evolution.... (Score:3, Interesting)
NetBIOS is pretty much limited to Windows, and it's kludgy on other OSes. Plus it's proprietary and somewhat unreliable.
Re:worse still Re:Serverless browsing .. (Score:3, Interesting)
And while your comment is correct for a Simple basic P2P network it's not true for an Advanced P2P network.
With an advanced P2P network you have advanced topologies, pre-emptive retival, caching, Super Nodes, Node Proxies, etc.
The problem is that advanced P2P products are still under development (same with clustering which is similar to P2P on a lower level - single box vs lots of little boxes) whereas client server and thin client products have been out for a long time and lots of people understand them.
The problem with P2P is that it is more complicated.
Taking you example but using the minimum number of connections instead of the maximum number as you did. In this instance it looks either like a single line OR a star or multiple stars connected together(this is still a P2P network although far from optimal).
2 Computers = 1 conection.
3 Computers = 2 connections.
100 Computers = 99 connections.
Now email is P2P already and was always designed to be P2P as it the Internet. Now if your talking about scaling can you imagine the specs you'd need for a single server or a single cluster of servers!
I don't suffer from instanity!
I enjoy every moment of it!
Re: Evolution.... (Score:2, Interesting)
So I have a look on every new OSS that tries to be an Outlook replacement in the hope to find something which can handle M$ NetFolders.
And no, the usual DIY isn't an alternative this time, because a) I don't want to reinvent the wheel (see above
P.S.: If I'm wrong with Evolution not being able to handle NetFolders, I would be glad, if someone could drop me a note, since which version it's available and how to configure them.
Announcement Engineering (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, goody! A list of features! Can that list remind me about my wife's birthday? Well, no. It can't do anything. It's not software. It's just hot air.
Do I smell JOS [jos.org] here? (I know that site vanished two or three years ago; that's the point).
Where's the product? I see an announcement, and I see a public discussion about what people might like to do, if by some quirk of fate they were to shut up and start writing code. I see an elaborate "Mission Statement [osafoundation.org]" located on a slick-looking web site. But I don't see any code. I don't see any output at all.
A lot of people are going to jump into this and start arguing endlessly about features, programming patterns, methodology, licenses, and all manner of irrelevant crapola. No functional product will ever emerge, because they're doing it backwards. This is a truism, but people never seem to remember it: If you start with code, you may end up with something. If you start with a flashy web site, a vague 400-word mission statement (any "mission statement" longer than ten words is a death sentence), and a public call for sidewalk superintendents to gum things up, you'll never end up with anything. The latter approach is best described as Announcement Engineering. It's been tried, and it has failed, and it has been tried again, and it has failed again.
Why does it fail? Because if you start a discussion, you'll get people who specialize in discussing things. If you start a slick web site, you'll get people who like slick web sites. Both of those groups are self-selected for parasitism and uselessness. If, on the other hand, you start writing code, you'll get people who like to write code. If writing code is your goal, people who write code are the people you want. Not sidewalk superintendents. Not methodology-obsessed BS artists. Not visionaries, not self-appointed "philosophers", not "online community" addicts, not Open Source rock stars, spokesmodels, public figures, beloved elder statesmen, or opinionated teenagers -- all of which are going to descend on Kapor like a horde of locusts. For programming, you want programmers. But all the programmers are somewhere else, working on projects that actually exist.
Devil's Advocate Dept.: What about the GNU Manifesto? It does superficially resemble Announcement Engineering, but one crucial ingredient of AE is missing: Stallman never asked for anybody's goddamn opinion, and to this day he still hasn't. He doesn't want to discuss anything with anybody. When Stallman wants to know what you think, Stallman will tell you what you think. He never asked anybody for an opinion in that announcement; he just asked for code.