Improved Thunderbird Still Fails Enterprise Test (eWeek) [LWN.net]

Improved Thunderbird Still Fails Enterprise Test (eWeek)

Posted Oct 14, 2005 16:54 UTC (Fri) by tjc (subscriber, #137)
In reply to: Improved Thunderbird Still Fails Enterprise Test (eWeek) by alextingle
Parent article: Improved Thunderbird Still Fails Enterprise Test (eWeek)

Such arrogance!

My humble opinion.

Outlook's collaborative scheduling system is really very good.

I'm not saying that it's either good or bad. But it's munged together with an email client, which is probably not the optimal solution.

Unless someone has used an email client that hasn't been burdened with additional, unrelated features, they probably don't see the benefit. Mozilla saw fit to release a web browser that wasn't burdened with an email client, and quite a few people found it to be a better alternative than using the Mozilla suite. If Mozilla had not released Firefox, I doubt that many people would be asking for it.

I'm not aware of any free software that can match its functionality or ease of use. (And believe me I've looked, and if I found anything, I'd be using it.)

Again, I'm not comparing Outlook to any existing free/open source calander/email client, but rather (trying to) make the point that a stand-alone calandering system is probably better than having everything munged together into the same binary wad.

The open source community needs to acknowledge what's good about the opposition, if they hope to prevail in the end.

I do not think that it has been convincingly demonstrated that combining everything together into a single program is a Good Thing.

Just because you want to believe that everything Microsoft makes is rubbish doesn't make it so.

I did not state, nor imply, that I believe that everything Microsoft makes is rubbish. You must have (incorrectly) made this inference.

Sorry about the lateness of my reply; I've been off doing non-computer things for a few days.

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Improved Thunderbird Still Fails Enterprise Test (eWeek)

Posted Oct 15, 2005 17:59 UTC (Sat) by phudson (guest, #33105) [Link]

"I'm not saying that it's either good or bad. But it's munged together with an email client, which is probably not the optimal solution."

No, I think it is. Or at least you need *very* tight integration. That's the way business works; discussions turn into appointments and meetings, which require arranging through communication with the participants, and meetings cause discussions, need re-arranging etc.

Now, you could implement an entirely separate communication system than email to do that, but I need another place to monitor for messages like I need a hole in the head.

Or you could have the meeting-related messages arrive in email, but the email client treat them as email and the user has to do the right thing.

Or you can recognise that calendering related messages are a major fraction of the email handled by enterprise users, and have the email client do something intelligent with them.

In other words, delivering tools that support what your users need to do trumps technical elegance any time.