Re: OT -- An extremely dumb curiosity question?

[Tim X]

Galen Boyer <galen_boyer@yahoo.com> writes:

>> 
>> What prevents you from using Emacs for email, even though your
>> correspondents use Outlook?  In other words, what's so special with
>> Outlook that Emacs cannot cope with?
>
> Not whom you responded to, but for me, to configure Outlook I needed to
> know the server and security configurations as well as if it supported
> pop or IMAP and all of those questions were things that got the email
> admins suspicious of my activities and brought questions from my bosses
> and so I would shy away from it.  They did not want to hear that I was
> using a different client than everybody else.
>
> The other reason is that the most important thing about Outlook is the
> calendar and I had no idea how to get Gnus to deal with that.

The calendar and MS exchange are probably the strongest reasons people are
required to use outlook in a work situation. We have tried to avoid this for
some time, but have recently been instructed by management to trial MS exchange
because none of the other calendar systems seem to work as well or provide as
good an interface as the MS Exchange and Outlook combination. 

If the company is not using MS Exchange as the mail server, Outlook is a fairly
dumb client with calendar support not much different in fucntionality to emacs
calendar/appt modes. While outlook can work with other calendaring systems,
such as meeting maker, the quality is poor and reliability seems shabby with
frequent problems and unreliable syncing with outlook and PDAs/Phones etc.
Outlooks calendering support is notoriously unreliable if you don't also have
MS Exchange running - at least it use to be 4 years ago. 

It would seem that this is an area MS has done very well. Few of the currently
available alternatives seem as reliable and feature rich, unless you want to
pay a hell of a lot.

Tim

P.S. There is an open source calendering system - I think it is based on mono.
Can't remember the name, but last I looked, it seemed interesting (depending on
your view of mono, novell and all that political stuff!)


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au