What are some good alternatives for Windows Outlook?

[Will_3]

I'm looking for a good alternative to MS Windows Outlook... (Open source would be fine)

With...
- Calendar
- Task
- Notes
- Contacts (Can use Outlook Express WAB for this function)
- Email - (Can use Outlook Express for this)
- etc

thanks for any suggestins.

Will

[ftack]

All you use Outlook Express for can be perfectly replaced by the Mozilla suite. Personally, I use the separated components Mozilla Firefox (browser) and Mozilla Thunderbird (email client) which are actually pre version 1 releases, but do their job excellently (they are in fact based on the very mature Mozilla suite). You will be delighted by the automatic spam recognition and handling of Thunderbird +, you will be more virus-proof!

Other Outlook features are currently more difficult to replace with open source on the Windows platform (on Linux, it's all there). Mozilla (and Firefox) can be extended with a Calendar, but this is still quite basic.

If you want to get started with Open Source Software on the Windows platform, then take a look at the project TheOpenCD (www.theopencd.org). You can download a CD that contains the highest quality OOS software that runs natively on Win in an easy to install form. That way, you can easily migrate to OOS software and use OpenOffice.org, the Gimp, Mozilla rather than MS Office, Photopaint, Internet explorer. The day you migrate to Linux, the only new thing will be your operating system. You'll already be used to the main applications.

[9point9]

Getting rid of Outlook Express for Thunderbird would do you a world of good. It seems like every week theres one of those "A security whole the size of Texas has been found in Outlook Express that may allow a hacker to take control of your computer which will then crash and burn and you'll be thrown out on the streets."

Do you need a POP3 mail client anyway? That in itself can be a security risk. Using webmail access tends to be more secure but may not be available with your email provider.

What ever works for you I geuss, but Thunderbird would seem like the best bet if you really must have an email client/PIM.
_________________
Arch Linux
OOo 3.2.0

OOoSVN, change control for OOo documents:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooosvn/

[mb02135]

[Michael A. Kearsley]

Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird:
http://www.mozilla.org

[mb02135]

[Graaf]

Sunbird is indeed still more than a little immature, but Mozilla seems to take the project seriously. They raised it to their main "products" page on their new website (see: Calendar project) and added some new features and unified visual theme to it. Latest build is August 17th and the project seems to be fairly active.

OpenOffice.org has it's own groupware project, GLOW. The project started about a year ago, but is not mature either. Interesting though: http://groupware.openoffice.org/ and http://groupware.openoffice.org/glow/

Then there is a project named OpenGroupware.org, which seems to be a groupware server with web-based client. It is quite fully featured (news, email, ToDo lists, projects, interoperability with Outlook etc.): http://www.opengroupware.org/

I'm fairly certain that in not-so-distant future we will have serious alternatives to Outlook as every party aspires to come up with the "leading open source groupware". Well – I'm not complaining

[Michael A. Kearsley]

There's Novell Evolution (available for Linux and Solaris but not Windows unfortunately.) as well which isn't Open Source but is freely downloadable - looks far more comprehensive than Outlook :
http://www.novell.com/products/evolution/

OGo is only available for Linux so that too won't be much use to the original poster.

Of course so far as notes go there are extensions to Firefox\thunderbird\Mozilla Application Suite that cover this - if you are using Windows XP the old Windows NT3.51 Cardfile is quite neat and will run on NT4 and XP, it's 32 Bit and supports long filenames.

Then there's Keynote which I rather like - it's Open Source and like Cardfile is far more useful than the crappy notes facility that Outlook has:
http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote.html

You can also have a folder with documents in and use that as a notes organiser and use the application of your choice for working with them in the format of your choice (just have the folder open and of course you can view the files in a number of different orders - you could put a link to the folder on the Taskbar perhaps) - Outlook's Notes facility is a bit of a con because they don't actually give you any more functionality than you would have by using seperate files as notes in this way) - Editpad, Notepad or Wordpad.

In OOo 2.0 of course in Base it will be relatively simple to create a CSV or dbf file with a nice form for entry and a text field, and of course a Spreadsheet is ideally suited for notes - first column acts as the Index entry and second column acts as the note (Just adjust the cell size to the size you want and then hide unused columns - you can then filter the entries to show only the ones you want and carry out sorting of rows, each row then being a single record).

In fact using the Navigator in OOo documents in Writer, Calc or Impress could be used for storing and managing notes in much the same way as Word, Excel or Powerpoint can be used in outline view to store notes - the Headings act as the index entries and the text under the heading is the note.

Incidentally I notice that in the OOo 2.0 timetable - it lists that a plugin to load OpenOffice.org documents in Mozilla has been added, presumably giving the same integration that MS Word can have with MS Outlook\Outlook Express (I haven't seen 1.9.m52 and it doesn't say anything else about it there).

[vipul]

You can try using Ximian Evolution.
I did used it on a Linux box and it can even connect to the MS E2K Server.


Rgds
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[oddman]

I use Sunbird for all of my scheduling needs and it works very well. While it is not yet compatible with Outlook or Palm it does use the iCal format that Apple uses. If I'm not mistaken iCal should be popular enough that any good program should be able to export to it, thus allowing you to import to sunbird.

If you decide to get Sunbird, search the forums for an helper application named "suntray." Suntray allows Sunbird to minimize to the systray. It makes Sunbird so much easier to use it's amazing.

[multifacet]

Chandler http://www.osafoundation.org is another interesting project which has great potential but is still very much in the embryonic stage.

[Queensparker]

Thunderbird & Firebird are great as e nail client & browser.

A good personal organiser is Palm's Desktop. It is a free download from handspring.
It does all of the basic stuff well, diary, to do's address book etc. And you don't need to use it with a Palm.