Re: [Evolution] Advice

["David Fallon" <davef getacard com>]

> I'm not encouraging the Evolution team to build a newsreader either.....
> but they should be at least work well together and the Evolution team
> should understand why or why not they would want to do it. Outlook & OE
> don't work together at all. For example, you can't drag a message from
> an OE newsgroup into Outlook's folders. And the fact that Outlook & OE
> have a slightly different UI for doing very similar things doesn't make
> it easy on the user. For example, in OE you can view news in a threaded
> view, but not in Outlook (another big request from users for Outlook).
> If Evolution and Pan or any good newsreader could be integrated into the
> same UI, it'd be a surprisingly big plus for Evolution, i think.

I think the hope here is with the component system work going on (bonobo),
adding Pan as a component to evolution will be fairly trivial. :) I hope...

> Another thing that I mentioned to another person who replied was the
> Outlook store. Very quickly, the Outlook database ("store" as I call it)
> is very, very, very poor. it's slow, gets slower as it grows, is not
> multi-user and is very unstable. MS has tried and tried to get rid of it

Yeah, it's impressively horrible. However, what do you mean by "not
multi-user"?

> and replace it with a better store, from a SQL db to a mini version of
> the Exchange Server store. Both failed, so Outlook will be stuck with
> this terrible store for the foreseeable future. And customers know and
> understand why Outlook's store suck so bad. If Evolution had a fast,
> reliable, 3rd-party-accessible and a non-proprietary store, a surprising
> number of corporations would be very interested.

Can any of the evolution hackers address this? Obviously, as GPL'd software,
it's automatically non-propriertary, and I'm sure the conversion tools will
be in place to make it third-party accessable (in a worst case scenario, the
third party has the source code...), but specifically, what format is it,
and what are the expectations as to scalability/speed? Is the current format
a temp solution or the long term fix?

> Another thing that comes to mind is the poor version of Schedule+ that
> Outlook had. Outlook, to this day, has not yet caught up with the
> features that Schedule+ had years ago. Customers constantly complained
> about this feature or that feature that S+ had that Outlook doesn't.

Any specifics for the features that were needed/missing?

> 5. Client & server-side rules are BIG! This should be really easy to
> configure and if they can work on the server (e.g., edit Procmail rules
> from the client), even better.

What do you mean by this? I.e., what's a client-side rule vs. a server side
rule?

> Anyway, I'm rambling and I can't really recite every piece of info I
> learned in an email message right now. But if there are specific
> questions I'd be happy to answer them, like why Outlook did this or
> didn't do this, what UI features of Outlook didn't work well at all
> versus which ones were very good, what people want to do with Outlook,
> why the Journal feature in Outlook is despised, etc.

:) All of the above seem like great questions to answer...