I'd like to give some advice: where I work, everyone uses Outlook. One of the biggest complaints is that outlook is "not responding" or "really slow". You don't know what pissed is until you have someone call you because they need to find the email they spent 20 minutes typing that got lost and you have to tell them "It's gone.". Another HUGE thing, and everyone here is gonna want to nail me to a cross because of it, is that almost all of my users want to user WORD as their email editor. I know, it's funny to have outlook use 13MB of ram and then have WORD use 8MB just to type a short message, but that's how they want it and they have a fit if we change it (even though there is a relationship between crashes and using them both at the same time.). You see, even though the native email editor in outlook has a spell check function, it doens't "Catch the errors while you type." Most of my users want to see the red and green sqiggley lines as soon as they make a mistake. Then we could get into the email.dot problems that users have ("Everything is in a small font, and when I change it and reopen outlook it is small again." or "My outlook printer settings are not right.") And how about 2 of our users that have outlook.ost files that are well OVER 600MB? That doesn't include their local archive.pst, which is at least as big (some of my users have never deleted an email, and in my organization, it's not our policy to tell them too.). I heard a bit about Outlook 10, and I think it will work better than 97 and 2000, but I don't know if it'll stop this phone call induced headache I have.
So, here it is:
No matter what happens to the network connection between client and server, DO NOT Let EVO HANG FOR anything(this give people a chance to save their work, even if they end up having to restart EVO)
Figure out how to implement an advanced editor that administrative & administrative support people will like (yes, with squiggley lines and perty letterhead. Remeber Fellas: what is the ratio of men to women who use email at work?)
It's gotta have some really cool features for mobile computing devices to make the IT manager happy
It's gotta work 100% all of the time to make the tech support people happy (or at least more than outlook :-)
Make the rules/filters import/exportable for those of us who have to support large rollouts
Don't allow any nasty VB code to kill our data (seriously, think security)
Consider things like global address books, even though they are server based. Large organizations will need them.
Oh yeah, you better be able to type in a partial name in the to: and cc: fields and have EVO pop up the name for the users (you can't imagine how many calls I get from people offsite that are using web access, and can't figure out why the email address isn't automagically getting filled out for them)
When GNOME matures, and we have settled on a standard for our word processor, I should be able to click "Send To" and EVO knows what to do
And last but not least, someday be able to have an "Out of the Office Assistant" type do dad