searching for replacements
I have had it with Microsoft Outlook – period!
While I would admit it has served me well for many years, it is time to look for some appropriate replacements. So, I am hoping to enlist the readers of geekyinfo in this process to assist me.
These are the things that frustrate me about Microsoft Outlook
- It crashes once you install plugins and a number of programs I use seem to delight in installing outlook plugins
- There is no simple way to share my calander with my wife, administrative assistant or other team members.
- Did I mention it crashes?
- It is resource hungry – this is not such a big deal these days with my computer having heaps of memory and processing speed – but, I do like programs that are lean and mean.
- Oh, and it crashes!
These are the things I like about Microsoft Outlook and things I would like to replicate if possible in my move to another solution/s.
- clean interface – particularly with email
- Ability to move a email to a task and/or a calendar event
- All mail I receive just works and this includes attachments. This has not been my experience with other mail applications which sometimes don’t handle mail attachments sent from outlook.
- The ability to invite other people to meetings (I have just started to use this more)
These are the things that I would like but don’t get with Micrsoft Outlook
- A way of sharing my calendar with my administrative assistant, my wife and team members.
- A feature that is a must in applications that replace outlook is that they don’t crash and don’t require a third party application that will shut down it properly.
A realisation that I have recently had is that I don’t require my mail, calendar, task and contacts in the same application. Even though outlook is designed this way it is not critical. It is obviously better for the contacts and mail to be in the same one as this means you don’t have to have duplicate copies of the email addresses.
I use a Treo for my calender, contacts and to a lesser extent tasks. I would be happy not to use my treo for tasks as I mostly am in task mode when I have my notebook open and I use mindmanager for my task management.
So, I am thinking:
Tasks >> MindManager
Contacts/Calendar >> Treo (but need a way to backup and share)
Email >> either gmail or thunderbird
Any suggestions?
October 5th, 2005 at 11:52 pm
Your thoughts sound pretty good on the whole - the Treo should be able to switch to using Palm Desktop pretty easily, then it’s all sync’d and backed up. GMail’s ok as long as you don’t need offline access to your email, and Thunderbird is pretty nice.
The bits I think you’ll have trouble with, though…
* Sharing calendar. Unless you switch to using an online calendar, this is going to be a bit tricky. Outlook shares well when you’re using Exchange, but I don’t know how you’d do it without. Getting the data from the Treo to somewhere you can share, though, is going to be difficult - might actually be easier to do by hand.
* Sending and receiving meeting invites through email - Outlook does this by sending Outlook forms, so it all works quite seamlessly with other Outlook clients - not sure if it tacks a .cal file on there to allow limited sharing with other clients too, but that’s never really going to be seamless. Nothing else that I’m aware of does the meeting invite thing in a similar way. Lotus Notes might - you need Eric Mack to comment too
* Moving emails to tasks or calendar items. Most other solutions aren’t going to be integrated like Outlook is, so I think you’d lose this. Copy and pasting is always an option, though, so it might not be as much of a limitation as it sounds.
I’ve never really used it, but it sounds like Lotus Notes might be along the lines of what you’re looking for. Not sure if it’s a very active product these days, though, and I’m not sure how expensive it is for a single user.
The other option is a good clean-up of Outlook. When all is running well, it doesn’t really crash, so you might be able to work around things by just removing or disabling the add-ins you don’t really need. I’m sure you already know, but they’re under Tools, Options, Other, Advanced Options, then either Add-In Manager or COM Add-Ins. Failing that, there’s always repairing the installation, or even uninstall/reinstall. It sounds like you’re quite hooked on some Outlook-only features, so this might be your best option.
October 6th, 2005 at 11:14 pm
Thanks Michael for such a indepth reply.
I am trialling gmail and so far liking it. I am thinking of ditching tasks completely from outlook and just use mindmanager. For calendar and contacts sync my treo with outlook which inturn will sync with airset. Might work as a way to share my calendar and contacts with my wife and assistant.