Re: Outlook vs. Alternatives

Aaron Bartell wrote:

Some of these things may seem silly, but Outlook is probably the most used
application in my toolbelt and if I am not efficient in it I will drown in
unproductivity (sp). Note I have mostly tried Evolution on Ubuntu to meet
my needs, though I did try Thunderbird/Sunbird once.

Actually, no, not silly at all. When you use Outlook as a primary conduit to your CRM, it makes more sense. Sales people in general find a lot more in Outlook than developers. The more people you deal with on a daily basis to do your job, the more likely you are to need some of Outlook's features.

- Ability to see other's calendars. This is important for scheduling sales
calls and other meetings.
- Ability to connect to an Exchange server calendar period. I don't believe
Sunbird can do this.

Yup, very chicken and egg stuff here, and exactly what Microsoft uses to keep its audience captive. If you use Exchange server, then you probably need to use Outlook. Me, I never used Exchange so it was a snap to switch to another client, and just getting rid of the .PST files was worth it for me.

- Salesforce plugin that allows me to easily click on an email and add it to
CRM.
- GoToMeeting plugin that allows me to quickly create meetings and add them
to my calendar (I probably do about 10 to 15 meetings a week via GoToMeeting
for support and sales calls).

This is another issue: plug-ins. If you have Outlook plug-ins, chances are you're used to them. Although Ihave to say that the Thunderbird plug-in community is pretty active, and I like a lot of what they have.

- Ease of pasting screen shots into an email (it seemed Evolution always
screwed it up).

This works great in Thunderbird.

- Outlook is less buggy than Evolution (Evolution would keep going to 100%
CPU usage upon creating a new email message in the latest version of Ubuntu
and I had to close and reopen to get rid of it - simply unacceptable)

Opposite here. I've had Outlook do some bizarre things, especially in looking at large lists. Thunderbird, while not perfect, almost never crashes and has lots of really cool support for searching and so on - things Outlook is missing.

I guess the point is that if you're using Outlook as a mail client, there are good alternatives, but if you use it as an Exchange client, probably less so.

Joe