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New Project: eMail Beauty Contest


Despite all the media hype eMail is still the work horse of enterprise and cross enterprise collaboration. And the bulk of workers use a traditional computer. So looking at eMail applications is surely worth a look. From my experience, having worked with MHS, MS-Mail, CCMail, Profs, CompuServe, Outlook, Notes and some more obscure packages, I can tell that details make all the difference. All applications have an Inbox, a send button and a calendar view. After all it is not enough if software works, Users have to be pleased too. So time and energy permitting I will dive into the details of a selection of eMail applications and compare: eMail, Calendar, Contact and Task management. My focus will be the user perspective and not admin capabilities or technobabble, so no diskspace or memory consumption musings. And yes, stop howling, Notes is much more than eMail, but that's not the point for this comparison. I have picked 3 eMail clients and 3 web applications for this project:
  1. Lotus Notes 8.5.2 running on Ubuntu 10.10 backed by Domino 8.5.2 on Linux
  2. Outlook 2010 running on Windows 7 backed by hosted Exchange 2010
  3. Evolution 2.30.3 running on Ubuntu 10.10 talking to Exchange / GMail / Domino
  4. iNotes Web Access 8.5.2 on Domino on Linux
  5. Outlook Web Access 2010
  6. gMail
This little project will run over the course of this year and I will publish installments in irregular intervals. If a software gets an update during this period I will most likely update it. To make this project successful I will need a good body of eMails, calendar invites and tasks. This is where I can use some help. Can you send some messages (richly formatted, some attachments) to the test account: BeautyContest? Please nothing NSFW. Some double byte eMail would be cool. What would you like to have compared?

Posted by on 08 January 2011 | Comments (4) | categories: IBM Notes Software

Comments

  1. posted by Stephan H. Wissel on Sunday 09 January 2011 AD:
    @Bill: You are welcome to collaborate on this. Products I could think of are VMWare's Zimbra, Cisco's PostPath (now called WebEx Mail), Mozilla's Thunderbird, Mac eMail (including me.com).
    But I had to draw the line somewhere since it is a pasttime exercise and there are other things I also like to do in the after office hours.
    Emoticon biggrin.gif stw

    P.S.: A complete different story would be (will be?): Mobile eMail comparison.

    P.S2.: Anybody who want to contribute to this project is very much welcome
  2. posted by Bill Dorge on Sunday 09 January 2011 AD:
    I think it would be good if you looked at Zimbra, now from VMware. I'd especially look at version 7 coming out soon, you can get the beta pretty easily.

    Give it a look, I've been pretty impressed so far, would be kind of cool to see if others feel the same way.
  3. posted by Stephen Lembert on Thursday 20 March 2014 AD:
    Hello,

    I appreciate your effort regarding your informative project. On the basis of my experience as a user I used both Notes and Outlook. In my view Outlook is far more better emailing application than Notes. The complexity of Notes naturally repels the new user but on the other hand user feels comfortable with Outlook. Also high installation and maintenance cost of Notes is extra expenditure for the organization. Due to these reasons it can be observed that there are large number of NSF to PST conversion taking place.
  4. posted by Stephen Lembert on Thursday 20 March 2014 AD:
    Hello,
    I appreciate your effort regarding your informative project. On the basis of my experience as a user I used both Notes and Outlook. In my view Outlook is far more better emailing application than Notes. The complexity of Notes naturally repels the new user but on the other hand user feels comfortable with Outlook. Also high installation and maintenance cost of Notes is extra expenditure for the organization. Due to these reasons it can be observed that there are large number of NSF to PST conversion taking place.