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Email + PIM - Is There A Decent One Out There?
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Posted by Chris Thompson
Dec 7, 2007 at 04:43 PM
I’m a little skeptical that such an architecture will be added to Windows 7 in 2010, just because Microsoft has too much incentive to defend the Outlook/Exchange part of their business. (I certainly don’t blame them either, it’s a very lucrative franchise.) The reason why Outlook has never extended its data schema since it first came out is partly because that would require server support. Behind the scenes, versions of Exchange post-2001 are remarkably powerful, but none of that is exposed to the user.
Even for basic things, Microsoft has not shown an interest in a abstract, shared stores. For instance, when you mark something as a todo in OneNote, it has to go through a synchronization step to get to Outlook. It works, but synchronization is never elegant. They control both pieces of the pie, so why not go the extra mile? If they won’t do it there, arguing they’ll implement more fundamental changes that would benefit multiple applications sometime in the next five years seems unlikely to me.
In the OS X context, what I find really exciting is the potential for outliners to support the shared store. Mail already supports inserting todos in textual/graphical notes using a legal pad metaphor, but when OmniOutliner or NoteBook or another outliner supports marking a row as a todo, or marking a boolean column as identifying todos, we’ll have the equivalent of Ecco operating at an OS level.
(Circus Ponies NoteBook already does this through iSync, like OneNote, but eliminating synchronization with a shared store improves both speed and reliability. Documents are *views* on your underlying PIM database, not copies.)
Even now, it’s great to be able to see time logged in by billable hours application superimposed on my weekly calendar (if I so choose), with no synchronization and changes in either app reflected immediately in the other. Todos of course are the same way.
—Chris
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>But I do think that the aforementioned
>functionality is the way to go, and I do believe that Windows will be getting similar
>capabilities in the future, as will Linux. (In fact, if I am tempted to gradually
>switch over to another operating system that would be Linux, even if it would mean
>significant investment in time). As far as I have seen, the operating systems
>significantly and continuously influence each other in terms of features.
>
>alx
>