On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Bruce McCulley wrote:
> Thanks, Roger! That sounds like it's exactly what I desired. BTW,
> that was a very impressive piece of work with those details and
> especially the cross-references!!!
How I love playing for an appreciative audience.
> Interesting note that what you referenced is actually a generic
> standard that Micro$oft Outlook implements
Yes. I should have mentioned that IMAP4rev1 is an Internet Standards Track
protocol [1].
> - makes me wonder if I can hack around with Outlook and get some
> interoperability with other tools
Yes. You should be able to use Outlook with other IMAP servers, for
example.
> - do you know if M$ Exchange can be used as a server with other IMAP
> clients too?
Yes. In the real world, the extent to which different IMAP clients and
servers interoperate depends on how well their developers have adapted
them to each other's quirks. This sort of thing is why the industry has
regularly-scheduled Connectathon-type events [2].
I could start listing examples of particular versions of clients and
servers that I know do not interoperate well, but it wouldn't be fair to
the vendors to pick on them at random that way. Every vendor has had to
deal with interoperability problems caused by bugs, ambiguities, and
misreading of specifications in their own and their competitors' products.
However much a vendor might like to point fingers at a competitor's broken
implementation (and they do, they do!), the fact is that customers don't
want excuses; they just want it to work. The Internet interoperability
credo, "be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you
produce" applies to IMAP products in spades!
> Also, will other features in Outlook and/or Exchange interoperate
> with or be replaced by generic open source tools? I'm just starting
> to delve into Outlook's calendar/scheduler/planner tools, and I'd much
> prefer to discover an open source alternative.
Now you're asking me to gaze into my crystal ball, which is notoriously
cloudy. There are standards for useful notions like the iCalendar protocol
for Internet calendaring and scheduling [3]. iCalendar interoperability
seems to be pretty spotty, but the protocol is comparatively young and
this should improve eventually.
I have no idea if anyone's building an open source C&S application based
on iCalendar. It's an awfully big job, and I note with some disappointment
that open source PIMs always seem to lag far behind their commercial
counterparts. (I'm still pining for Ecco, a wonderfully-powerful PIM for
Windows that NetManage purchased, ruined, and cancelled a few years back.)
> FWIW, to answer some of the other comments in response to my original
> question, one of the reasons I asked was because these features are an
> important part of a couple of very successful Windoze groupware
> products, and I think that it's essential for Linux to have equivalent
> functionality in order to be a credible contender in the PC platform
> space. From the answers I got I'd say that there is a reasonably good
> solution for this particular requirement at least, but that the
> general knowledge and documentation are still somewhat behind the PC
> product vendors' offerings. If we can improve on that we may have a
> contender!
I agree. But who's going to step up and fund development of these
badly-needed open source client applications? maddog, you still reading
this list?
-- Roger
[1] http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2060.txt
[2] http://www.connectathon.org/
[3] http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt
--
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