Hello David, John & others on TBUDL following this thread,
Wednesday, March 07, 2001, you stated regarding :
The Bat! as a PIM's Contact Manager for email (not phone calls or
appointments).
J>> Microsoft Outlook Express integrates successfully with Outlook the MS
J>> contact, information and time management software.
DE> ROTFL.
I haven't learned what ROTFL stands foor, but imagine it means
something like "so what". (Who would want to ride on that ship)!
J>> Does the developers of these softwares consider the Bat! as not being
J>> important enough to include it in the email system setup wizard?
It's also important to NOT take on more that more than one can
handle well. There are a lot of things TB! doesn't do. It just
happens to be the best email solution available to date (AFAIK).
DE> Is this what MAPI is for ? (If I understand the question)
I would say that OLE2 dynamic linking might be the mechanism needed,
and most good PIM's have that now.
<snip>
J>> If people have chosen to pay for the Bat! while OE is "free", won't they
J>> buy a Personal Information Manager from RITLABS if it is as good as the
J>> Bat!?
I'd say that what people who use TB! want from each and every
application is comprehensiveness, control and integration. The
paradigm of all from one source is M$'s way of doing things, & and
what they do is buy out other companies anyway.
EccoPro (from NetManage) is a very good PIM (which I still use) that
integrates w/ their own mailer (Z-Mail) and browser (WebCrawler).
All were very good but were dropped by NetManage for the windows
platform. EccoPro is for sale and could probably be integrated w/
TB°! (it's OLE2 enabled and calls up Z-Mail) but someone dedicated to
programming would have to comment further - I just use these things
J>> As a side question, which PIM is most commonly used among the Bat!
J>> community?
DE> Lotus Organiser.
Definitely inferior to EcoPro IMO.
J>> I don't have any notion of programming, but a PIM in my opinion has much
J>> in common with an email client : Address book, sorting, filtering,
J>> templates, search function, tree structure for organising messages (tree
J>> structure for organising information for a PIM), forms, columns etc . I
J>> may be completely wrong, but can we say that a good email client is
J>> already half way to a good PIM?
Part way.
<snip>
J>> If so it wouldn't be that difficult to write a PIM as a plug-in for the
J>> Bat!.
I would be interested to know how difficult it would be from a
programming standpoint to integrate TB! with EccoPro or another good
PIM (Act, Goldmine, Jana Contact, Maximizer, etc.).
Am I correct about OLE2 being involved? What would call up the
mailer? To what degree and in what way does the registry figure in?
What about associating an extension used by TB! and linking it to
the PIM's document handling facility? (The big 3 of a PIM are
contact, agenda & document handling). If I have time I may fiddle w/
this but the best bet for an convergence would be another
independent app that made it relatively easy to integrate w/ any
mailer.
Lastly, if NetManage's price for EccoPro is not out of line w/ it's
potential, this might be a good investment for someone (inc RITLabs)
who would add the TB! integration, if that were easily accomplished.
The main problem w/ EccoPro is the fact that NetManage stopped
developing new versions & fixing glitches, but it was ahead of the
field at the time.
Douglas
--
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