[vox-tech] Looking for a Sunbird (Google Calendar) replacement

[Tony Cratz]

Chanoch (Ken) Bloom wrote:
> While I'm on the subject, why wouldn't Evolution work in offline mode,
> without configuring email at all. Each of Evolution's different
> functions (Tasks, Calendar, Notes, Contacts, Email) gets equal billing
> in the interface -- they're all equally important citizens, so if you
> don't want it to do email, you won't find that you're always starting
> in email mode, or anything like that.
> 
	I'm not a real fan of Evolution as a mail client. It does
	a good job don't get me wrong. I'm just not a real fan. With
	that said, I may take a look at it.


> You might also consider KOrganizer.

	Really I think you mean Kontact which is the megapackage
	which include KOrganizer along with Kaddressbook.

	I have used Kaddressbook but was not fully happy with it. I
	have not looked at Kontact or KOrganizer yet. Again I may.

	I have taken a quick look at Osmo and it is closer to what
	I want but still not fully there.

	As both you and Rich pointed out I am looking for a PIM. In
	years gone past I used a deadtree version of a PIM based on
	the Franklin Daytimer Organizer. While the Daytimer had
	limits (being a deadtree for one) it had most of the
	features (except for an real event reminder alarm) I'm
	looking for.  Also in the past I used the old Unix
	command 'calendar' used an plain text .calendar file
	containing a date field and a value field. It was nice
	to use as a birthday reminder but it was poor for the
	adhoc non-repeating events as it would only run once a
	day and require hand editing the file.

	I should also say while Sunbird was a fair PIM it was not
	really what I was looking for either. To handle events it
	required to leave Sunbird up and running all of the time
	(no daemon process to deal with event reminders). I also
	was not really happy with the syncing of data.

	Now with all of that said (and what has been said before)
	my ideal PIM is really more complex then what I have been
	saying. Beside being iCal and Vcard base I would like to
	be able to sync my laptop PIM with a PIM on my main server.
	The main server PIM would handle most of the event reminders
	for any client which currently has a live connection to
	the main PIM. In the case where the laptop is away from the
	main server it would handle the event reminders locally.
	For both versions of the PIM I do not want to be forced to
	use a web GUI. I really want a standalone GUI so my laptop
	can be (as I'm calling it, as thin as possible. No
	Apache/PHP|Perl|Ruby stack require. Just a standard Linux
	program which can be started via the command line or the
	menu via Gnome or KDE (with a very lite weight daemon
	to handle events reminders).

	Also as Rick mention I have seen a number of PIMs which
	seem to bloat up and have creepy featurism. They start to
	turn into a full E-mail client (such as Lightning/Thunderbird
	and Evolution) or they start to move more toward a CRM (such as
	SugarCRM). Also most are now moving toward web base requiring
	a web server. Myself I don't need to be able to store images
	of a customer Gold Fish in my PIM. I also don't need to have
	a 4 generation family history for a contact.

	I should also say, yes I know that if I have an address book
	in my PIM I may/will desire to share it with the E-mail client
	in the future. But the same could be said about a softphone.
	To me the PIM should be the central core and the other clients
	(E-mail, softphone, browser) should be able to query the PIM
	database as needed. This would be a change of mind set from
	the current method.


	BTW thanks for the discussion. I'm finding it helpful and I
	hope others may also gain something from the discussion. At
	present I'm not sure I will find the type of PIM I'm looking
	for.



							Tony