Next Generation E-Mail
by Volker Weber
Maintenance Release 0.4.5 of ZOË came out last week. I picked up this information from Justin.
When IBM announces 2002 that they were working on a next generation e-mail experience, I was hoping for something like ZOË. It can best be described as Google for your e-mail. It takes it way beyond threads, dates and full text search.
As it turns out IBM is not solving my problem with e-mail but instead is creating a Portal-On-Your-Desktop. It will require WebSphere Portal (or some other clever marketing name for The-Mother-Of-All-Fat-Servers) as the backend. I most likely won't have that so there is no need to wait ...
While ZOË is written in Java and runs on anything with a JVM, it neatly ties in with Mail.app on the Mac:
Almost everything in this header is a link that takes you to ZOË. From there you can follow all kinds of links to other messages touching on the same topics, or related people and companies. If you have not tried this program you are missing out on something.
Comments
Volker,
I agree - ZOË is very good indeed. I use it all the time on both work and home machines.
The new "readable" URL format in 0.4.5 makes random navigation much more viable.
I have recently got a new (hp) laptop for work and was going to copy all the data from my old machine. Then I remembered ZOË's mail server - so I just reconfigured to POP port and had the new machine read all the old data as mail.
Plus RSS feeds, plus all my Domino mail via IMAP...
I agree that this is much more like the personal portal I'm likely to use, but am willing to wait and see what the "rich" workplace client/offline portal looks like.
Until then, ZOË is my friend.
Cheers
Justin
I haven't studied ZOE yet, but perhaps your comment re IBM's next gen mail platform is out-of-context. You, being a single person in a very small business, are surely not the target market for WebSphere Portal Server and next-gen mail ... IBM's architected this thing for the Fortune 500 or 1000 or 2000 market in the first instance.
Michael, you are absolutely right. I understand where IBM's focus is. What I did not expect however is that the rich client won't even work in a smaller environment.
Now let's take a look at the market place for "non-enterprise". Small companies with very few, highly skilled people. It may be one person, it may be a dozen, maybe even fifty. Who is going to provide interesting communication or collaboration solutions for them?
As an information client, Haystack looks really really good (though it eats your memory and might be a bit too bloated)
"Who is going to provide interesting communication or collaboration solutions for them?"
I think some light bulbs have gone on recently over this issue and where the Notes client is going.
Do you remember the famous Linux question?
you telling me this is what I have to look forward to in Kassel? :)
No, I am replying to your somewhat cloudy response about light bulbs assuming you mean a bright future for Notes. Notes will never be available on Linux. You have been clear about this.
So, if we are looking for collaboration software for small firms and assume they are clever enough not to pay the MS tax, Notes is not an option. You have heard it here often enough. I talked to a partner lately and he complained that his US vendors don't get the fact that companies are throwing out Windows for alternatives. Even on the desktop. His whole company has already converted. Currently they are running Notes inside a Windows emulator. Which reminds me of WinOS2.
The new mail client, based on the toolkit that was created for the Eclipse platform would be a wonderful alternative. But it looks like IBM still does not get it, as far as small companies are concerned. The new mail client will not be available without WebSphere Portal (or any other clever name for The-Mother-Of-All-Fat-Servers). For a small firm that will not be an option.
So my question remains: Who is going to provide interesting communication or collaboration solutions for them?
Volker,
The organisations I work for are usually geographically dispersed with slow links between sites. I get the feeling that the MOAFS model will not suit them either. What suits them is a distributed environment that can deploy and manage itself and applications using some form of data replication.
They will not deploy 500xMOAFS + 500xDB2. So who is going to provide interesting communication or collaboration solutions for them?
anyone tested REBOL IOS?
-> http://www.rebol.com/ios-faq.html
-> http://www.rebol.com/index-ios.html
I know already two non-IT guys testing it and both are more than positively surprised so far by that groupware tool. I hadnt until now the time, so i would be curious to hear something from some IT pro's about "REBOL IOS".
REBOL is indeed the answer to: Who is going to provide interesting communication or collaboration solutions for small businesses?
IOS rocks. However, it is not currently an email solution. It is a light-weight, flexible, cross-platform groupware and development platform.
You may also want to have a look at AltME, the Alternative Messaging Environment:
http://safeworlds.com/
This is currently a closed messaging environment, but will soon be an open groupware platform.
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