Talk:Open Letter Re: OOo PIM
Why Open Office needs an integrated PIM.
These days contacts, diary and e-mail are fundamental parts of personal and business communication. Microsoft have recognised this and made MS Outlook the "front end" for the other office products. The key to the success of MS Office is its integration of the whole suite.
This "tie-in" makes MS Office very attractive because work can be completed seamlessly and without fuss. Simple tasks like creating a letter and sending it by e-mail from a common contact list are repeated many times per day in most offices.
Having all contacts in one place saves repetition and time. In Outlook the above task can be done very quickly and easily with a few clicks of the mouse. There is also a "Journal" option in Outlook which can record when the letter and e-mail was sent and to whom.
It is also very important to be able to share the contacts, calendar and tasks with other people in an organisation. Microsoft have built this into the server installation so that Outlook users can share information on the LAN and Internet.
More users are now mobile and having synchronisation with Laptop, PDA and phone are essentials. Access from the internet is also becoming a requirement rather than a luxury.
So any alternative offering for Open Office would have to have all the functionality of MS Outlook to compete.
There are other products that work like Outlook such as Maximiser, WinPim, ACT!, Goldmine and Sidekick but they rely on linking with MS Office products and they are an added cost and overhead.
None of the alternatives to Outlook have developed links to Open Office and until they do completing the simple daily task above requires two databases or a lot of cut and paste!
Users that are new to MS Office tend to start with Outlook because that is the first point of contact with the outside world, thats why its called Outlook. MS deal with business users and they know that server based web enabled products are here for the forseable future.
Not having a PIM integrated with Open Office will hamper its progression onto the desktops of home and office computers.
It may be possible to use Thunderbird, with the Lightning Calendar extension,to exchange details from the address book too OO Writer by pasting fields into templates using scripts.
The average user will give up at not finding a Calendar as standard in Thunderbird. so they will hardly be bothered to go learning scripts or programming to automate pasting information into OO Writer.
