On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 10:10:10AM +0100, Michael Stahl wrote: > i wonder why people say that an office suite needs to have an email > client: is that only because Microsoft Office includes one?
It is not only, and even not principally, an email client. Principally, it is what we used to call PIM or personal organiser, networked on a workgroup / entreprise / ... level As things are, it is a rather awful email client, but integration with other features make it the killer app/feature for many users: - It does calendaring, which means between Outlook users, you can just invite someone to a meeting, he says yes/no/another time, and all this appears nicely in your calendar. When connected to an Exchange server, you can see / modify / ... someone else's calendar directly (if duly authorised to do so). - Task manager / contact manager / note organiser / ... all this stuff that your PDA (which many people now call "smartphone") does; and with synchronisation with said PDA. - With an Exchange/Sharepoint server, can do shared mailboxes, etc. - Journal: keep track of what you did for how long for whom (which allows you to bill it later) - It has (very limited) mailing list features, in that in an Exchange environment, you can mail all members of a specific group (possibly this has been improved since I was subjected to that kind of environment at the university; they couldn't add me to a "mailing list" without also increasing my powers in the windows domain, because the "security group" and the "mail group" were the same entity). - Sharepoint gives you collaboration on a document better than "change tracking + email it around". Outlook is the client-side of Sharepoint (at least partially, I'm not sure I understand the whole process well). Now, whether it belongs to an Office Suite or not can be discussed; I predict opinions will hinge on whether Office Suite is "everything you need to get your work done in an Office environment" or "stuff to make documents", which is more restrictive (and could e.g. also exclude Base). but the fact is people are used to having these features available; the general "alternative to full Microsoft" ecosystem needs, to compete efficiently, to propose an alternative also for these roles. Whether you call it "LibreOffice Organiser / Collaborator / ..." and bundle it with LibreOffice or "Yoyodine Alicia" and allow it to function independently is IMO not the most important point. See http://conference.libreoffice.org/talks/content/sessions/037/files/RevertingGravity.pdf and the associated video recording, when it becomes available; watch http://conference.libreoffice.org/talks/ for availability. -- Lionel _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
