One of my major appliations on the PC is a contact management tool (wich runs only under Windows of course). It contains a list of zip-codes, knows auto-completion of addresses, maintains the history of contacts, can dial my contacts, has password protection, etc..

Nothing comparable to that exists in Linux, whereas this is typically a cruscial business application. Applications that come close to this are either complex database applications like OpenCRM and Tutos or limited addressbooks. In particular for the average office worker, who is used to work with Outlook, the loss of functionality is too big when moving to KAddressbook or Evolution (in combination with a Palm).

KAddressbook appears to be feature rich but is not well tested and the performance is poor. Try for example to modify an address in an addressbook that contains 600 entries. My cursor was always one word behind on what I was actually typing. Furthermore it has some blocking issues. For example when exporting contacts to vcards it does not export the mobile numbers. When I tried to sync with my Palm it messed up my addresses (did anyone ever tested this?). Contacts that live in the Netherlands should be entered as living in the "Nederlandse Antillen" otherwise the feature of finding the address in map24 will not work (something wrong in the country code?).

Evolution looks quite similar to Outlook, rather nice and feature rich. I did not do a lot of testing on that after I found out that also evolution is not capable of syncing my Palm properly. It did not mess up anything but I could not see the cathegory information (I can in JPilot) and I could only sync my business addresses in Evolution. Private addresses and other addresses are still visible in my Palm but do not show up in Evolution. b.t.w. I could not find any application in Linux that can handle multiple addresse and e-mail addresses. A killing bug in Evolution (or wrongly defined feature) is that Private memos are synced to the desktop in cleartext (in a directory with mode 700 and the files are 600). This is insecure. If anyone has physically access to your PC he (or she) can read all you private information. I like the implementation of JPilot better where private information is only accessible after typing your Palm password. The encryption might be weak but it is still not in clear text on your disk.

The software that comes with the Palm syncs multiple addresses perfectly and the Outlook sync is painless. Unless this crucial application becomes more mature in Linux I cannot convince anyone that using Linux for business purposes is at least just as easy or good as in Windows.

Bottomline: what can we do to improve this? Is there a sense of urgency?

Have you checked out Novell Desktop, formally Ximian?

I read some info on it, I am looking for a contact management software for unix/linux as well, and so far this one seems to have all that and a bag of chips, possibly way more for my taste but I'm sure you can just install certain packages you need.

try WWW DOT ximian DOTCOM (won't let me post URLs yet) and it will redirect you to Novell's new site.

Peace and freedom!

kapri78

Dear Kapicorn78

I think you're making a good choice there. Just check what are your needs in terms of must have's and nice to have's and check if there is software out there that satisfies your current, and possibly future needs. Evolution is one of the most mature packages on Linux in the field of contact management in the SOHO.

I have checked Evolution contact management (as part of my Suse 10.0 distribution) and I was impressed by the ease of use of it and the richness of features. For Linux I think this is the closest you can get to contact management however people who are used to work with ACT! or similar tools will still miss essential features.

There are two reasons why I am now using JPilot in combination with my palm and not Evolution:
1) I cannot set/see the categories of my items (private. business, etc) in evolution. I even remember that I lost them using evolution.
2) My private items (like memos) are stored in my filesystem in clear text, with access permissions 700. JPilot offers with resprect to this a functionality close to the palm. You have to type your password first before you can access these items. Currently I am using KeyRing for this functionality in order to have really encrypted private data that allows me also to store passwords, acces and PIN codes on my palm. JPilot allows me to maintain the data, encrypted by KeyRing, as well. So if I cannot access my Palm (and maybe someone else can :-( ) I can still read my sensitive data on my PC.

I am looking forward to SUSE 10.1 (intended release date is April 25th) to see if there are any improvements in this field.

-- That you may live long in good health and prosperity --