Outlook connectors feedback revisited

[Price,Neil]

I've been testing connectors again...

I installed the bynari on several other machines and in each case it worked
perfectly. I was unable to reproduce my original problem with it. I got some
funnies during installation but simply ignored them and it worked fine. The
"register for 30 days license" form which thankfully only pops up once did
not seem to work. Strangely I got a message from Outlook, saying the server
could not be found. But I seemed to end up with a 30 day license anyway `(I
don't have a direct internet connection, only through a proxy).

What I liked was that I could choose to download headers only. This is vital
if I am stuck in some little town with a slow connection. If you added ntlm
support for single windows sign-on then I think it is an excellent
connector. I also had excellent response from Bynari to my queries. They
also informed me their connector is available in Europe for a similar price
to the Toltec one.

I was really confused by the calendar. Konsec and Bynari both saw the same
calendar but Toltec saw an almost, but not quite, completely different one
with only 1 event in common.

Bynari showed my folders differently to the other 2, with all my folders
under an inbox, so I had an inbox under an inbox which is a bit confusing.
The other 2 showed nmy folders as I expected them, with several folders on
the same level as the inbox.

Compatibility between the different connectors leaves something to be
desired. After the Toltec connector had done its thing, the other 2 showed
attachments "Toltec.dat" on many emails. Bynari (but not Konsec) showed some
indecipherable Toltec objects in the inbox.

With the Konsec connector Outlook often told me on startup that my server
was unavailable. This may have been a side effect of the silly "buy a
license now" window that pops up at startup.  I simply tried again and it
worked.

Konsec seemed to produce an extraordinarily large pst file of over 500MB for
a 150 MB mailbox. Toltec's pst file was as expected and Bynari was very
thrifty with disk space (it stores the headers in a .db file and stores the
attachments as files).


> I've been testing some Outlook connectors on Kolab.
> 
> Toltec
> 
> It works fine and is reasonably priced. The manual is a bit 
> confusing. Its
> got an awkward method of downloading the emails via pop3 and 
> synchronizing
> it back again. You end up with 2 inboxes in Horde because of 
> that. It uses
> pst files with their limitations. Its slow on start-up and 
> synchronization
> on a big mailbox (150MB)
> 
> Its got ntlm support so a single sign on is theoretically 
> possible if you
> used a samba-kolab ldap setup, but I could not find info on this yet.
> 
> Bynari
> 
> Its got a nice feature where it will copy the emails from 
> your existing
> Outlook profile. This worked fairly well copying emails out of an MS
> Exchange profile but some of the sender emails addresses got 
> trashed in the
> import. It looks really professional but it kept locking up 
> on me while
> downloading the emails on a big mailbox. It would sync to 
> about 5% and lock
> up. I will test it on another machine in case it just did not 
> like the one I
> was testing on (this is windows, remember). It does not use 
> pst files. Its
> more expensive that the Toltec one. A lot more, like 50% extra.
> 
> Konsec.
> 
> This is quite similar in principle to the Tolltec one except 
> it does not use
> pst files. I had heard that Konsec used a mapi connector but 
> it is the same
> pop3 setup. Synchronization was noticeably quicker than the 
> other two on a
> large-ish mailbox (150 MB). It was quite stable on the same 
> PC that the
> Bynari crashed on. There is also ntlm support. The manual is 
> only available
> in German.
> 
> Its quite expensive if their price list is accurate, like 
> about 3 times the
> price of Toltec.
>