Alright. Got my new PC just gaaruuuuvin’ along here. I’ll detail that in another post. Been loading software on the Windows partition past few days and it came time to install or not to install MS Office. I get all Microsoft stuff for free/cheap from work, depending on the situation, so I’ve always had Office installed as a matter of course. I’m a long time user, abuser, tech supporter and trainer of Office, so its very natural for me to use that. However, since I am starting from scratch here, I thought I’d see what else is out there nowadays. And as my friends know, I am a right cheap bastard.

I’ve installed Openoffice 1.9 betasomethingorother. I’ve used it before and highly recommended it anyway, so this is a no brainer for me. I’m sure I’ll get along fine with that.

But one app not found in OoO is Personal Information Management. In other words, tasks and calendar events. I don’t even need an email client really, since I’m a gmailhead right now. Normally I would use Outlook for this.

I love Outlook. I have a quite unhealthy relationship going on with it actually. But in all fairness, it’s a bit slow to load when you toss in the plugins like I like to do. Plus if I’m gonna look past Word, Excel and the others, I might as well see what else passes for PIMs out there.

With that in mind, I am currently evaluating two open source programs: Sunbird, a Mozilla project, and Aethera
, a project from theKompany, the fine folks who have brought you many programs that contain the letter K.

Initial impressions: Sunbird, even at v0.2 is functional, snappy and seemingly bugfree. Some dialogs look awkward, but overall very nice. Its only a task list and a calendar, nothing else. Its written in in XUL just like Firefox and Thunderbird. Definitely some promise here.

Aethera is more complete. There are email, tasks, sticky notes, calendar and contacts features. It’s written in QT, which, like XUL is cross-platform and makes me happy. It also includes RSS reader and weather forecast plugins. It too is pretty snappy, but I don’t like the interface as much. However it has sticky notes of which I am a fan (like Outlook Notes). Another interesting bonus is that tK offers a commercial Jabber plugin for Aethera called tkJabberPro. I’m already a bit busy on the Jabber client space, but this is cool nonetheless and might be an important selling point for one of you guys.

Too early to tell, but I think Sunbird will win. Why? Because as an open source project with the positive mindshare and big marketing help from the Firefox project, I think it’ll soar and soon we’ll have tons of cool extensions like you have now with Firefox. What I will really want to see is some kind of Windows Mobile synchronization tool for use with my aforementioned iPAQ. I can dream anyway. I will add however that I believe that Aethera is scriptable and pluggable by the masses, which is A Good Thing ™.

You never know, another contender might come in to challenge the winner of this battle. Only time will tell who wins the war. Or–I might install Office.