First of all, what is a PIM anyway? Basically it is a personal information manager, like MS Outlook, Novell’s Evolution or Microsoft’s Entourage for you OS X users. Up until recently, it has felt like most PIM solutions for most people were fairly limited. Then came news of this new Mozilla based option, still very much under development - Spicebird.

Spicebird could indeed have some real potential based on their description, however I would also remind people who have called this app an “Outlook killer” to remember that if it is not playing nicely with my PocketP/iPhone/Blackberry like devices, it will be received as a consumer app - not an enterprise application. Again, I love the concept, I think it is potentially better than anything Outlook has provided recently, but if I am not able to sync anything with it, who cares?

One alternative however, would at the very least to provide a way for it to work with Google Calender and provide users a means of “texting” appointments to the calender. This would be a rough sell still, but it’s better than acting like collaborative calendering with no mobile functionality is anything to be impressed about.  This is the same reason why I could care less about Google Calender - unless I subject myself to some half-hearted third party solutions.

Hopefully Spicebird has something to address this need if they truly want to play with the big boys.

Tags: outlook, pim, ms exchange