Book Review: Kontact Compact

A lot of people are telling, Linux doesn't breakthrouhg because it lacks an equivalent of MS Outlook. But, in some forum, I read, Kontact can do a lot of the tasks Outlook can. A bit later, I found on the KDE site, the German publisher Bomots offers a (German) book about "Kontact", KDE's Personal Information Manager (PIM). I decided, it's time to figure out if this book, "Kontact Kompact" by Andre Schreiber,  is usefull for people looking for a 'replacement' of Outlook, and people willing to learn Kontact.

I am one of these people willing to learn Kontact, being one of the persons who never used it before.
It's always difficult to sell a book on Open Source software, because there's always documentation included in most software programs, and if not included, it can be found online, especially when regarding Open Source. So, what I wanted to figure out, is, does this book add value to the 'free' electronic documentation? And maybe also important, is it worth translating to English?

The book isn't real expensive, in contrary to a lot of other books on software; it's only ~13 Euros. For this price, you get a paperback of medium size with around 133 pages. So, I would say, the price is good. The only thing is, since I traveled by train a lot and put the book in my overfull bag a few times, the book gets a little damaged, like all paperbacks. But, a damaged book is better than an unread book, and if you are a bit carefull, that's no problem.

The story on the back of the book whets our appetite: It tells us Kontact is an alternative for Evolution and it mentions there's a chapter about how to get KDE to work with MS Exchange and eGroupWare. The book itself is rather complete for a paperback; it contains a table of contents, a preface, appendices about Kontacts configuration, and an alphabetic index.

When starting to read, it stands out, the pictures are a bit too small / unclear. This may be because of the paper chosen, but it's a pity the pictures in the book aren't a bit clearer, since the pictures really add value to the book, especially if German isn't your first language. The language used isn't that difficult, but I had to use a dictionary to look up some specific terms. The language isn't aimed at absolute beginners, as the writer expects the reader to know how to work with a computer. This is actually nice, since there isn't much space waisted with boring descriptions of obviuos things.

The first chapter offers a Quickstart, which gets you on the road with Kontact very quick. I would say, this chapter doesn't contain much usefull information for people familiar with KDE, because they can figure out the simple things themselves, but it is usefull for people who don't learn new software that fast. So, lets continue to the more interesting chapters.

The second chapter is really interesting, it is about appointments. It shows how to make them in Kontact, but far more interesting, it shows how to synchronise with Exchange, eGroupWare and even IMAP on the end of the chapter. I would say, it is the most valuable chapter of the book, since this is the item most persons are interested in. It's too bad I wasn't able to test synchronizing with Exchange according the chapter in the book, since my schools Exchange Serve won't let us connect laptops with it, and my whole school runs on MS. The part about "ToDo's" is rather straight ahead, but the paragraph about reminders is interesting.

The following chapter, about KMail, offered me a solution for a strange problem I had: my mail was displayed in HTML code, and I couldn't get my normal layout again. Neither could I find how to fix the view in the Kontact Help, so as you see, a book about software can be a complement to the helpfiles. Really interesting is the part about filters (to filter e-mails), since this is one of the important feature of a PIM. The chapter also helps us to fight spam. The writer must now Kontact rather well, since chapter five (about contacts) describes a rather hidden feature, about the ability to look an adress up using online maps. For the rest, chapter five isn't really shocking. After that, the book gives us some Drag and Drop tipps, which I would consider handy.