Many people in the business world use Microsoft Outlook. Usually it is due to:
1) It came with Microsoft Office
2) It has a calendar feature
3) Someone told them to or they have used it for years
Then if you ask the average home user why they use Outlook Express it could be:
1) It came with my Windows Operating System
2) It can cope with multiple user profiles
3) It is free
Thunderbird an email client is free and can do the following:
– Cope with multiple profiles by typing thunderbird -p in the ‘run’ box and then selecting an option to get it to prompt you to select a profile next time you run it.
– Thunderbird has a calendar add on called ‘lightening’ that gives you a calendar option that might be suitable as an alternative to Outlooks and meet your requirements.
– Thunderbird also makes an excellent RSS reader, which is good to just use the one application for email,rss and newsgroups.
– & more
There is a host of addons for Thunderbird other than the calendar feature that I have not explored yet and you need to make sure it is the right solution for you.
If you are a small business, home user or even a business start up, it is worth look at the solutions available such as Thunderbird. Then for an alternative to MS Office try OpenOffice. If the right solution for you the savings can be huge.
links:
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/features.html
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/
http://www.wickedblog.com/2007/03/29/thunderbird-vs-outlook-2007/