Fedora and Apps: Kontact

I've tried to write about the applications I use on a regular basis, but never really followed through with the them consistently.  So, I'm going to give it a shot again.  For the next few weeks, I'll show you what I use.  Today, it is KDE's Kontact.


Kontact is an organizer on steroids.

It is comparable to Microsoft's Outlook.  

Of course I can read e-mail,

I can set up a calendar, a to-do list,

view RSS feeds,

create project outlines using Notebooks, jot stuff down on the Calendar via Journal (not shown)
view my desktop Pop-up Notes (not shown), and
even track time on my projects (not shown).

Setting up Kontact is pretty simple.  It has a pretty nice set-up menu.   And it can handle several e-mail formats.  I currently am getting g-mail and Windows Live Mail through this.  It can also hand your corporate e-mail if you have all your permissions are in place.

While I have used every one of these applications within Kontac, I mostly use it for e-mail, calendar, RSS feeds, and Notebooks.

One really cool thing about Kontact is that an Internet browser is embedded within the product making viewing video links a matter of clicking a button.  Then, a new tab opens with your video playing (of course you need Adobe Flash for this to work properly).  It can also be set up to open an external browser of your choice, like Google Chrome and Firefox (to name a few popular ones, but not IE as that is, of course MS).

How does it compare with Outlook?  Well, I use Outlook at work on the Intranet.  Outlook is a pretty powerful piece of software as it will integrate with I/M software, Word, Excel, Access, and any other MS Office product and access the MS Exchange Server.  And Outlook is fancy looking, has a nice calendar, to-do list, and a few other things.  Oh, did I say it was fancy?  Yes, it is fancy.  However, I think Kontact, for the home user, is much more adaptable for home use than the MS contemporary. 

Kontact will access the office suite of your choice either from the K-Office selection or the OpenOffice-LibreOffice suites.  I have not used it at work on the Intranet so I don't know how it would hand the Exchange Server environment.  And Kontact seems to be pretty plain looking.  I haven't gotten into changing background colors...but....you know...let's do that right now.  I have time......

There we go.  In order to do this in Fedora, just go to System Settings-Application Appearance and change the colors to what ever you want.  You can also download new themes for a starting point and then tweak them to your own preferences.
 This has been fun.  Check-in next week for a new KDE application.