Bound to Outlook? Thinc again!

An Australian-based company last week launched a range of office applications aimed at challenging Microsoft Outlook's dominance of the small- to medium-sized business market.

The suite from Thinc Technology includes the Thinc-Mail, Thinc-Time, Thinc-Serv, Thinc-Store, and Thinc-Store Enterprise applications.

Thinc-Mail is an alternative to Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express. The mail client features an SMS option to send and receive messages from a mobile phone, and offers many similar features to Outlook reportedly lower costs.

Thinc-Time is a shared diary tool to share users' diary entries across a network. An SMS feature also allows users to have appointment reminders sent to their mobile.

The company claimed that its e-mail storage, Thinc-Store, "includes an extremely fast and effective search function which places it at the forefront of the software required to meet new legal requirements for the storage and retrieval of e-mail in original form."

An optional e-mail storage and archiving service -- Thinc-Store Enterprise -- is also on offer from Thinc, for an annual fee of AU$2,700 per annum.

Thinc-Server bundles Thinc-Time, Thinc-Mail and Thinc-Store into one product and aims to provide an alternative to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.

The suite of products can be downloaded via Think Technology's Web site.

Thinc-Mail and Think-Time are available as a free download if limited to three licences per organisation. A 10-user site licence for each application is priced at AU$130.

Thinc-Server and Thinc-Store are priced at AU$750 (for up to 50 users) and AU$699, respectively. A three-user site licence for Thinc-Server is also available for AU$40.