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Will Evolution Exchange Microsoft?
Anonymous Howard writes "Infoanarchy has a comprehensive review of Ximian Evolution. The reviewer claims that the Windows/Outlook combination is inherently inferior in terms of security, because users have too many privileges on the host system. Also, Evolution's indexing appears to be quite well scalable."
Please review this article in which a company used OSS to creat software that allows PC users using Outlook client to connect to Exchange servers.
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InsightServer is built atop these unmodified pieces of Open Source software:
Cyrus IMAP Server, from Carnegie-Mellon University
http://asg.Web.cmu.edu/cyrus/
Exim MTA (Message Transfer Agent), from Cambridge University
http://www.exim.org/
Berkeley Database, from the University of California
http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/
GDBM GNU Database Libraries from Free Software Foundation
http://www.gnu.org/software/gdbm/gdbm
ProFTP from the ProFTPD Project
http://proftpd.linux.co.uk/
Apache HTTP Server from the Apache Foundation
http://httpd.apache.org/
Bynari has not modified these, and does provide the source code with the Open Source components.
We buy the academic open license MS Office suite for $60.00/seat. This includes Outlook as well as the whole office suite.
Now how am I supposed to tell my boss that Linux/Evolution/Open Office, will free us from the licensing costs and license tracking overhead of closed proprietary software? The OS academic open license for Windows XP costs $40.00/seat and the Office suite costs $60.00/seat...for a total of $100.00 per seat.
The exchange connector for Evolution costs $69.00! This doesn't give me an entire office suite....just an Exchange connector! And I still have the license tracking overhead of closed proprietary software.
I'd be willing to consider this product as an Outlook replacement, but not at this cost.
-ted
While Evolution is broken for inline pgp, I have to ask - did you submit bug reports? :-)
Most of the in-line pgp bug reports didn't start flowing in until after the 1.0 release which by that point was too late to fix for the most part because it to fix it right, we have to redesign the way we handle it completely.
btw, I as well as the mutt maintainer and every other mail client author that implements in-line pgp will agree that in-line pgp is just plain broken to begin with.
if you read the bug report that you linked to, you'll notice that there are a lot of possible security holes that all clients must face when implementing in-line pgp.
I would highly suggest you convince your friends to use PGP/MIME. There is some slight brokeness in Evolution's PGP/MIME implementation too (it sometimes says a signature isn't valid when it is, but it will never ever say a signature is valid when it isn't) but this is being fixed in the development branch. If you have questions about why this didn't work, feel free to email me or the evolution mailing lists and I will explain it in as much detail as you want.