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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."
Evolution is one of those pieces of OSS, that you can point at and say: "OSS can deliver, there, eat this". It belongs to the group of amazing projects like Apache, Samba and Mozilla if you ask me. Now if we had some great multimedia programs (MPlayer is getting close though).
Anyone who's been tracking Evolution development from the early days will be aware that it used to have preliminary NNTP (news/Usenet) support that was lobotomised for the 1.0 release. At present, this is the only major feature that's holding it back from competing with the likes of Outlook Express and Outlook. Sure, GNOME already has the Pan newsreader, but it's clearly designed for computer-literate people and doesn't really integrate with any email client.
So, what's holding back NNTP support? It can't be all that difficult to do, after all Evolution provides all the infrastructure for handling large lists of messages. Only when NNTP support arrives do I think Evolution will be-feature complete.
What this all boils down to is security vs. user-friendliness. What the reviewer basically says about security is that the older 9x windows versions are not secure -- which is true, and that the newer NT based versions are but the lazy users don't bother to configure their systems in a secure way. Then he chalks down a point for linux and goes on.
But this is not a inherent linux strenght or windows weakness; it's just user behaviour. It's comparable with doing regular backups and such. Basically, the reviewer is saying: "My installation of linux runs a cronjob which makes a tarball of my important files daily, and my installation of windows doesn't; hence linux is less prone to data loss"
It's just a differance in accent; windows puts more of an accent on user-friendliness and linux more on security.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
I sent myself a few thousand extra messages by accident last night. The acid test of every mail reader I've used has been exactly this scenario. Evolution opened my mailbox, showed me the messsages. I deleted them.
It all took less than 10 seconds, and most of that time was SSL/IMAP reads from my IMAP server. Best darn mail reader I've ever used.
If you haven't tried it try this out: bring it up, select a message in the subjuct summary window. Right-click and go to the "create a vfolder on this message" sub-menu. It just rocks. You can even have vfolders that encapsulate multiple real folders or EVEN ACCOUNTS.
Very sweet!
Evolution is one of the few things out there that could draw attention of the corporate eyes to using Linux as a desktop. The features that it has are really nice and comprable to those found in Outlook.
What will make it even better is the ability to import my mail from Outlook Express and handle about 10000 emails in a folder.
When it supports shared calenders then it will be great. Want to know why that feature is important? Well simply because the office manager can enter everyone's schedule into it and then everyone else can look at it to see where they're supposed to be, or if someone is gonna be going on vacation.
But all in all, it's a great program and I reall hope it keeps on improving. Now if only they got on of the MTA's to mimic the functionality of Exchange, as one easy to use package, then THAT would be awesome! I'd be able to convince my company to switch in no time.
Watch a bunch of half-truths and misrepresentations of facts. He starts out comparing search to Netscape without actually testing it (quote:"Netscape Messenger would probably [emphasis mine] take a minute or longer." Then he talks about Windows 9x security. What does that have to do with a mail client. How many large companies out there actually use 98 and not 2000 anyway.
And he talks almost entirely about these so-called miraculous new features (mail sorting, etc.) with almost no mention as to downsides. It is such a disgusting piece of non-reporting/advertising that it disgusts me to look at it.
Would You Trust a Source Named Anarchy?
.gov.
More than I would trust one ending with
At least the word anarchy (probably) makes you pay attention to what they are saying and force you to evaluate the information critically.
If it passes this evaluation it is, IMHO, more worth than any information you just swallow down because some source with "authority" tells you.
This is one of the good things about slashdot too. Half of what is posted here is rubbish, there are true gems here too. But you have to use your intellect to find them.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
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.
.VBS's toast the system when some sap forgot to disable them, or didn't realize upgrading Outlook with the default settings would put support for them back in.
I don't see what this has to do with Outlook.
I think the quote was misleading, or just assumed we'd assume. Windows/Outlook is inherently inferior because users have too many privileges on the system, which lets those
If I was to run Evolution on Windows I'd have exactly the same problem
There's no scripting support in evolution (at least, not yet). I don't know of any security problems with it. I'm sure someone could configure it to make Word the default editor, thus allowing that MS flaw of surpassing macro checks, but that's not "inherent". Outlook tries to do too much, which is a recipee for disaster. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Part of the reason you'd emulate what the majority of people are using is to make it easier for them to transition to your software. You can't expect the majority of home users to want to switch to OSS if they'd have to relearn what might have taken them a long time to learn previously (and no, anyone that's had to try to help home users learn software can attest that this isn't an exaggeration).
:)
Businesses are the same way. They've trained users on the software they need to do their jobs. While the total cost of OSS may be lower, we can't forget that switching to OSS would incur training costs more than likely. By making OSS emulate the competitor, you provide an extra enticement for switching.
Yeah, we might not like how some of the MS stuff looks, but the one good thing about most OSS software is that it's often times easy to customize the interface
-Dave
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Console-based and keyboard-based apps can have excellent usability, as applications like Emacs show. What they don't have is "usability for beginners"--it takes a while to get proficient at them. But once people are proficient at them, they can be more efficient with them than in GUI-based systems.
It is true that this may limit their adoption in corporations, but it is absolutely not true that therefore we all should settle on user interfaces that make making easy things easy to learn their number one priority.
Also, few if any of the old clients have collaboration features like Outlook -- they are email clients and nothing else.
Gee, this is no coincidence. In the UNIX world, collaboration and group applications happen in the file system. This is doubtlessly confusing for people who are used to Windows, but it has worked very well for the last 30 years on UNIX systems. Windows/Evolution-style systems don't look like an improvement over that.
Don't get me wrong: Evolution is a nifty E-mail client, and it will doubtlessly attract many users, in particular users coming from Windows. However, neither Windows nor Evolution are the single gold standard for usability--there is not single gold standard for usability. There are many different kinds of user interfaces and many different kinds of people. Let's not fall into the Windows/Gates trap of believing that one size fits all.
Users on a subscription model don't have to worry about licensing issues in the same way that a dog chained to a post doesn't have to worry about trampeling its neighbors' lawns.
Apples-to-apples comparison would be Lotus Domino, and it supports _at least_ 3x more users per box than Exchange does, and it also provides a more functionality, such as server-side 'agent' (script) support that runs in a secure sandbox, and much better database management and search features.
Exchange is just bloatware royale. Once glance at the convoluted architeture diagrams in the MS books should tell you that. It's a X.400 system that was in development for 7 years before it hit the market just in time to have the requirements move out from under it. Consequentally it's got all sorts of RPC and SMTP functionality plastered on to it while still retaining a legacy Jet backend.
I highly suspect that MS will eventually junk the the thing and replace it with something much more scalable and straight-forward (probably based on a MS-SQL store).
Really the only thing positive about Exchange is the calendaring functionality, and that's all done by client-side magic. And while Outlook is good for the 'in-the-box' features, it's a really crappy platform for anything custom that you might need.
I mostly use windows with outlook. I am pretty fed up with outlook (slow, unstable, insecure, vendor lock in and hard to export mail/addresses without losing information) and would like an alternative. I've been looking for a serious alternative for a while. I specifically dislike Netscape (too slow, insists on running in the same process as my browser), Eudora (too ugly/old) and Pegasus (too ugly/old)and consider them to be inferior options and haven't seen any other comparable mail clients (in fact I consider outlook express to be better than any of these). There are plenty of other mail clients but they all lack features.
Specifically I want HTML in my mail but no scripting (unlike the popular beliefs here, outlook can provide this functionality). This disqualifies any command-line clients. I want flexible filtering. I receive a lot of mail and filtering is essential to me. Outlook is pretty good in this area too. I don't use/care about calendering right now but may need it in the future. It needs to be fast. Outlook does not scale well. Searches take forever in my mailbox and sometimes it just sits there for minutes doing god knows what for no obvious reason leaving me waiting to read/send some mail.
Evolution looks like it has most of the features I need and I would consider using it instead of Outlook. I like the concept of a virtual folder and would probably use such a feature to organize my mail (1 virtual folder for each of my colleagues, 1 folder per topic I'm working on, 1 with everything in it, etc.). Because it is open source I have some level of confidence it performs well and is secure. If only it had a win32 version.
I think being crossplatform would convince a lot of organizations of standardizing on evolution. Reality dictates that most companies need to use ms office and depend on calendering. However, a lot of people are very annoyed by the continueing stream of outlook related security breaches. Most large companies have lost valuable time fixing such issues in the past few years. I'm an advanced user and know how to dodge security issues in outlook but it still is annoying.
If evolution is anywhere near as good as it is claimed to be, a lot of people would switch if it was available on their platform of choice. I certainly would give it some serious consideration.
Jilles
"As much as this pains me, here is the bleek future of All-Things-Open-Source...... Regardless of it's security and speed, Exchange is on top and will remain there. Especially once .NET comes out and applications go to a subscription model. The subscription model will pretty much send the open source movement back about ten years. In a subscription based model, IT managers pay a yearly fee and never ever have to worry about upgrades, patches or licensing issues."
As opposed to Open Source where the IT managers pay nothing for upgrades and patches and doesn't have to worry about licenses?
I'm sure it's possible to get it working, by reading some how-to's and following the instructions, but I never could. (under RedHat 7.2).
Compare this to the Windows version, where most folks can achieve sync with Palm Desktop simply by plugging in the device and running setup.exe.
Evolution seems to assume that you are already syncing the Palm with another Linux tool, when in fact, lots of folks might be starting from scratch. I'd like to see this improved to the point where they have a setup widget for Palm devices that starts from nothing, loads appropriate drivers, and then allows you to sync all your data with Evolution with no fuss.
You can chalk this up to not being nerdy enough, but really, I don't think you should have to be a sysadmin to setup a Palm.
no, it's one MORE reason to switch.
Most people don't want to get rid of Outlook because of the UI. If they want to switch away from Outlook it's because they want to get away from proprietary software and/or Microsoft in particular. Who know swhat their reason is, but 99% of the itme the reason is not the UI.
Being able to go to another client with the same look & feel is important, just like having the ability to import mail from your older client.
The less time it takes you to get into the swing of things in the new environment, the more likely you are to switch.
If there is one fundamental rule that you can rely on, it's "people do not like change".
The problem is, even if you're not using the extra groupware functionality, you still can't get as many mailboxes on an Exchange server. It doesn't scale down well at all (like most Microsoft products - they're designed for full use of all the bells 'n whistles at all times).
Here are some of the things that we have that work, and work well. So far, we have:
kdevelop - development environment
KDE3 - desktop environment
Evolution - mail, PIM, colaboration (albeit, you need the Connector to use Exchange Server)
Mozilla/Konqueror - pick one. Browser, o'course. And there are others that are 'satisfactory' for most tasks as well.
Xine/mplayer/xmms - media
PDF viewer - many are available that work well.
samba client component - combined w/ all the various file managers for X, it's equally as functional as the Windows clients.
These items are getting there, but still need a lot of/some help:
GIMP - 'replace' photoshop. Still needs a lot of work on making it easier to use for 'non-script writing' users. Several generations behind Photoshop in that respect, but quite/just as powerful for a technically advanced artist.
OpenOffice - I'd say it's arrived for most things, if it were able to deal with Word documents and had revision history support. There are just too many documents out there that are in Word format that will still need to be read and written to. Those features need to be supported.
gnumeric - as far as I know, it should be able to do anything someone needs to do, but I've never really used Excel or gnumeric, besides for some very basic work. It did what I needed it to.
There might be some commericial solutions to these things (WineX, for instance), but the idea is to not have to rely on MS's horrid licensing extortion, etc.
Here are the main applications that I feel are the main things that are keeping linux back on the desktop in companies:
AutoCAD - there really aren't any OSS CAD solutions, let alone one that's comparable to AutoCAD. IMO, the best thing AutoDesk could do would be to release a version of their software for linux. The (possible) added development that would be necessary to port it would be beneficial to the overall stability of their product as well. I really don't see there being an OSS solution for AutoCAD in the near future, unless it's an abstration layer. CAD is such a complex, involved item and would require a high degree of backward compatability.
Complete independence from any Microsoft product - Unless this happens, MS will still have a strong foothold on manipulating the industry, and will make things general hell for everyone else involved as long as possible.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers