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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."
Am I the only person that wonders why MS hasn't sued the crap out of Ximian yet? As far as look and feel goes, Ximian Evolution is as close to Outlook in terms of apperance as it could get. The only real differences in user experience exist in areas where functionality differs in such a way as to necessarily alter the UI.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I can testify to that.. evolution handles my folders with 20000+ messages very gracefully indeed.
Beware of machines with 128Mb RAM though.
I think there is a simple fact you are overlooking in the difference. The average Joe user doesn't give a damn about how it works and why it works. Joe just wants it to work. He will plod along and open attachments without thinking and spread viruses again and again and again.
Asking Joe to install security patches and turn off options to make his Outlook more secure is like asking a horse to bark. If he could understand what you are saying, he wouldn't do it anyway.
If his e-mail client AND OS are built secure from the ground up, then Joe will have to make an effort to compromise his system.
Yet a much more important issue is the other direction - open and freely accessible groupware protocols implemented by a free-as-in-speech server solution, with Outlook connectivity provided by a Windoze plugin. For example, the Bill Workgroup Server takes this approach.
Microsoft Exchange is not the only major proprietary groupware solution - Lotus Notes is here to stay, to be even more proprietary - it's quite impossible to read or write Lotus NSF files with anything but Lotus software. Free groupware standards exist and should be used by anyone. The user should have free choice between PHPgroupware, Evolution, Outlook and Lotus Notes, similar to IMAP providing choice between lots of different email clients.
I've been using Evolution 1.03 built from sources using Gentoo and I have been extremely happy with it. Evolution will even underline your spelling errors which my Outlook98 would not do. I imported six years worth of email which was an 800MB Outlook PST file and have some folders with over 6,000 messages. The filter functions are very powerful and I'm able to filter out spam very easily. There still is the odd bug that I encounter but none have been show stoppers that prevent its use. I'm sure those will be fixed soon. Evolution was the program that allowed me to use Linux as my primary computer. I only boot Windows to run my tax program and accounting programs now. I might try Plex86 to see if I can run my Windows legacy applications within Linux. Goodbye Outlook. /g
And, of course, cost aside, this also implies that a shop with microsoft-free aspirations currently has to buckle under and purchase at least one Windows server/exchange combo, plus hire or contract the skill to administer the beast. This is exactly what happened to my small company recently. We were going to go Linux (and in fact our Web site and time tracking server were Linux-based), but being a "virtual" company, with everyone working out of our homes, we required strong group collaboration. So, reluctantly, in came the W2K Server box running nothing but Exchange. If only there were a Linux-based option (even if it weren't OSS!). And yes, we looked at Notes, but I don't even want to go there... Of course there used to be OpenMail by HP (I think) but that's been sold off, is unavailable, and we can only wait and see where that goes (and, regardless, it won't be OSS).
Now that a polished, capable client exists, it would be fantastic to complete the offering with a server.
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"Anarchy" was Alan Cox's user name with SUCS when they started work on NET3.
A lot of people trust his source now.
"Am I the only person that wonders why MS hasn't sued the crap out of Ximian yet?"
Sort of. I don't know why MS hasn't sued them, but I'm more curious as to why Miguel/Ximian insists on copying *everything* MS does. I have a strong dislike of Outlook's UI, and so there's no chance I'm going to use Evolution - it looks exactly the same as it's non-free competitor. Yiick!
Gnumeric of course was the first such example. Use a windows-like GTK theme and you'll have trouble telling the difference between it and Excel. Doesn't Gnumeric also use a VB-like scripting language? I know the function library is very similar.
Then there's the whole Mono/.NET thing. C#, the intermediate format, the runtime - it's all a Java clone, but dancing to MS's tune rather than Sun's. Given how the majority of the Free Software / OSS community has shun Java, why are these guys jumping on what is essentially the same bandwagon, albeit one that's shiny new and pink, rather than a more mature one?
ObJavaFreeSoftwareDisclosure: I *am* a free software Java developer, so I guess I am biased here.. but honestly, what gives?
Anyone taking bets on Ximian's next product? An IE clone based on Gecko? A shoddy OS based on Linux? Sendmail with GUI just like Exchange's?
Mike.
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
Also, while I agree that technically, dealing with newsgroups is similar to dealing with mailboxes, the two have always been semantically different in my mind. Whether your email is stored locally or on a server, and whether the news articles are on a server or cached locally, email tends to have more of a "sense of mineness" about it. By that I mean, e.g., I would expect my email program to let me set up a filter that puts any email with "narts" in the subject into my narts.com mailbox, but I would be very surprised if my newsreader allowed me to set up such a "filter" for putting things into alt.narts. Deletion is similar in its different meanings in each context.
Basically, I think there is a UI issue to resolve. Namely, an interface that is too consistent across the two applications risks implying more similarity than is really justified, while inconsistency requires the user to learn twice as many interfaces. I think the second option is better (though I don't know how best to go about it), since in either case, the user is going to have to learn two sets of semantics. The second one makes this explicit by also requiring the learning of two sets of syntax.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
First, a user doesn't REQUIRE full access to a Windows system. Just like UNIX, I can log in as root if I want, but it's not always a good idea. Set your users up to be just users and they'll have a harder time killing the system. Outlook 2000 is always more secure in regards to viruses. It won't let you run many attachments directly, and it will prompt you before letting something access your address book.
Second, Evolution costs more than Outlook in an Exchange environment. When you buy an Exchange client license you get with it an Outlook license. If I were to use Evolution I'd still have to purchase the Exchange client license PLUS the Evolution connector for Exchange. So, it's not always cheaper.
Finally, I consider Exchange to be Microsoft's best product. The server is very robust and extremely reliable. A good Exchange admin can set up Exchange and only needs to do minor maintenance and it'll run itself. Notice I said a GOOD admin...not just someone off the street. My Exchange servers run until something else, such as a hardware repair or firmware update, requires me to restart the system. The only software restarts I have to do usually are the fault of anti-virus software getting hung. Now that we've switched to Antigen those have gone away as well.
I use Outlook at work... because I have to. Ok, so I could get a job at a place that doesn't use Windows, but I'm trying to get the ignorant to open their eyes and migrate. I'll save that story for another time...
But I've been using Outlook at work for years, including all of its "advanced" features like custom forms. I've been using Evolution at home for maybe 6 months. I deal with up to 100 emails a day at work and I have to say Outlook's scalability absolutely sucks. To keep it running at any reasonable speed, I let it "auto-archive". When my local mail box was about 85mb, the client was just too slow. Searches could take 3 or 4 minutes (on a fast machine). And the custom forms are horrible. I'll never use them again. We also tried importing a few thousand contacts through Outlook (to Exchange), but beyond maybe 100 for a single Outlook user, it grinds to a screeching hault.
It may sound silly, but my favorite feature of Evolution that's not in Outlook (97 at least) is the discussion threaded e-mail view. On a mailing list, for example, I can see a tree of the conversation and read it in conversation order rather than date. It's such a little thing, but that's really handy. With that, it's nice, easy configuration, it's speed, and all the other great features others are posting about, overall I prefer Evolution.
One other thing about it that relates to every Windows and KDE/GNOME app: Linux desktops are multi-threaded properly so windows will never freeze with an app and the desktop won't freeze unless the destop app itself has a problem. If Outlook freezes, well I've got to see that frozen windows until if and when I can "end task" and all of the other apps run slowly around it, when the desktop doesn't feel like freezing also. When connected to a big e-mail server, proper multi-threading is a great feature for the client to have.
Developers: We can use your help.
Nonetheless, if one was an SA or esp in management (of an SA group), I would think that finding an e-mail client that offered similar functionality, better security and ease-of-use as compared to Outlook would be welcomed. Particularly when these "idiot" e-mail viruses continue to be a problem. They waste the time of the SA group (cleaning up the mess) and kill productivity for the poor saps that are "victims" by opening these viruses. Finally, due to the similarity between Evolution and Outlook, a memo describing the new e-mail client and that it works like Outlook would likely suffice for transition.
The fact that it DOESN'T run on Windows is an issue that will hopefully be resovled, although doesn't affect me, I admit...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
... what about the hordes of people who use Windows? And want to continue doing so?
I'm desperately looking for a new email client. I'm still using Eudora Lite 3.16 at home, simply because I haven't found anything to replace it with. The newer versions of Eudora are laden with spyware and ads. I looked at Pegasus and disliked it. Outlook and Outlook Express have nice ease of use, but we all know the utter lack of built-in security (this is Win98SE btw).
Yeah, I'm probably going to nuke one of my boxes and put Linux back on it soon, but I'll still have a Windows box around for playing games, and it's likely to be my main PC while Linux is my putter/hack TiVo box.
So, any suggestions on a decent Windows email client? I was really hoping Ximian was cross-compiled, but it doesn't appear so.
...is its lovely behavior of permanently saving every email as a file in your directory, even if you're using something like an IMAP server where the whole point is *not* to save messages locally. This leads to two problems:
1. My quota gets eaten twice. I lose the mail quota for having mail stored on the server, plus I lose disk quota for the local copies.
2. The directory is created with your default permissions, which for most shared systems include readability by others in the organization. I have been able to wander through other Evolution users' home directories and read their email. Joe User is not going to have a *clue* that this could be happening.
OK, sure, local caching is good, but use some compression or encryption or *something*. (And yes, I still use it, because it's the nicest client out there. But security is not *that* hard.)
I'm a fan of evolution, but it still can't sych mail messages with my palm (it will for calender, contacts, and such). I'm just hoping this feature will be integrated in the future.
Oh yeah, is there any easy way to transfer outlook messages to Evolution (I've only used some dumb roundabout ways)
www.prochange.org
We have already coded an initial version of virus and spam filtering, along with integration to the open source Apache James mail server. The project is in need of more developers, so be sure to take a look at the website!
I'm not saying that OSes should be somewhat secure by default, and Microsoft has been doing a better job of this as of late, however you can't make them uber locked down systems like most geeks have, it will just piss them off.
Exactly. In most cases security goes directly against usability. Why do I have to log into my *home* machine? Why do I have to log in as admin/root to install a new application? Why can I only run this particular program as admin/root? These are all questions that the typical home user will ask when using their home machine. Having to do these things ends up making the machine less usable to the home user(albeit more secure).
As a large company we have to use MS apps that are a few years old for security and stability reasons. We're now slowly migrating to Windows 2000. We didn't consider it stable until the middle of last year (I still don't like it...). Most large companies, from what I've been researching, are only migrating to Win2K because support for NT is going to end soon. Most won't just to XP because of instability, too many bugs, and too many security holes. It's become an industry standard to wait a year after an MS app is released before using it in production.
Also, if Outlook 97 has worked until now, why pay many thousands of dollars to upgrade to a new version which contains at minimum the same number of bugs and security holes. Any minor new features aren't worth it. We're now forced into MS's upgrade cycle.
Developers: We can use your help.
This actually kind of supports my original point, though. Some functions of a newsgroup "filter" would be present in the email counterpart, but you are not going to have 100% feature overlap (without majorly crippling either or both). That being the case, you either force the user to remember what kind of filter they are dealing with, or make it difficult for them to be confused (by using, as you suggest different color schemes, widgets, layouts, and terminology).
An example of this in Unix would be regexes and globs: they are similar, but by giving them different names (instead of using vague words like "wildcard" or "pattern") and trying to make it clear when and where each is used, we avoid confusion and errors.
BTW, I have a great example of email/news confusion; in college, my friends and I commandeered an unused school newsgroup for a little while. I showed my girlfriend how to access it from pine (de facto standard school email client), and she ended up hitting "R" to reply to a news message of mine, incorrectly assuming that this would perform the same function as it does when reading mail. Of course, the newsgroup function would more accurately be called "follow up", as it responds with a *public* message. Basically, if the pine interface had differentiated a little better between the two UIs (or, mea culpa, if I'd explained it a little better to begin with), it would have prevented a little bit of embarrasment on the parts of my friends and me.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Many OS X users (like me) have been frustrated with MS's lack of a true Exchange client. The current client they have in Office X is Entourage, doesn't support any Outlook functionality. After reading the glowing review of Evolution and doing a little Google searching, it seems there may be an OS X port of Evolution soon!
- hackers/2002-April/004332.html
According to the Evolution hacker list, there is a port underway, though no posts have been made in the last month.
http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution
It would be sweet irony if OS X users got 1) an email client for OS X that could deal with Exchange but not from MS, that 2) was better than Outlook itself.
One thing I'm not clear on is Evolution's functionality. Can it handle all of Exchange's functions like being able to schedule meeting rooms and other resources, tasks, etc? If so, I could see a large number of users in my company dump their OS 9/Windows boxes and pick up new Macs running OS X...