Has Anyone Used Evolution in an Enterprise?

Sikmaz asks: "We have a few Solaris clients that our graphics department uses, they are now requesting access to our exchange server from those systems. They currently use IMAP to connect using Mozilla Mail but they want to view calendars and tasks. I know that Evolution works on Solaris so I am investigating using it in this instance and in a few other areas where we run various flavors of Unix/Linux. Does anyone have any experience in using the Evolution Connector in an Enterprise environment? Was it stable and how well did it scale? Since it pretty much runs on OWA should I just get another Front-end server to run OWA just for this purpose or is it stable enough to run on one of our current OWA servers? How well does it mimic all of Outlooks features, does it do all of the Calendaring/group collaboration features?"

Comments

yeah but...

[DShard]

I haven't used it to connect to exchange.

I have tried to use it to connect to groupwise. !.2 worked liked a dream. 1.4-1.4.5 are broken though. It chokes on large downloads as seen on about 5 different distros so I would easily say it's a bug. If it wasn't so annoying I would find amusement in the fact that they were bought by Novell. Nor does it support groupwises calendering yet. Although LDAP works like a charm for addresses.

As a side note Thunderbird works just fine, albeit slow. My guess is it is a timeout problem 1/2 server 1/2 evolution.

Re:yeah but...

[nocomment]

I havn't used it to connect to exchange either, but beware: You WILL have problems if you try install on Solaris 9. While evolution is compatible solaris 9, the installer isn't. It's often easier to install solaris 8 (when you can) and upgrade to 9. If you have clients already running on 9 be prepared for some tough installs. There is some source code available if you browse google groups, that you can use to compile a custom version of "uname" (although I never got it to work). I did try making a bash script and naming it uname. It took basic inputs and reported the system to be solaris 8. That got me farther, but never succesfully all the way through. Why exchange by the way? Can't you just install phpgroupware and use that calender? It's compatible with the iCal protocol. Exchange sucks IMHO.

Outlook Web Access

[OrangeSpyderMan]

I believe that the Connector requires that Outlook Web Access be available on your E2K server - so watch you don't get bitten by that if you choose not to allow web access to your Exchange.

Re:Mozilla has a calendar

[josepha48]

Um not it seems still alive to me http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

Problem is that you need to install a webdav web server and then setup the read / write access lists to it. This means that you need to have apache or some other web dav server and stuff. I have it running at home and using apache, webdav, mozilla and moz calendar, with phpcalendar I can provide a calendar system that allows for basic calendaring. It works for me at home, but I have not tried it in the work place.