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Has Anyone Used Evolution in an Enterprise?

Posted by Cliff on from the getting-its-foot-in-the-door dept.

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?"

5 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. I tried it on Linux in an Outlook 2000 environment by toygeek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I tried it on Linux in an Outlook 2000 environtment. It worked relatively good, except it does not handle attachments in the same manner. For example when changing shifts we'll send a "start here" type of email to our public address that we all check. Outlook lets you open those attachments (which are .eml files, a handoff of all the email that needs to be answered at the time of the shift change) and Evolution does not. It will only display them in series in the attachment window. Not very handy. So, I did not use it. I had to go back to Windows with Outlook 2002.

    Hopefully it'll work out better for you.

    --
    Nobodies Prefect
    Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
  2. Evolution exchange tunnel almost works by mpechner · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I paid the $70 for the evolution tunnel. It crashed because my task list uses a custom view.

    Otherwise it seems fine. But if your users use custom views, you will be an unhappy system adminstrator.

    Without the tunnel, I find the calendar and task list managment to be unusable.

    Try looking into citrix instead. Get one really beefy box and make it a citrix server.

    Unfortunately, I find OWA and Mozilla to be awkward.

    But I.E 6.0 and OWA for exchange 2000 is quite usable.

  3. Re:Is there connector version for solaris? by AndyElf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    yep, solaris indeed is listed as supported. as for 'gnome-only' -- you don't have to have *all* of gnome, albeit a large portion of it...

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    --AP
  4. Crossover Office by sunbane · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We tried evolution for our solaris and linux users and found it fairly buggy and SLOW hooking into exchange. So we have switched our efforts to crossover office server (run on a server and export office clients to solaris/linux workstations) and that allows the solaris guys to actually use outlook itself. We are still in the evaluation stages, but it is looking pretty promising. You might want to give that an eval as well. Both codeweavers and ximian will give you evaluation licenses as needed so I'd say give them both a try.

  5. I did.. by MichaelMarch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I got about 5 people to beta test linux. Everyone was realitivly happy with the results except for the small learning curve on how to use the copy and paste command.

    There was one thing that everyone complained about that is a "Most" used feature in Outlook 97/Express and that is the ability to make "read recipts" option. For this simple reason I had to scrap it all and use the Lotus Calader and Outlook Express. However we now use Open Office for our word processing and save everything as a PDF that is sent to the clients.