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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?"
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.
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.
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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.
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...
--AP
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.
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.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
My experiences of using Eudora to connect to the corporate Exchange server were limited to using email, and I was unable to get the Calendar, Address Book or Task Manager to sync with the server, but this was with the stock Eudora that came with RedHat 9. Email worked brilliantly though, but I had to give up my lone RedHat box in the end for the standard XP configuration due to my lack of access to the printer and shared calendar / address book. You may have more luck with Evolution Connector though (I'm working on the assumption here that Evolution and Evolution Connector are different products).
--Muzz
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.
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.
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The US Postal system has been using Evolution in the Enterprise for years. Every few years, a worker kills the slowest and/or stupidest of his co-workers. This is supposed to yield a faster, sleeker organization.
Results have been disappointing so far.
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