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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?"

4 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. yeah but... by DShard · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:yeah but... by nocomment · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      /* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
      /* http://allyourbasearebelongto.us */
  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. 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.