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Novell to port Evolution to Windows
Gladiat0r writes "Nat Friedman blogged on Planet Gnome today that Novell has hired Tor Lillqvist (of Gimp for Windows fame) to help Fredrik Hedberg port Beagle to Windows, and after that his main task is to port Evolution to Windows."
there sure are a lot of open source hippies getting jobs today.
Finally, a real client will be available for OSS calendaring. Granted, Sunbird is giving it a go, but I think that this will be warm and fuzzy for corporate users. This is a Good Thing!
Sure, take all the nice Linux applications over to Windows...don't worry about porting the nice Windows apps over to Linux though. Nope, we're fine...We'll just run them at half speed with WINE or something...
If this encourages companies to move away from Microsoft's office organiser software, it could make it easier for them to migrate to Linux. Interesting.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
I hear Kentucky has already started the port of Creationism to Windows. Lets hope the right team delivers first.
This write-up is pretty short. Maybe a sentence about Evolution would be nice.. or at least a link to a webpage about it.
I run wine with the dll's from 98 (legal version) and have no speed issues.
Seeing as how the submitter neglected to link to the actual announcement, here it is: http://nat.org/2005/january/#17-January-2005
Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
Would Mozilla also get involved with the project? I would like to see some open source competition on the Win32 platform resulting in a real alternative to Outlook.
Tor did a lot of work on porting gtk and gimp to windows and because of that, today gimp works as good or at least almost as good as it does in unix, and is a great competitor to photoshop.
Seems that his work payed off for him. Congrats Tor, and keep up the good work.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
..would be a point that very well could begin to erode MS's stronghold. Sure, it will keep you using Exchange for the short term. But some kind of migration tool to turn all those mbx's into openexchange or another OSS backend could make the transition on the desktop seamless.
There goes the last hurdle in your IT budget for Windows boxes. Now there's no reason to buy Office! I'll gladly pay say..a $100 for a nice port of Evolution per box. Save me all sorts of money.
This guy is way out there
I mean let's bring all the greatest OS-programs to the Windows platform. Just what Microsoft needs to strengthen it's monopoly: even more great applications on Windows. Of course many people will get in touch with Firefox and now Evo but they won't make the switch to a free platform. But still, I'd love to get my desktop users off of Outlook and this might be a real alternative for them.
I am just not sure if OpenSource should battle Microsoft on their own ground. They can change the rules anytime they like. And they have done so before...
Does Beagle support an open extension API for third-party developers to add extension support to it?
:-S OK, not sure how open it is, haven't looked into it, however it's an extension API documented here.
I've found this being something missing in Google, Copernic, X1, and Yahoo! Search which is a variant of X1. Basically all of them, except... (you'll never see this coming) Microsoft's new desktop search engine.
Please let Beagle get something like that if it hasn't already, so we don't have to rely on their developers to add everything we want. If Beagle become well used due to being open source and all, that could become a huge advantage to it, with the most obscure formats indexed in an intelligent way with metadata extracted, etc.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
""Nat Friedman blogged on Planet Gnome today that Novell has hired Tor Lillqvist (of Gimp for Windows fame) to help Fredrik Hedberg port Beagle to Windows, and after that his main task is to port Evolution to Windows.""
It would be much better if he ported "Creationism" over, and leave "Evolution" for the more enlightened.
....both Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird is dead! The BEST groupware client ever made is now heading to Windows.
This will really help getting Outlook out of the workplace.
Do you have any idea how many companies can not replace windows because they depend on Outlook?
Another great step on the way to migration.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This is great news for GTK+ on Win32, which has always suffered speed and look-and-feel problems on the win32 platform. When a big application like Evolution gets ported from one platform to another, the base libraries such as libgtk, pango, and the like can only benefit. I look forward to the speed improvements and bug fixes in the win32 versions of gtk. This should really bolster the cross-platform nature of gtk.
I'd rather see the development of Thunderbird/Sunbird than Evolution.
TB/SB is already cross platform and has a better framework than Evolution.
Last I checked, Beagle 2 was delivered to the general vincinity of Mars just fine. Granted, maybe it was delivered just a few meters too deep, but on a distance of millions of kilometers, who's counting?
One of the strongest reasons Microsoft is putting in the table when comparing Office vs Open source alternatives is the availability of Outlook. We've Openoffice, we've firefox, we've thunderbird, but we didn't have a Outlook alternative.
That was certainly stopping many people from switching to Openoffice. With Evolution ported to windows, it's no longer the case, and having the exchange connector even more. Nice news.
They don't even have a beagle port for Linux yet! Easy jabs aside, why are you porting software that is still in version 0.0.4 that most users can't get to work on their native system? Maybe working on cross-compatibility from the ground up is the idea, but Beagle could really use some full time programmers just getting it to work, period, and then maybe get Dashboard up and running for non-hackers.
- Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.
- OpenOffice.org instead of Office
- Evolution instead of Outlook
When Windows users can easily move w/o doing any "scary" OS change and try out open source applications "risk free", they'll be more likely to try.The last, most significant jump will be made smaller and easier, after new users become comfortable with that suite of applications.
Namely, Linux instead of Windows.
Which is down where an OS should be; a standard commodity, interchangeable, free, stable and not full of Innovations® like HTML renderers, special codec media players.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If people use Windows apps at work, and can't use them back at home on their Linux boxes, they will just stick with Windows.
If people can use the same apps at work and at home on Windows and on Linux, full migration can be done.
Cheers,
Adolfo
- Exchange Server Integration
- Calendar Integration
- Bluetooth Integration
I, for one, will be anxiously awaiting a release.http://gatewayink.com
am quite happy about this. go novell!
If you can get everybody interested in a suite of applications and API's that will work on something other than Windows, then it frees them to switch.
The problem you have right now is that companies will balk at the notion of going to Linux on the desktop because they don't have Outlook and Office. If you can convince them of the value of alternatives on Windows, it opens the door to move them to Linux down the road.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Maybe they could free up some moolah to pay someone to take up the Aqua port of OpenOffice, since they're being so generous of late. *sigh*
This is a great alternative for those forced to use Outlook but possibly even better for those forced to use Groupwise.
Plus endless vertical market apps which do one or two weird things, so won't yet run under WINE.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This will also help Linux as well. As soon as more Windows people start using OSS on windows (such as firefox, evolution, beagle, and open office) instead of Microsoft products (IE, Outlook, .NET stuff, MS Office) the easier it is for them to move onto a new OSS OS! Once they are used to the apps, the switch is as easy as "do you want a new software that runs all of your apps, thats built safer than windows and is free like the apps you are used to?"
For those that doubt, please note that this IS a way to help Linux. I recently switched because I knew that my most used software in XP (Firefox) worked great in Linux.
Open Source Sushi
..."the left team"? (-:
Anyway, computers didn't evolve, they were progressively created. Hugh Ross must be fairly happy about that.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
(Your probably gonna mod this as flamebait for me saying this) Make no mistake about it, cross platform applications are good for the open source movement. They spread awareness of how good Open Source can be, and give people a viable free (as in beer, as in choice) alternative. However, people crying about how certain applications should only stay on "certain" operating systems are hypocrites. This is supposed to be about freedom of choice, right? This isn't supposed to be about the freedom to only work on a "particular, politically correct, operating system."
Requiem
Now we just need a Winderz port of Planner to complete the set of apps. Then there will be free software apps to replace everything MS sells for Windows. This will change nothing for those of us running Linux, and it will offer zero incentive for anyone to change. OTOH, they can change one app at a time until it's time to switch the OS too.
Even "The Magic 8 Ball" is smart, and knows Microsoft Sucks. It says "Outlook Not Good."
Actually, if you read the judge's ruling in that case, they'd have to prove that they weren't putting the stickers on primarily for marketing purposes if they wanted to continue applying them.
I've always thought the holo stickers were a bit of a two-edged sword; after all, if it was "designed for Windows", what else could it have been designed for?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
We've had pretty good alternatives to Word and Excel available on Windows for years. But the retraining and file compatibility issues prevent most people from going over.
Now if people suddenly start abandoning Word, Excel, Outlook, and Internet Explorer for cross-platform alternatives, then sure, everybody would start asking "Why are we paying all those licensing fees for Windows when Linux is free?" Don't see that happening any time soon.
I meant to ask about first-party Microsoft products. I could list a ton of Windows-only client-side programs from third parties.
It works on all the popular platforms, giving it an real edge over Outlook.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
He says, Grinning, ducking, running.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The beta part is having Evolution connect to a Groupwise server, which is rather unlike servers that Evolution was originally intended to connect to. If you are running Linux and want to connect to a Groupwise server you can use Groupwise client for Linux. Groupwise server supports the Outlook client so what it appears they may be actually doing is making a transition of the groupware client from Groupwise while retaining the server component, cross-platform. It would be a lovely thing indeed. Novell server products tend to be excellent. Client products like the Groupwise client historically blows dogs.
So once your MS-Windows users are all using FireFox, OpenOffice, Evolution it's not such a big deal to swap the expensive, unreliable and difficult-to-maintain virus flypaper for an OS which is stable, easy to maintain and free of spyware.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
and after that his main task is to port Evolution to Windows."
An obscure company called "Microsoft" have already beaten him to it.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Just wish I could run Beagle on Linux it requires an inotify enabled kernel and the patches haven't made it in to the mainline kernel yet.
I'm really pleased to hear that Evolution is moving towards becoming cross platform. If it makes its way to the Macintosh as well I might finally have an alternative to Thunderbird. I'm a huge open source advocate but I do not (indeed cannot) just use linux. I use Windows, OS X, linux (SuSE) and some other systems from time to time. If an application isn't cross platform, it's generally not much use to me and I think I'm not alone. All other things being equal (and sadly they rarely are) I'll always pick an open source app over a close source one but for me at least it has to be cross platform as well to receive serious consideration as an addition to my desktop toolkit. It's also a heck of a lot easier for me to promote open source software if I don't have to convince people to switch operating systems or work methods in the process.
I use Firefox, Thunderbird and GIMP regularly. Now and then I use OpenOffice, though I need to use MS Office still most of the time for compatibility reasons. There are a few applications I haven't been able to replace on one platform or another. I'm still stuck with Quicken on Windows/Mac. GNUcash just isn't there yet as it is still stuck on linux and doesn't have all the features I need either. I'm also stuck with Palm Desktop which is Windows only as there is no cross platform syncing capability for my Tungsten T3. Thunderbird despite being a great email application isn't good enough at syncing for addresses and it can't handle calendars, notes, memos, voice memos, pictures or anything else I need to sync.
I'm hopefuly too that someone will solve the calendar compatibility problem in a platform independant manner. I'm REALLY tired of having separate and incompatible address books for Thunderbird, Palm Desktop, Gmail, etc. Why this hasn't been an "itch" to anyone with some mad programming skilz (not me sadly), I cannot fathom.
Kontact works for me - much faster than Mozilla calendar, and doesn't require a webdav server (shared IMAP folder works.)
Gimps new interface is a lot better. Ie it had a bad interface to start with. Give a porter lemons you still end up with lemons. Give a porter a good interface you still endup with a good interface.
"modern day commie".
Hippies has feeling too you know!
this is great news - this will help the migrations later when users finally get sick of paying microsoft for viruses and spyware.
...what the heck Evolution is, you can find more info on it here, but it's basically an email/address book/calendar program, a la Outlook, for Gnome. A link in the article itself might have helped, especially since Novell seems to be targetting Windows users like me, who also (coincidentally?) haven't heard of the program.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Namely, Linux instead of Windows
This is what you'll do:
Oh looky what I have in my pocket! A Knoppix (or Knoppix variant) miniCD! With all three major apps!
You then boot up the PC with the live CD and open up Firefox, OOo, and Evolution. You can kiss those per-seat licensing contracts good-bye boss! Helloooo bonus check!
For maximum effect, the small miniCD case has a label in bold letters: RESCUE CD (when all systems are down). But that last part was just me, before I woke up.
"till this day I've not had an alternative to Microsoft Outlook at work"
The whole Small business world has wanted an Outlook alternative on Windows for years now. Evolution is a excellant Outlook clone and finally brings a solid Outlook alternative to Windows not to mention the fact that its OSS. I really really really hope they bring PDA sync over as well. We can't keep waiting around hoping that someday Sunbird gets finished and Thunderbird actually becomes more than a basic pop3 client for home users(a still important role btw).
btw Beagle, on windows...falls over...
A top quality OSS search engine which unlike Google's shitty app might actually work with Firefox and other OSS apps like OO.org? Say it isn't so...
You know I'm still not sure how I feel about Novell's longterm impact on Linux. Being a CNA from a while back my main memories of them are being a big proprietary technology company who screwed up everything they did after Netware 4.11 came out. I will say that in the last year they have finally started to win me over with what they are givning back to the community.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I use MoneyDance. Although its pay for, its Java so cross-platform to an extent, and is good for basic money management. I wish the Gnucash people would at least make some steps to become cross-platform, but nobody seems to be interested in taking the challenge.
Why bother porting Beagle to Windows first? Practice? I'd figure Novell would want to prepare a polished application they can sell, instead of Yet Another Google Desktop Search Alternative.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
I use Kontact on my FC3 box at home for all my communication and calendaring needs. My wife, however, is a Linux-phobe: she approves of the concept, but doesn't trust her ability to learn a new OS, and has too many OS-specific applications on her computer. She's been bemoaning the fact that she's stuck with Outlook for her e-mail/calendaring needs, since there is no OS equivalent available on Windows. Finally, though, there will be an option!
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Sunbird is a personal calendar. It doesn't support or have goals of being an Outlook Calendar replacement.
For one thing sunbird's events are events they aren't tied to users, etc.
It works great for a single person or a small group of people (i use it!) but it would never work well in a situation where events need to be tied to a user.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
And it's sure will connect to the nice Novell Open-Xchange implementation.
Google Desktop can't index the content of emails in anything other than Outlook / ~Express as it doesn't understand the MBOX mail format. Beagle will presumably index ones documents and the contents of their email inbox. If it's really sweet it'll index my OpenOffice docs the same way Google Desktop does my MS Office files.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
At least one Evolution developer has said he would quit if Evolution was ported to Windows.
He's now in a the tough spot of deciding whether to eat his words or actually quit.
I agree totally. MSAccess often gets an undeserved bad rap. Its not designed for enterprise level IT apps, its desigined for end-users to create what they need, now.. and without expensive help.
It is REAL common out there in the business world. It also does quite a bit more then most people will admit to ( or realize ). Its the 'silent member' of MSO and has to be directly addressed.
Until you have something that a *non IT* user can use create forms/queries/reports as easily, then MSO wont be replaceable on a grand scale.
I do see that OO 2.x will have something, but after playing with the betas, its still not going to be for the 'average user'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's all very well, but when are they going to port Wine to Windows?
Yes, it'd be great if it were done faster. Volunteering?
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
If Beagle is already written in Mono/GTK#, shouldn't it already be able to run on Windows, as The Mono Site indicates?
Everybody keeps saying "great, now all my users can move off Outlook". One reason why I personally haven't moved my entire desktop over to Linux is that I can't easily and reliably move all my years' worth of Outlook email, calendar, task, and notes data into Evolution.
So a port of the app is nice, but we also need de-mensa'd data migration tools.
What we need is a really decent GPLed calendaring and groupware backend/server, which supports Outlook as a frontend.
What we don't need is yet another spiffy skinnable GPLed frontend, that supports bloody buggering bastard Microsoft Exchange as a backend!
Until there's a drop-in, OSS replacement for Exchange Server, with all of the functionality (more would be nice), Microsoft will continue to own the groupware arena. OpenMail was shaping up nicely before HP dropped it (I think Samsung(?) picked it up, but they haven't done anything public with it AFAIK, and it sure as hell ain't free). Why is the OSS world so averse to creating a drop-in replacement for Exchange? Almost everything else in the business world has been tackled. Exchange is the last big target.
I love the idea of Evolution being available on more platforms. It's a nice tool.
It's a non-starter to talk about this being a step toward moving away from Windows desktops because of the licensing agreements entrenched with the Exchange licensing.
It's the exchange CAL that drives the costs. Let's say that you throw Outlook out on its ear. You still get to pay the MS tax as long as you use the MS back end.
You want to get rid of the Windows desktop? Get rid of the Exchange server, then get people weaned from Outlook.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
As you may know, Novell has been sponsoring the Mono project to port .NET over to *NIX. Maybe if they port this app for use with, they can kill 2 birds with one stone.
More info on the Mono project here:
Mono
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Evolution is great, and a port to Windows sounds great too. But if Macs aren't included then that's unfortunate. Both Firefox and OpenOffice.org are available across Windows, Mac, Unix, and Linux. It'd be great if a good OSS/FS Email/Groupware combo were cross-platform too.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Now, if the desktop can follow. Announcements like this only help the desktop.
Of course, I'm posting this from Mozilla/Windows as my stupid Canon multifunction printer only supports Windows hence this computer is 90% windows, 10% linux....
What's with Novell's priorities? Why choose to work on yet another search app (everybody is making one these days) *before* porting Evolution (possibly the only real Outlook alternative)? I would think that Evolution for Windows would have a much better chance of bringing Novell some $$ than a search app. I can see people buying a support contract for Evolution, but for desktop search, come on!
Please Novell, deliver us from the evil that is Outlook and let it sync with my palm PDA!
MS' Office suite has a stranglehold in corporate offices but while many people are used to Outlook, using a different email client is not out of the question. It's often Excel and PowerPoint and Word documents floating around that causes business people to have little choice (because like 95+% of their peers use it - inside/outside the company).
/. crowd is very anti-MS but the reality is, most business people really don't care about this stuff. As long as it gets the job done they're cool. Business people who might raise an eyebrow are CIOs who want to cut costs but MS could easily give away Outlook and see the situation as a "we got take it in the gut to keep Word, Excel and PowerPoint entrenched." Do not be surprised if MS were to take such a stance.
/. crowd may also laugh at "retraining costs" argument (since invariably companies do consider this) since we're talking "email" here. However, given the amazing inflexibility I've witnessed with the average person during my lifetime (even among the tech ranks), there's some teeth to this argument.
Email on the other hand is a different story. I was very impressed with Evolution on LINUX. Having a Windows port would at least pry one finger on Microsoft's stranglehold in corporate offices... maybe.
I know the
If they did, the motivation for CIOs to use Evolution disappears.
There's also the security argument but many larger companies have wised up and your Joe Average User runs in a limited account to stop their desktop from becoming a festering pool of viruses.
The
Home users often fall in a few buckets:
1) Web based mail
2) AOL mail
3) Still blissfully ignorant and using Outlook Express
4) Have a geek friend who has proselytized open source and are now running an open source email client, e.g., Mozilla's client.
That leaves primarily the third group (and some segment of the fourth group) as candidates for Evolution. Assuming NOVELL doesn't expect to charge people for this. This will have some impact but nothing dramatic.
I personally, gasp, went back to Outlook. I liked the changes they made in Office 2003 and they eliminated some of the annoyances I had with previous versions of Outlook. I operated with the Mozilla email client for quite some time having eschewed Office 2000 and Office XP.
I would be happy to go to Evolution if for no other reason than I discovered that MS is as usual thwarting my attempt to run securely. Being a super savvy user (as well as a developer/security person) I happen to run Outlook in a stunted account, i.e. I run it in a different account (Windows "runas" command) and played with ACLs so that sensitive areas such as C:\WINDOWS and "C:\Program Files" can't be written to). You might ask why I didn't create a limitd account and run Outlook with that. Turns out if you do, Office will not leverage Windows XP's themes. Stupid. I don't like the "classic" Windows motif and prefer the default that comes with Windows XP. Anyway,
I discovered much to my chagrin that despite running Outlook in this fashion if I were to run Word (under my normal desktop account), save a document, then try to reopen that document later, Word simply cannot find the document. It will repeatedly stick up an error dialog on each attempt UNTIL I close Outlook, which happens to be running under a different user!!!
I've done Win32 development. It would seem the moronic MS Office development is generating a cookie, alias, moniker, etc., based on the window station I am logged into. They are probably using the Win32 handle and are keying into some shared memory. God for all you know they could be generating strings and putting them into the Global Atom Table.
Why would they do such a thing? Because *no one* would EVER think of running desktop apps in a secure fashion... right? What they have done is simply architecturally unsound.
If you are curious about Window stations:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?u
Or is that the wrong way round?
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
I use Evolution with Fink in OS X, but yes I agree I'd like a current Evolution release that runs native in OS X.
By going this route, one could be Microsoft Free (tm) without running any Linux on their machine. Granted, it'll probably be another year or so until ReactOS can run major applications, but it'll be an interesting option.
Currently, ReactOS is running Windows GUI applications thanks to code shared with the Wine project. The networking stack was just implemented, and some simple web applications are running.
most open sourced Windows apps have already been ported to Windows.
Meant to say:
most open sourced Windows apps have already been ported to Linux.
4. Profit.
Novell is going to screw the pooch on this one. First they bought up SuSE, which got a lot of people hot and bothered about potentials for Linux Desktop becoming a reality. Then they kind of sat on their ass and starting talking about how great it will be when SuSE/Linux incorporates all the Novell technologies. Now they're looking at porting Linux applications to Windows.
It's the wrong direction for Novell
It's the wrong direction for SuSE
It's the wrong direction for Linux
It's easier get Evolution if we can get Beagle on Darwin. Or was it Darwin on Beagle?
Whatever. It worked last time.
Communists believe in communal control over communal resources, where there is a planar social heirarchy - that is, everyone is on the same level. There are no consumers, producers, or managers - just people. The controls are all artifacts of human nature taking over human intellect. In communism there are no instant-gratification, tangible incentives (namely capital, be it money, land, or equipment) to perform at a higher level. Thus, in Soviet Russia the incentives to work became not being whacked by the secret police, not being thrown into siberia, etc. But, in pure communism, no one owns anything and government, money, capital in general are not needed. Everyone works for the common good.
Much of the centralized control and secrecy came out of Stalin and his...well...he was just fucked in the head. He brought the facism and violence to post-revolutionary Russia
Microsoft, on the other hand, would be an example of the evils of US capitalism - incentivising the destruction/consumption of competition in the name of worldly success, with very little thought to the long-term consquesnces to the consumer. This brings your walmarts, starbuckses, the destruction of small business and the uniform feel of department stores.
But, hey, I could just be talking out my ass.
Your experience is not typical.
However since 2000 and XP at least the reliability front has been much better. Still not up to snuff, but probably 1/10 of the effort involved with 9X/ME and to a lesser extent NT.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Microsoft Office is not a necessary App.
Internet Explorer is not a necessary App.
Outlook is not a necessary App.
The prefered apps will be ported. Reason for the port is to stop there market share from being eaten up.
Required programs change from companys to company. Coral produced Word Perfect for dos but ported it to windows just so they could try to keep market share. This is the prediced out come.
So Microsoft will go the way of Coral. Ie from a strong company to a week and dieing.
This is what non-geeks would do to shift to Open Source:
Replace Windows search feature with Beagle, browser with FF, Office suite with Oo, Paint with GiMP, etc.
This is what geeks would do to shift to Open Source:
Install Linux.
Congratulations to Novell about this great step! All the time when I install or support Windows machines (which cannot be converted yet/wound't be due of various software), I dream about version of Evolution for Windows - because Outlook is big, fat security hole and unsecure as hell (from my own expierence).
:)
So it is just GREAT.
And ohh - no one wants to convert Evolution to OS X?
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Awesome Awesome Awesome Awesome!!!!
Finally windoze gets the goodness!!!!
maybe novell needs a localized version for Jesusland called Creationism.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
---southpaw
I think this is a good thing fo a start. But this won't be enough as an Outlook killer in Exchange environments.
The one nice thing about the latest Office 2003 is Outlook's cached mode, which is an big improvement on usability for people who connect from remote offices, home, etc.
Microsoft even advertises it as a plus in the sense that you can put one big mail server centrally and let everyone conect remotely to it, whereas before you generally wanted a local office Exchange server for responsiveness.
Now when you now that the current Exchange connector in Evolution totally lacks any offline capability, I'm rather sceptic about how fast Evolution will get the next killer app - on Windows.
Serge
Why submit a link if no body cares to read the links? The moderators that had modded you up for sure don't have read the link neither!
:-)
It's easier if you make the work for them:
I am thrilled to announce that we recently hired Tor Lillqvist into the Novell Desktop group. Tor is famous for his work to port Gimp and the Gtk+ toolkit to Windows, and these days he helps keep Gimp running on Windows.
For Novell, Tor is working along the same lines, making Gtk+ and various parts of the Linux desktop stack run better on Windows to improve the experience for cross-platform developers. He is currently working on a dbus port to help complete Fredrik Hedberg's port of Beagle to Windows.
Beagle running on Windows
After that is done, however, his major project will be to port Evolution to Windows. The scope and difficulty of this work is currently unknown, so we don't have a timeline (or even a "development plan" to speak of), but you will be able to follow his work on the various mailing lists and on Tor's blog (once he starts one). The Evolution porting will be discussed along with all Evolution development topics on e-h.
If you're interested in helping, I'm sure Tor would welcome you with open arms. It's a big project.
Good luck, Tor! We're all really happy you joined!
Nat Friedman
My city: Barcelona.
Finally a SERIOUS open-source competitor to Outlook (no offence to the Thunderbird fans out there)! Cheers Novell!
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/