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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."
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...
And if that person is a responsible for an IT department that is currently negotiating to buy a site license for the latest version of Windows, well, suddenly Linux will look mighty attractive. A budget goes a lot further when you're not paying for Windows.
No.
Odds are pretty good that migration is an on going process. It is very hard to move "everything" at once to a new platform. One of the reasons that Windows did so well was that it ran dos apps.
A company that is thinking of moving will want to do it a step at a time.
I know my company is trying to do it now. Oh how people complained when we made them dump outlook for Thunderbird. Not to mention how some complained about using OpenOffice because it did not work EXACTLY like word.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Evolution is free. It uses OWA to connect to the exchange server so whatever licensing you need for that still applies though.
Anything that Access can do can be done better for free with MySQL
... I'm still confused what cheap/free GUI clients are available for MySQL since MySQL.com abandonded their MySQLGUI project.
Access the database may suck, but Access the GUI client is pretty nice. Sometimes people don't care about referential integrity, they just want an easy to use tool for organizing data, but want something better then a spreadsheet.
The GUI clients for MySQL are lacking
When you're creating relations between tables, a graphical table editor and a GUI that lays everything out for you is pretty nice and takes away alot of the eliteness of the DB world. I can get a moderately experienced office worker setup with Access very quickly, but using MySQL requires more experience.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
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.
...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.
DBDesigner4 is an open-source database designer for MySQL. It's not really a replacement for Access, as it doesn't have a form designer for non-techies to enter records. But for all the fancy stuff like designing databases and forming queries, it's beautiful. My one beef is that it depends on Kylix, and as such I still can't compile it in Ubuntu. Worked great in Gentoo though.
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
There are unofficial free Windows builds available here.
It's such a shame that the official Windows builds cost money. Some of us can't change what OS we use.
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Ever tried that? I did. I went to OO Writer document and picked Data Sources from menu. And I was able to connect to various types of databases, create queries and include fields into the document.
The only 'difficult' part was to make sure that my system knows what ODBC is - and that is because I wanted to get data from SQL database and I never needed it before and thus I did not have ODBC installed.
I always found GTK+ to be much faster on Win32 than on other platforms. For the look, there is a theme engine (MSEngine afaik, formerly known as gtk-wimp).
.lnk files ("symlinks" on Win32).
The feel is probably the only part where noticeable differences can still be found, in particular with the file chooser. Not the fact that there is no file entry, but e.g. the (non-)handling of UNC paths (got some fixes recently) and problems with