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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."
- Exchange Server Integration
- Calendar Integration
- Bluetooth Integration
I, for one, will be anxiously awaiting a release.http://gatewayink.com
That's OK. Just as long as everyone keeps using and enjoying OpenOffice, and using Psi to connect to our new Jabber server, and Firefox to use our web applications (FreeBSD/PostgreSQL/Zope), and now Evolution to read the email that gets filtered by our happy little Postfix server before it can choke the Exchange server to death, I'll smile and nod in agreement.
The truth of the matter is that except for one or two in-house apps, everything our employees use is either a port from Unix or interacting with a Unix server. We're really not that far from being able to drop Windows altogether, and Evolution will close the largest part of that gap.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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