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GNOME GUI Linux Business

Has Anyone Used Evolution in an Enterprise? 49

Posted by Cliff 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?"
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Has Anyone Used Evolution in an Enterprise? More

Has Anyone Used Evolution in an Enterprise?

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  • yeah but... (Score:4, Informative)

    by DShard ( 159067 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @04:42PM (#7814270)
    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 [mozilla.com] works just fine, albeit slow. My guess is it is a timeout problem 1/2 server 1/2 evolution.

    • Re:yeah but... (Score:4, Informative)

      by nocomment ( 239368 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:56PM (#7814599) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • Exchange sucks IMHO

        An how many people has that prevented from using it?

        My guess would be that the decision to switch from using Exchange to another system might be beyond the decision making capacity of the original poster, and even if he did have the authority to do so, you might still see some resistance from the already installed userbase over switching to something new, making it easier to switch those in the minority over (i.e., good short term decision, though it doesn't help you in the long run).
  • I thought (but have not bothered to check just now) that it was a linux only affair...
  • Mozilla has a Calendar [mozilla.org] that uses the standard iCal format. I haven't used it very much, but it was very easy to install! It looks like it doesn't work seamlessly with Outlook or Exchange, though.
    • Last I heard, the Mozilla Calendar was for all intents and purposes a dead project.
      • Um not it seems still alive to me http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

        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.

  • I tried it on Linux in an Outlook 2000 environment (Score:3, Interesting)

    by toygeek ( 473120 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:15PM (#7814402) Journal
    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.

  • Evolution exchange tunnel almost works (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mpechner ( 637217 ) * on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:32PM (#7814496) Homepage
    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.

  • Crossover Office (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sunbane ( 146740 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:48PM (#7814568) Homepage
    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.
    • While a bit OT, what sort of enterprise tools does Crossover provide?

      Or is it just a 'better' version of wine only.
      • You can download a trial version so it's not hard to find out but for those of you that can't be bothered here's a summary:

        *Preconfigured.
        *Tweak for supported products.
        *Tested for supported software.

        Here's a quick example:

        Wine worked fine with notepad. Tried to do some more advanced stuff but to get most of it working I had to tweak and go to google and then find out that some of it didn't work or didn't work well enough or that I had to install it on windows copy it accross and then copy a ew dlls as we

  • Outlook Web Access (Score:3, Informative)

    by OrangeSpyderMan ( 589635 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @06:49PM (#7814841)
    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.
    • 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.

      Ick. I've heard this before, and it sounds horrible. Outlook Web Access is slow and buggy, and what you're telling me is that the Connector is basically a giant HTML scraper?

      Honestly - I've got a similar problem to what the poster is describing, and I can't see replacing the Windows machines on our desks with Linux
      • Not sure what version of OWA you used that was 'slow and buggy', but a client of mine has ~15000 users on it for over a year without incident, the biggest issues are the subtle interface differences.

        What version of VMware was too slow? VMW on a 3.06 P4 ran windows under VMware on linux faster than native on the machines we replaced (1.2GHz PIIIs), the fact that you could run 3 at a time sold it. But from what your requirements describe, crossover office may be a simpler solution.
  • 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 wo

  • I did.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MichaelMarch ( 686675 )
    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 s
    • read recipts

      That is one option that I hope never makes it to Linux.

      If you really need to know whether someone got your e-mail, ask them.

      If you can't be bothered to do that, it wasn't that important anyways.

      If you think they're lying when they say they didn't get it, ask your e-mail server admin; It's just as reliable to look at server logs to find out if a message was received.
      • You obviously don't conduct any significant or time-sensitive business transactions via email.
        Read-receipts are actually quite useful! Kind of like the transmission log on a fax...

        • Re:I did.. (Score:2, Insightful)

          by SaDan ( 81097 )
          You obviously don't conduct any significant or time-sensitive business transactions via email.

          Read-receipts are actually quite useful! Kind of like the transmission log on a fax...


          So's your "Sent" folder in whatever mail client you prefer.

          I agree with the person you replied to... Mail receipts are stupid.
          • That is not the point. They will be used no matter what you think. Ignoring how people uses their software is ignoring reality.
            • Mail receipts can be blocked/disabled by the vast majority of email clients. They are worthless in this day and age, because there is no enforcement over EVERYONE's email client, and ANYONE could disable the mail receipt functionality.

              I do not return mail receipts. The corporate office I support has mandated that no one should have mail receipt functionality enabled on their clients.

              I'm not ignoring how people use their software, I'm ignoring a worthless function in email.
              • We use it on our work to know the other guy has read the mail, somehow it's configured in the server. You can configure in the client if want to ask for it or not. Not only that, exchange/outlook let you see in the sent items which destinations had read it and when. It's very useful for us, at least for internal mail.

          • The "Sent" folder does bugger all for nonrepudiation of receipt. A fax machine uses a direct synchronous connection to a station in the effective authentication domain of the recipient.

            Larry

            • If you're that worried about authentication, ask your friendly sysadmin to print the section of your mail logs that indicate your message was successfully transmitted, and received by the other party.

              Fax messages are no where near as easy to trace as an email message. Logs on both sides of the email (sender and receiver) offer much more detail about where a message went, who looked at it, and where it is now than a plain ol' fax system could.
        • I don't... but mostly people who use them at the place I work use them to find out when people are at their desks so they can drop in on them and [yell|ask a question|give them a new project]

          One of our technicians pulls his ethernet plug out of his computer before reading his email every day (he downloads it to local folders before reading)
          • It's not really the read receipts that are the problem, it's how idiots like to (ab)use them. Personally, I just fetch my email with pine.
          • One of our technicians pulls his ethernet plug out of his computer before reading his email every day (he downloads it to local folders before reading)

            WTF is he using for an email client?!? Every one I've ever used (dozens) has an option to prompt you before sending the receipt.
      • It's just as reliable to look at server logs to find out if a message was received.
        ...who has nothing better to do?

        It's just as reliable to look at server logs to find out if a message was received.
        ...if you have access to the server logs, or the person who does have access has nothing better to do.

        You also have to take into account that spam filtering has made e-mail a really unreliable mode of communication. Just because it got to the recipient's server, that doesn't mean the recipient didn't spam-

      • Right. Why pay attention to what the client wants? That's no way to run an effective support infrastructure.....
    • "read recipts" (sic)
      Nope, as a matter of fact when I am forced to use outlook I click "deny" everytime. screw them man, they will know I got the mail when I reply and say "that was stupid". and when i send mail I never ask for a read receipt for the same reason.
  • replacing outlook... Linux Journal [linuxjournal.com] has a good article [linuxjournal.com] on kgroupware [kroupware.com].

  • The Post Office (Score:3, Funny)

    by sysadmn ( 29788 ) <{sysadmn} {at} {gmail.com}> on Saturday December 27, 2003 @11:18PM (#7819971) Homepage
    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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