Has Anyone Used Evolution in an Enterprise? 49
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?"
Re:Evolution in the Enterprise (Score:1, Offtopic)
Sorry to disappoint.
yeah but... (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:yeah but... (Score:2)
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).
Is there connector version for solaris? (Score:2)
Re:Is there connector version for solaris? (Score:2)
Re:Is there connector version for solaris? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is there connector version for solaris? (Score:3, Funny)
Mozilla has a calendar (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla has a calendar (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla has a calendar (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Mozilla doesn't have a calendar anymore (Score:2)
I tried it on Linux in an Outlook 2000 environment (Score:3, Interesting)
Hopefully it'll work out better for you.
Evolution exchange tunnel almost works (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Server Tools? (Score:2)
Or is it just a 'better' version of wine only.
Re:Server Tools? (Score:2)
*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)
Re:Outlook Web Access (Score:2)
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
Re:Outlook Web Access (Score:1)
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.
Only email unfortunately (Score:2, Insightful)
I did.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:I did.. (Score:1)
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.
Re:I did.. (Score:2)
Read-receipts are actually quite useful! Kind of like the transmission log on a fax...
Re:I did.. (Score:2, Insightful)
So's your "Sent" folder in whatever mail client you prefer.
I agree with the person you replied to... Mail receipts are stupid.
Re:I did.. (Score:2)
Re:I did.. (Score:1)
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.
Re:I did.. (Score:2)
Re:I did.. (Score:2)
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
Re:I did.. (Score:1)
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.
Re:I did.. (Score:2)
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)
Re:I did.. (Score:1)
Re:I did.. (Score:2)
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.
Re:I did.. (Score:1)
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-
Re:I did.. (Score:1)
Re:I did.. (Score:1)
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.
You might consider (Score:2)
The Post Office (Score:3, Funny)
Results have been disappointing so far.