For many year now, my place of employment has used the Lotus Notes Database for their email and calendar functions. As all the world knows, Notes is a wonderful idea gone terribly and expensively awry. A couple years ago they started looking at other solutions, and decided on Microsoft Exchange.
Since I run Linux on my desktop, my only real option for running the native Lotus client was in VMware. This worked well, I just had to fire up the emulator and then fire up windows and then fire up Notes to find out what was for lunch.
Moving to Exchange/Outlook may seem no better in that regard except for one thing: Evolution works as an Exchange client.
I got it to work for the most part on Fedora Core 4 with Evo 2.4, but FC3 only has 2.0, which won’t make the connection. 🙁 There’s a bit of irony in the fact that Outlook won’t connect from off campus, and those stuck in windows must use the "web" interface.
Speaking of which, the Outlook "web" interface is far far cooler than Lotus’ was. Since it’s half a web app and half a windows app, it works far better in IE than in Other, but it does work in Firefox.
So at the end of the day, I’m better off than I was regarding my Cornerstone email address. My other 65 email addresses all go safely to Pine however.
Update: My friend Dan made some comments that I think should be addressed out here where everyone can see them.
To say "There's a bit of irony in the fact that Outlook won't connect
from off campus, and those stuck in windows must use the "web"
interface" is not sharing with the world the entire picture. It is not
an Outlook flaw, it is an implementation flaw we are working on
changing.
That’s quite true, and I should have pointed out that we’re still in the roll-out process on this, and there will obviously be many things to tweak. My comment was more in surprise that of the clients to just "figure it out", I expected Outlook to have more success that Evolution.
No knocks in the decision to move this way. I may have picked something different, but this is far far better than where we were.
Currently, Outlook does not connect to the Exchange server off campus. …
We are working on making Outlook accessible off campus.
To say “There’s a bit of irony in the fact that Outlook won’t connect from off campus, and those stuck in windows must use the “web” interface” is not sharing with the world the entire picture. It is not an Outlook flaw, it is an implementation flaw we are working on changing.
Knock software for things it should be knocked for. If you would like to knock the staff (me) for the implementation path, do that. But at the very least, please report the whole story. Don’t let your readers think this is an Outlook software problem when it is truly not.
Not angry, just correcting.
Dan
I’ve had mixed results with Evolution working with Exchange. It seems like it breaks every-other version so I’m currently running my notebook with Windows on the side so I can access Exchange (instead of using the web interface). We also have it setup for webmail only access when off-campus. One of these days we may figure it out, but demand doesn’t make that a high priority task.
Webmail’s pretty good, especially for the IE users. It works fine in Firefox though as long as you don’t know what you’re missing.