New module proposal for GNOME 2.26: evolution-mapi

[Srinivasa Ragavan <sragavan novell com>]

Hi guys,

I would like to propose, evolution-mapi a new born connector for
Evolution to connect to MS Exchange 2007. But being a connector around
the MAPI protocol, it practically can connect to any version of
Microsoft Exchange (5.5, 2000, 2003 and 2007).

It has been under development for more than a year under a branch
EXCHANGE_MAPI_BRANCH in evolution and evolution-data-server project.

http://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution-data-server/branches/EXCHANGE_MAPI_BRANCH 
http://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution-/branches/EXCHANGE_MAPI_BRANCH 

Its now licensed as LGPLv2 or LGPLv3.

We just created a new svn project for the connector and Johnny sent out
a mail on evolution-hackers and users list about the new project. It is
now hosted under GNOME Svn under as evolution-mapi.

http://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution-mapi

We have requested to create a new bugzilla component for Evolution-mapi
in GNOME Bugzilla.

We have now basic support to create account, folder, send/receive mails,
calendar/meeting and contacts. Its has bugs, and doesn't have feature
parity with the evolution-exchange (WebDAV based connector). But we
gonna spend make it the default connector in the longer term, and would
have more features than the WebDAV based connector.

It is being developed on top of Openchange's libmapi [1], which in-turn
has a strong dependency on Samba 4. Libmapi is about to go for 0.8,
which is waiting for Samba 4 alpha6 to be released. So libmapi and
samba4 (Evolution doesn't link to samba4 directly) has to be defined as
external dependencies for GNOME. Libmapi is already built for Debian
[2], OpenSUSE, Ubuntu [3].

Current source of evolution mapi is targeted to build against Libmapi
rev 810 and we would be moving to depend on libmapi 0.8, once its out.

evolution-mapi would be versioned as 0.25.x (to 0.26.0) for GNOME 2.26
to match the minor version with rest of Evolution components and to be
in sync with GNOME versions as well.

Feel free to ask any questions, and I should be able to answer them.

Thanks
Srini.

[1] - http://www.openchange.org 
[2] - http://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openchange.html 
[3] - http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/libmapi0