RE: [Evolution] Advice

[Andrew Cowie <afcowie shadnet shad ca>]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Daniel Ashley wrote:

> ** way to make Evolution talk to Exchange - not just getting mail
> ** via IMAP, but specifically to the calendaring application and
> ** achieve the degree of integration between
> ** scheduling and email that Outlook does so well.
>
> It will not.  MS will not let this happen.  The communication methods
> are not publicly documented.

I understand.

> If someone hacks it and makes it work then
> MS will break it with the next Service Pack for Exchange.

I agree that this would be in character, and I while I think it "bad form"
(which is about the worst deprecation in my book) it has proved for them to
be an excellent defensive mechanism. Lawsuits notwithstanding - "get in
line", right?

Troy, what is your take on this?

--

But I believe that I failed to impress the urgency of my point.

I *NEED* to talk to Exchange. Without that I am forced, no alternative
choice possible, to have Outlook running so I can share calendars and
invite and be invited to meetings, and *that* forces an MS Windows desktop.
Sure, I can (and do) run XWin32 or Exceed as an X server and get X things
off of one of our dev or ops servers, but I can't run a Unix like operating
system as my desktop (which, with GNOME where it is, I'd prefer).

[The vehemence of my previous paragraph makes me think of one possibility.
Invites in Outlook *do* come across as emails - they just have a particular
formatting. If we could write an extension which would reverse engineer
that, stick things in evolution's calendar, and equally be able to generate
those messages as a way to invite, that would be a first order solution.
Lacking power, but it just might do it.]

But do you see? For so many of us the appearance of SAMBA - both as client
(browser) and as server was brilliant. It was one of the first critical
steps in creating a heterogeneous environment. 

Sure, I *wish* MS used open standards openly. I have personally always
believed that allowing interoperability would have strengthened their
market position, not weakened it. But the fact that they don't shouldn't be
an excuse for us to ignore the fact that most corporate environments have
Exchange servers, and they're not likely to go away. Unix (esp Solaris and
Linux) has been doing extrodinarily well on the server side. It's be great
if we can help get more users on the desktop side (Red Hat's & Corel's
whole philosophy) and that means helping them migrate in existing
environments.

Anyway, this team is obviously thinking about these issues, and has some
pretty clear vision for the way ahead. I commend you, and can't wait to
find ways to help.

--

> As you can tell from this e-mail it does let one choose other characters
> besides '>'.  You just have to spend a lot of time in the non-intuitive
> Options menu.

Sorry - new guy question - where exactly?

Regards,

        Andrew

--
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Director of Operations
Upoc, Inc

afcowie upoc-inc com
mobile: +1-917-217-4578
http://www.upoc.com

"Order; counterorder; disorder"