Re: [Evolution] A few newbie questions

[Keith Sharp <kms passback co uk>]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 21:23 -0800, Mark Horner wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I have a few questions, not answered quickly by the manual and the
> go-evolution.org wiki is not responding. I have evolution working
> without any problems on my ubuntu machines. The one I use as a server
> and I'd like to be able to access my info from any of my machines. I
> presume the evolution data server can be used for this (something like
> an exchange server).
>
> 1) Is there a manual for setting it up somewhere? I will gladly read it
> but the documentation page on the evolution site doesn't have it.
>
> 2) If my assumption is wrong is there a generally recommended and simple
> way to set up a server for a small group of people so that they can
> access their calendars etc. from multiple machines? Just a pointer in
> the correct general direction will be great!

Remember there are (roughly) three types of data that Evolution manages:
emails, contacts, and calendar.  Each of the three can be stored in a
central server and accessed from remote machines.  Evolution uses open
standards and protocols to store the information remotely so you need
server applications that support these: for email use IMAP or POP3, for
contacts use LDAP, and for calendar use CALDAV.

You can build a server to use different applications for each protocol:
something like Dovecot[1] for IMAP or POP3, OpenLDAP[2] for LDAP, and
Cosmo[3] for CALDAV.  Or you could use a "Groupware" application that
provides all of this functionality in a single application, kind of like
Microsoft Exchange.  Examples of groupware applications are: Hula[4] or
OpenGroupware[5].  All of these applications should either be available
pre-packaged for Ubuntu or you should be able to compile them yourself.

The main problem you will discover is that CALDAV support is still quite
new, I believe that it is only available in the latest Evolution
releases and I am not sure how advanced the support is on the server
side.

Good luck,

Keith.

[1] http://www.dovecot.org/
[2] http://www.openldap.org/
[3] http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/CosmoTempHome
[4] http://www.hula-project.org/Hula_Project
[5] http://www.opengroupware.org/