I’m one of the lucky few to have a Microsoft Exchange server running at my company. I use it to organise my life, and here’s why.
Of all the e-mail systems with groupware capabilities, none quite does justice to the featureset of Exchange. With Exchange, you can store all your data on the server, contacts, calendar, e-mail, and have it be retrieved by virtually any device. A PC running Outlook, a PDA, a cell phone, you name it, it’ll store it.
You can create projects and goals, and subprojects – and you can relate two projects to each other so that the level of completeness of each project adds up to the completeness of both projects as a whole. You can chart, graph, monitor and streamline to your hearts content.
In short, Exchange is really nice, and I don’t care who hears me say that.
And so, in order to retrieve my data, I use Evolution. It works nicely. It doesn’t allow me to sync my PDA, but I put up with that and keep Windows around in a virtual machine for palm sync.
The only problem is, like clockwork, almost every second release of Evolution stops talking to Exchange.
True to form, GNOME 2.10 comes out, and the included version of Evolution no longer works with Exchange servers! Sure, it says it does. It has the Microsoft Exchange dropdown option. It lets you configure it, and authenticate into the server. It may even let you read a mail or two.
But the NEXT TIME YOU RUN IT! It’s kaput. Totally screwed. And there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not a distribution issue – the same issue manifests itself on Arch Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Core, and FreeBSD.
So I’m doomed. Here’s a mail client with advertised features which don’t work in the real world! Don’t bury your head in the sand by thinking you can do away with Exchange. Oh no. It’s here to stay. And as soon as Gentoo brings GNOME 2.10 into stable keywords, I’ll never be able to talk to my beloved Exchange server again. SIGH!