There are many corporate environments that require Outlook, and a number of other people who just rely on it. But Outlook can be expensive (not everyone buys Microsoft Office). So even though I use Thunderbird somewhat and have been switching over to Google based offerings for this type of thing, I was glad to see the blow…. Evolution for Win32.
Evolution is an incredibly versatile email/calendar/PIM that took the Linux world by storm a few years ago. It has been called an ‘Outlook replacement’ by every tech site from ZDNet to InfoWorld. Evolution played a major roll in allowing the Linux desktop to move into the enterprise by giving being able to connect to Microsoft Exchange Server and schedule/accept Microsoft Outlook Meetings. Here’s a screenshot of how it handles meeting invitations sent by Outlook. The company that I work for needed the capability to schedule/accept meetings with participants outside of the company, most of whom use Microsoft Outlook as their email client. Until this point we were content with using Mozilla Thunderbird, but now it became clear that we needed something a bit more versatile. I’m sure the Lightning guys will eventually have something great and integrated into Thunderbird, but we needed something now, not two years from now.
Our options became:
- Buy many copies of Microsoft Outlook (eventually tens of thousands of dollars)
or- Adapt and roll out Evolution on our Windows computers
Being a Linux guy for the last 11+ years , option 2 seemed infinitely more sane.
The tremendous amount of work that it took to port Evolution and its dependencies to Windows was done by Tor Lillqvist (and others?). He, not me, deserves the credit. The graphic above was made by Shaun Wilson. All I (Mark Pinto, aka Markybob) did was put together a few scripts and an installer to make it easier for people who wanted to give Evolution on Windows a try. To be honest, I did this for my own good, since I wanted the process to be easier for my company. However, what kind of a guy would I be if I didn’t release it to others? This also means that you should bother me, not Tor, if you have problems/suggestions/comments regarding this installer. Feel free to email the mailing list or say your peace in the forum. Yes, I know that these links go to a project page called ShellTer. That’s another project of mine and I didn’t see the need to start another one on SourceForge. There are a few things that my package helps with that differs from the ‘official‘ Evolution release. Here’s a small list:
- My package contains an installer and not just a bunch of zip files of Evolution and its dependencies that the user is supposed to figure out and put together. I like things easy
- My package does not cause an MS-DOS Shell window to be open during the entire time that Evolution is being used. We save screen real estate space, yay!
- My package sets the environment paths automatically, which again makes things manageable for your ‘average’, non-geek user.
- My package cleanly terminates some processes and deletes temporary files that Evolution should take care of by itself but does not do so in the default release. This effectively means that this install starts up repeat seasons of Evolution 4x-5x faster.
Here. Go, enjoy. The source package is located at the same spot.
Tags: Applications, Interesting, Programs
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