Well, look no further, my Unix and Linux companions. Ximian has unleashed Evolution 1.0, an integrated workgroup and PIM suite that runs on a wide variety of Unix variants. Need a calendar? Got it. Looking for contact-list management? Got that too. Need a task list? Want to sync to your PDA (personal digital assistant)? Need to interoperate via peer-to-peer collaboration standards? No problem. It's all inside.
Evolution 1.0 looks and feels a lot like Outlook with one glaring exception: It isn't vulnerable to the virus-of-the-week problems that have been afflicting Outlook over the past few months. While this "immunity" isn't on Evolution's feature list, it should be. So what is on the feature list? The lineup includes flexible message formatting (for HTML and text, as well as for embedded images and attachments), address recognition, a built-in spellchecker, automatic e-mail indexing, user-defined filters, multiple e-mail account management, and support for industry-standard security and encryption, including PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)/GPG (GNU Privacy Guard), SASL (Simple Authentication Security Layer) and SSL/TLS (Transport Layer Security).
Evolution supports a wide variety of communication protocols, including IMAP4, LDAP, POP, APOP (Authentication POP), SMTP, authenticated SMTP, and iCalendar (RFC 2445). A nifty little e-mail-accounts configuration wizard lets you direct Evolution to query your server and determine which protocols are supported. When I set up Evolution, it correctly indicated that one of my accounts was using a server that supported APOP and POP, and that another was providing support only for POP. You can also specify local delivery, mbox or Maildir format as your account type. I sampled mbox support by using fetchmail to download and store mail locally, then pick up the mail on an interval basis from the local mbox with Evolution. It worked perfectly.
Feature-Rich and Functional
Another feature of Evolution is vFolders, which provides a handy method for categorizing and managing your e-mail without copying mail from folder to folder. vFolders offers a view of your e-mail according to user-configurable filters, and automatically updates as new e-mail is stored. I tested this feature by creating a vFolder that would contain any message with the words "Web pad" in the subject header. I then cross-checked the messages in the vFolder against my saved e-mail and found them accurate. Be careful, though: If you delete a message from the vFolder, you will lose the original message as well. The vFolder editor lets you specify criteria, such as sender, recipient and regular expressions, and date-based criteria, such as "sent before" and "sent after," as well as subject, message body and even attachments. Multiple criteria can be joined via a Boolean and or or search. vFolders can be limited to configurable sets of folders or "all local" or "all remote" folders.
The contact-management portion of Evolution provides some nifty features as well. You can pull contacts from LDAP servers or create them on your own. Via iCalendar, you can share appointments with other Evolution users or with users of Outlook or Lotus Notes. Select an appointment, choose to forward it as an iCalendar (via e-mail), and the intended recipient will receive the appointment along with options within the e-mail to add or ignore the appointment, provided the recipient is using a package that supports iCalendar, of course. The vCard standard is also supported.
Synchronization with your PDA is possible but still glitchy. You can transfer your schedule, contacts, task list and messages. Syncing is accomplished via conduits distributed for gnome-pilot. I had varied success synchronizing my Handspring Visor--sometimes it would sync and sometimes it wouldn't--and error messages indicated a probable communications problem at the protocol level. PalmOS support appears stable, however.
The configurable summary page, which displays a set of news feeds, a summary of your e-mail (unread and read messages), calendar and task list, is the only Evolution feature about which I have any complaints. The task list cannot display the due date of the tasks listed. I'd like to know not only what I need to do, but when I need to do it. I was more impressed by the news feeds, which was quite comprehensive and included my favorites (Slashdot and The Register), and let me add others. I added an RDF (Resource Description Format) I used in kicker (a KDE news-ticker applet) back in my K Desktop Environment days to show what my MP3 server was currently playing. There it was--displayed on my summary page. Sweet!
The calendaring portion of Evolution is just as full-featured as the rest of the product. Reminders (on screen, via e-mail or sound), recurring appointments and an appointment-forwarding capability are all included.
OS Support
Evolution is available for Red Hat 6.2, 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2; Mandrake 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 and 8.0; SuSE 6.4, 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2; Debian GNU Linux 2.2; Turbolinux 6.0; Yellow Dog 1.2 and 2.0; LinuxPPC 2000 and Sun Microsystems Solaris 8. If you use a desktop other than Ximian's GNOME (GNU Network Object Modeling Environment)-based desktop, you'll need to grab all the extra GNOME libraries necessary and do some tweaking with the configuration, but the result will be worth the time and effort.
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Vendor Information
Ximian Evolution 1.0, included with Ximian Desktop. Available: Now. Ximian, (617) 236-0442, 1-866-4XIMIAN; fax (617) 236-8630.
www.ximian.com
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For those who use a Microsoft Exchange 2000 server, hold out for just a little while longer. For a mere $69.95, Ximian will be introducing a connector for Evolution that will let it interact natively with Exchange 2000. Public-folder support and delegation functionality (which would let another user update your calendar on your behalf) are not included in version 1.0 of the Ximian Connector, but the company says it will provide those capabilities in later releases. A connector for Exchange 5.5 is also in the works.
Support Woes
Support is a bit of a problem. You can turn to a plethora of news groups where others can assist you with any problems, or you can buy one of the Ximian Desktop bundles that includes a support option. With the purchase of the Standard Edition, you'll receive 30 days of technical support, and you'll get 90 days if you splurge for the Professional Edition.
Ximian Evolution 1.0 can be downloaded for free or purchased as part of the Ximian Desktop Standard Edition or Professional Edition. For those of you running a Ximian Desktop, you can use Ximian's Red Carpet service to automate the download and installation of Evolution. Installation size is about 15 MB for the base product, not including the GNOME libraries necessary for non-GNOME desktops. Red Carpet's bandwidth is a bit sluggish, but Ximian will be introducing a new service, Red Carpet Express, in the coming months that will offer premium bandwidth for speedier downloads to those willing to shell out $9.95 a month.
Technology editor Lori MacVittie has been a software developer and a network administrator. Most recently, she was a member of the technical architecture team for a global transportation and logistics organization. Send your comments on this article to her at lmacvittie@nwc.com.
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