Evolution MAPI (Exchange 2007) Preview

Johnny sent out a mail on the Evolution list about the availability of the preview build of the Evolution MAPI provider. Read the complete thread, to know what works and what doesn’t and other known issues. Currently we have rpms for OpenSUSE 10.3 and Fedora only. We would be providing rpms for Evolution 2.12 and 2.21.x for all the distros supported by OpenSUSE build service (OpenSUSE, SLED, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, …). The debs might need a bit of tweaking in the spec file, which isn’t yet done, but might be done next week. In a general note, it is not feature complete when compared with the current Evolution Exchange provider (OWA/WebDAV). We are aware of memory built-up/issues in the preview build and it not fully tested. But it should be pretty fast. It can connect to MS Exchange 5.5, 2000, 2003 and 2007 though we have been primarily developing and testing MS Exchange 2007. It is based on OpenChange‘s libmapi-0.6 and many thanks to Julien and his team. The have been help us a lot, with the library, sample codes etc. They are working hard now libmapi-0.7 which would  give some important things for us to take the provider forward.

Unfortunately the Evolution MAPI provider won’t be shipped along with the Evolution 2.22/GNOME 2.22 release as the provider development schedule ends later than the GNOME release. So we would be releasing periodic standalone builds that can be installed on top of your Evolution/EDS installations and it should work seamlessly. We hope that various distros can pick these for their users later on. We are also thinking of nightly/weekly builds through build service, but that may take little more time, since we are now busy shaping the provider. Anyways try the preview build or build from source (EXCHANGE_MAPI_BRANCH of Evolution and Evolution-Data Server in the GNOME svn) and give your feedbacks on the wiki / mailing list as we don’t have much things for bugzilla now.

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