FrugalBrothers Software

If you are looking for an alternative to MS Office Outlook for Linux, look no further than Evolution. Its powerful, friendly and free. Distributed by Tubemogul.

I am using Ubuntu 9.04 on a compact NCC 6220 Laptop and I am using it in my small business right now to see how you can work with this day in and day out for business purposes. Linux is definitely very popular now. Especially due to of bad economy, people tired of the constant upgrade cycle, that they put up with, with Microsoft and apple. But can you really use Ubuntu in your Business. So I have installed some application and played with some of the stuff that came with Ubuntu 9.04, including the evolution e-mail client. This is from Novell and currently version. is 2.6.2.1. Now I have an exchange server here in my office so I configured it to work with exchange. I have to tell you all in all it is a pretty impressive application to use. I can sink my email, contacts and calendar with the exchange server. That seems to be working ok unless for some reason when I suspend the laptop, evolution does not like that, I have to rebut the laptop in order to re-connect to the exchange server.

The only feature I can’t seem get to work right now is memo and evolutions which is the equivalent of outlook notes. Also I notice some difficultly with tasks. Not all the tasks show up for some reason, sometimes mysteriously they don’t show up at all. After closing out and re starting evolution they show up again. Maybe there is a little bit of flakiness with that feature. Also I am having problem getting to the exchange public folders. Maybe there is a setting somewhere in the software that I have missed.

That is some of the skinny of the evolution product, but I like as an e-mail client it seems to work very nicely. It does a good job in keeping the email organized easy to read easy to use. It is very much like outlook in the way it functions, even the way it looks, you have the three pain view, which is nice. It is certainly a pretty decent outlook alternative, but there is some general flakiness in the software, especially keeping its connections with your exchange active. Other than that it didn’t cost anything came with Ubuntu, which is nice. There is a level of integration with evolutions with the open office suite of applications as using the contact list of data source. Something interesting, the contact on my exchange server is not available in the open office word processor as a data source, the local contacts in evolution are. So again there are some anomalies there trying to interrelate this in a exchange environment.

You can’t beat the price. So far it seem t be working well actually the mail notification and reminders, in my opinion seem to work a little better then outlook. It is a robust system; it is a PIM, personal information manager. I think it is right on par with outlook in a lot of ways. I think Evolutions is really very good. It probably will get a whole lot better as more and more organizations begin to explore using operating systems like Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. Evolution is a viable alternative to outlook. Try it out for yourself. Set up a virtual machine install Ubuntu, there is also woobie. Let us know what you think.