HowTo make Evolution work with Exchange
 

Help please.

I've managed to install evolution-exchange plug in. I've set up evolution to use the exchange protocol, username etc. I checked connectivity with Firefox to OWA (outlook web access) successfully (although I had to import an security certificate).

When I start evolution it reports "Error while scanning folders in Exchange server..."

Any help on the config for evolution and exchange 2007?

Thanks

I hate to tell you this, but there currently is no optimal Linux solution for Exchange 2007.

Microsoft deprecated Outlook Web Access (OWA), which was the protocol that allowed Evolution to connect to Exchange 2003. Exchange 2007 now uses Microsoft's custom MAPI protocol.

Currently, there is an effort to create a new MAPIProvider evolution-mapi plugin using code from the Openchange project.

I tried getting this to work back in January when evolution-mapi released some tarballs, with a Fedora 11 alpha install. It was definitely not stable.

Further, evolution-mapi does not have RPC over HTTP compatibility, which means that you cannot access the Exchange 2007 server over the Internet.

The only workaround is to enable IMAP and SMTP for Exchange 2007. However, my employer has disabled SMTP completely, and allows IMAP access only on the corporate LAN.

I haven't had time lately to try out the new evolution-mapi code. If you want to give this a go, I would advise using the latest Fedora 11 rawhide distro, as it will have the most recent Gnome, Samba and Evolution packages. Install it to virtual machine or to a spare partition, and install only those packages necessary for compiling evolution-mapi.

Evolution-mapi is also in Ubuntu, but it doesn't work. Also, see: Evolution MAPI plugin for Ubuntu 9.04.

I didn't have much success compiling evolution-mapi, either, because of the samba4 and evolution dependencies.

Good luck, this isn't for Linux newbies or the faint of heart. You can keep track of the project's progress through Googling "evolution-mapi" posts in the previous month.

There is a supposed alternative: Thunderbird + DavMail, but I haven't tried this yet. I don't think it will work because DavMail seems to depend on OWA, but some Ubuntu users have managed to connect it to Exchange 2007 servers.