Funtoo/Gentoo in company-setting - incompatibility with Exchange 2007
Moesasji
Following the discussion here it seems that you are interested in
maintaining Funtoo as a viable alternative within a company settings.
Crucial for many is the ability to use the company groupware software
for mail, scheduling meetings, etc which for us is Exchange.
Currently Evolution is able to work with older version of Exchange
through the evolution-exchange plugin (using outlook webaccess).
However that plugin does not support Exchange 2007 as that version no
longer has the webaccess feature (http://www.gnome.org/~jjohnny/talks/
exchange-mapi-evolution-GUADEC-2008-0.2.pdf).
The bad news for me is that within the coming two weeks our mail-
servers are being moved over to exchange 2007 cutting of my ability to
see joint calenders and arrange meetings. So I started exploring my
options to still use linux to do my work...and fortunately there is a
plugin supporting Exchange 2007 written by Novell....but not on
Gentoo!
This plugin is evolution-mapi based on openchange (http://
www.openchange.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=49)
that supports Exchange 2007 (and earlier versions). Although
distributions like Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian have it for more
than a year I don't see how to install it under Funtoo/Gentoo.
This seems to be because this plugin requires libmapi which requires
Samba4 to build (see build-instructions:
http://websvn.openchange.org/filedetails.php?repname=openchange&path=%2Ftrunk%2Fdoc%2Fhowto.txt).
Unfortunately getting Samba 4 installed is beyond my skills as I don't
fully understand how slotting works (which I assume is needed to make
sure that Samba 4 does not interfere with Samba 3?).
Seeing that Samba4 is still Alpha it will probably take very long
before it is going to hit the tree....yet a core functionality as
Evolution stops working if a company moves to Exchange 2007. Do you
(or anybody else?) have a quick fix/suggestion how to get this plugin
working on Funtoo as it seems a shame that a distribution that used to
be cutting edge is lagging so much in this respect?
... please ignore if you don't consider this relevant for the
direction of Funtoo.
Related bugs to this:
Request to support OpenChange: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=223821
Request to add evolution-mapi: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=262994
Bug related to creating ebuilds for Samba 4: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195703
(this includes a link to Git-hub with current efforts to create
ebuilds for Samba 4)
Build-scripts for Arch-linux: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=80899
**) Note: Samba 3.4 seems to include the sources for Samba 4...yet I
don't see any guide/pointer whether or not it would be possible to
build libmapi based on those sources (but I doubt it)
Jeff Mitchell
> Daniel,
>
> Following the discussion here it seems that you are interested in
> maintaining Funtoo as a viable alternative within a company settings.
> Crucial for many is the ability to use the company groupware software
> for mail, scheduling meetings, etc which for us is Exchange.
>
> Currently Evolution is able to work with older version of Exchange
> through the evolution-exchange plugin (using outlook webaccess).
> However that plugin does not support Exchange 2007 as that version no
> longer has the webaccess feature (http://www.gnome.org/~jjohnny/talks/
> exchange-mapi-evolution-GUADEC-2008-0.2.pdf).
>
>
I would start by talking to the gentoo-kde folks, for instance in
#gentoo-kde on Freenode. KDE's PIM suite has been planning on Exchange
integration for a long time -- AFAIK they were contributing to libmapi.
If that is still a goal, the #gentoo-kde folks might have an interest in
working on packages for their overlay.
--Jeff