Evolution EWS Ubuntu 12.04

[Scabby_al]

Has anyone had any success installing the evolution-ews plugin for Evolution in 12.04? I tried to manually compile it without any luck and the PPA is for 11.10 only.

Thanks!

[celluloid]

Would love to know if you had any luck with this - although with the glaring lack of response, it looks like may be not...

I'm really relying on some sort of decent Exchange compatibility so that I can begin using Ubuntu as my daily driver at work - everything else is fine, except enterprise Exchange support!

[Scabby_al]

I ended up going back to Thunderbird and using Davmail and a few other add-ons to email, bi-directional calendar support, and bi-directional global address list access. Granted I have to run Windows 7 in a VM while I'm at work for a few other apps that I need to use but this is one less thing I need Windows for.

Thunderbird Add-Ons:
Lightning
Exchange 2007/2010 Calendar and Tasks Provider
Google Contacts - personal use
Inverse SOGo Connector - Exchange address book sync
Provider for Google Calendar - Personal Use
Thunderbird Conversations - Creates a "Gmail-Like" layout in Thunderbird. I use it more for the conversational style grouping than I do the quick reply fields since replying in this fashion formats all Exchange email as plain text.

If you want to give it a whirl, just give Thunderbird/Davmail a try. If you need a hand setting any of this up, let me know.

On a semi-related note: Why is it possible to have phones and tablets that can support Exchange through Exchange Web Services (EWS) but there isn't a desktop client that can utilize it? I don't *think* there is any reverse engineering needed since this is Microsoft's preferred way to have non Windows Outlook clients access Exchange.

[mp035]

Why is it possible to have phones and tablets that can support Exchange through Exchange Web Services (EWS) but there isn't a desktop client that can utilize it? I don't *think* there is any reverse engineering needed since this is Microsoft's preferred way to have non Windows Outlook clients access Exchange.

I could not agree more! Seems like such a silly thing to leave out. OSX can access Exchange too. A decent Exchange client would make Ubuntu MUCH easier to adopt as a business tool.

I too use davmail, but with evolution. My only complaint is that when I'm out of the office, it's soooooooooooooo slow. Hence I would love to try evolution-ews, but my searches are turning up nothing for ubuntu 12.04 and there are several libraries too new to allow me compile the latest version from source..

[Scabby_al]

I'm really surprised this hasn't been addressed sooner given how important Exchange access is to a lot of folks.

[mp035]

Ok, I've done it. First of all, credit where it is due, my script is an improvment on the one found here: http://itworks.hu/2012/03/06/compili...-ubuntu-12-04/ by csak.

Copy the following text into a text editor:

#!/bin/bash
sudo apt-get install git gnome-common checkinstall gtk-doc-tools evolution-data-server-dev libgtk-3-dev libgconf2-dev libsoup-gnome2.4-dev libedataserver1.2-dev libedataserverui-3.0-dev libebackend1.2-dev libecal1.2-dev libedata-cal1.2-dev libedata-book1.2-dev evolution-dev
sudo rm -r evolution-ews ; git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution-ews -b gnome-3-2
sed '/\-Wall/ a \
\t-Wno-error=deprecated-declarations \
\t-Wno-missing-field-initializers' evolution-ews/configure.ac |
sed '/AC_SUBST(SOUP_CFLAGS)/ i \
AC_CHECK_LIB(gthread-2.0, g_thread_init)' >evolution-ews/configure.ac.new
mv evolution-ews/configure.ac.new evolution-ews/configure.ac
cd evolution-ews
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-maintainer-mode
#sudo checkinstall --pkgname=evolution-ews --pkgversion=3.2 --pkgrelease=git -requires `evolution \(\>\= 3.2\), evolution \(\<\<3.3\)` && sudo mv *.deb ..
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Save it in your home folder as build-evolution.sh
open a terminal and type:

 chmod a+x build-evolution.sh
./build-evolution.sh

Wait for everyting to compile and install, then restart evolution and you should be able to add "Exchange Web Services" accounts to evolution.

The script will leave a directory(folder) called evolution-ews in your home folder. Once you have confirmed everyting is working properly, you can delete this directory and its contents using your file manager of choice (eg. nautilus).

[gamblor01]

Ok, I've done it. First of all, credit where it is due, my script is an improvment on the one found here: http://itworks.hu/2012/03/06/compili...-ubuntu-12-04/ by csak.

Copy the following text into a text editor:

#!/bin/bash
sudo apt-get install git gnome-common checkinstall gtk-doc-tools evolution-data-server-dev libgtk-3-dev libgconf2-dev libsoup-gnome2.4-dev libedataserver1.2-dev libedataserverui-3.0-dev libebackend1.2-dev libecal1.2-dev libedata-cal1.2-dev libedata-book1.2-dev evolution-dev
sudo rm -r evolution-ews ; git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution-ews -b gnome-3-2
sed '/\-Wall/ a \
\t-Wno-error=deprecated-declarations \
\t-Wno-missing-field-initializers' evolution-ews/configure.ac |
sed '/AC_SUBST(SOUP_CFLAGS)/ i \
AC_CHECK_LIB(gthread-2.0, g_thread_init)' >evolution-ews/configure.ac.new
mv evolution-ews/configure.ac.new evolution-ews/configure.ac
cd evolution-ews
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-maintainer-mode
#sudo checkinstall --pkgname=evolution-ews --pkgversion=3.2 --pkgrelease=git -requires `evolution \(\>\= 3.2\), evolution \(\<\<3.3\)` && sudo mv *.deb ..
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Save it in your home folder as build-evolution.sh
open a terminal and type:

 chmod a+x build-evolution.sh
./build-evolution.sh

Wait for everyting to compile and install, then restart evolution and you should be able to add "Exchange Web Services" accounts to evolution.

The script will leave a directory(folder) called evolution-ews in your home folder. Once you have confirmed everyting is working properly, you can delete this directory and its contents using your file manager of choice (eg. nautilus).

This is awesome, thank you! Out of curiosity, have you tried contacting the maintainer of the evolution-ews package? It looks like the 12.04 build failed on May 5 and nobody is doing anything about it...but you got it to build!

Ideally we could get this built and put into the official repo. Then folks could just run "apt-get install evolution-ews" and get the binary version directly. That makes package management (updates and such) much easier to distribute.

In any case, many thanks for this. I'm currently using Davmail and Thunderbird/Lightning but I wanted to give Evolution a shot. Script is running as I type so I'm excited to give it a try.

Cheers!

[Scabby_al]

Nice work on the script! Hopefully this plugin will stabilize a bit and make it into the official Evolution build. Last I knew, mail worked but there were some issues with calendar and contacts?

[Derek Karpinski]

I ended up going back to Thunderbird.......

Thunderbird's lack of ubuntu integration with the panel calendar, and the messaging menu is a deal breaker. Should've been fixed before they switched from Evolution to Thunderbird.

Thunderbird, IMO is not an 'enterprise' solution. Evolution is much closer, although it has it's own issues too.

[mp035]

Nice work on the script! Hopefully this plugin will stabilize a bit and make it into the official Evolution build. Last I knew, mail worked but there were some issues with calendar and contacts?

Cheers Scabby_al. You are correct, the calendar is unusable, I am still using DavMail for my calendar, but have switched my mail over to evolution-ews.

There is a bug with exchange 2007 that prevents you from sending emails with evolution-ews, so I had to patch my copy to work with my employers server. For anyone looking, there is a thread here:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664749
It has patches attached to comments #8 and #11. I used the outdated patch in #8 because #11 is too new for evolution 3.2.3

IMO Davmail is a far more stable (and better overall) solution. As soon as I am back at the office, I will be dumping the ews plugin and switching back to Davmail. Unfortunately with thousands of emails in my sent and inbox, Davmail is just too slow while connecting remotely.

I hope that someone packages Davmail for ubuntu, with a pretty monochrome icon which is whitelisted for the default notification area.

@Derek, I agree completeley, neither is perfect, but evolution is clearly a superior package.