Ubuntu is a geek-favorite Linux distribution (I dual boot at home and know Elph has at least one machine running it), so it’s natural that we’ve been running it in the office. When we upgraded to Exchange 2003, I set out to find an Exchange client for Ubuntu.

Evolution is a popular Linux app, and the default client for Ubuntu. Evolution connects to the OWA giving you a new look to a familiar experience. You’ve got access to mail, calendar, tasks, and ZCoB address book. It’s pretty cool, and an understandable favorite.

When I was using it I noticed that, since it doesn’t connect directly to the mail server, there’s a slight lag in updating. I also missed some of the full-functionality of Outlook and Entourage, like browsing the GAL and opening shared calendars. These weren’t enough to throw Evolution out, but I wanted a client on par with Outlook or Entourage or that at least had some of these advanced features.

Using the OWA in Internet Explorer is a somewhat comparable experience to using Outlook. IE is only for Windows, though. Enter IE4Linux. IE4Linux runs on WINE and allows users to run IE on most Linux distros. This provides the same experience of using the OWA on a Windows machine: it’s good, but it could be better.

I learned a lot and had fun installing/configuring WINE and IE4Linux, but, man, it was a lot of work! (I spent a couple days playing with WINE (see below), and another couple hours installing IE). The pre-installed Evolution at least had the look and feel of a native client, but the OWA in IE on Linux…it was a stranger in a strange land.

Pressing ahead, Elph tipped me off to CrossOver, a derivative of WINE that “re-implements the WIN32 API, allowing applications to run as if natively on [Linux].” This meant that I could install Outlook* on Ubuntu with all the functionality I was looking for.

*This, technically, can also be done with WINE, but I spent 3 days trying to configure WINE to run the installation files, and even after “successfully installing” I couldn’t get Outlook to Launch.

Installing CrossOver was painless thanks to good documentation, and it installed and launched Outlook just as easily. It even added Windows apps to Unbuntu’s program menus (in WINE you usually launch through the terminal). Outlook in CrossOver was impressive; we all got the same silly look on our faces when we saw MS Outlook basically running natively in Ubuntu. Outlook consistently hung on closing, which was probably fixable (and even happens in Windows occasionally), but I was willing to put up with it to have a full-functioning client running in Ubuntu.

Of the three clients I tried, CrossOver is a clear winner…kinda. CrossOver costs $50, which I have a hard time paying while living in the open source freedom of Linux. But that’s a reasonable price, especially when running a free OS. The other downer is that CrossOver doesn’t support Outlook 2003 yet, only Outlook 2000. Outlook 2k was cool, but we spent a lot of time and money upgrading to Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003. Running the old Outlook felt like a step back.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 9:59 am and is filed under Exchange Project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.