A serial Blog entry about installing Debian 5.03 in a Dell D620 to see if Evolution / MAPI works there.

I can not recall the last time I have done a plain Debian install. I do know that they did not have the graphical installer yet, so it was a fair amount of time ago.

Even though my primary Linux is Ubuntu (9.10 these days), which is Debian based, Ubuntu is not Debian. Ubuntu is not even, as near as I can see, a mix of custom packages layered on top. It is a complete repackaging, starting with Debian. Seems like a lot of work, but it is hard to argue with Ubuntu's success.

Success except that Ubuntu still does not have a version of Evolution that works against MS Exchange 2007. It is coming. Very very slowly. I read today that the critical packages I needed to take a stab at a working Evolution was already packaged over in Debian. This would be to bring the MAPI support from 0.28.0 to 0.28.1 like the rest of Evolution already is in Ubuntu 9.10. There is a bug to track getting MAPI up to speed in Ubuntu:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution-mapi/+bug/472552

...but I think it would be fair to say that the rate in which the Ubuntu team has worked to get Evolution stable and working with Exchange has been lethargic at best, and at least in this they are no different from of the other majors, since no one has the 2.28.1 yet... Except Debian. And of course, Gnome.

http://packages.debian.org/sid/i386/evolution-mapi/download

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/evolution-mapi/

I do not know how this got missed, except that perhaps no one at any of the projects has MS Exchange servers and so they do not pay much attention to it. Just a guess though. It clearly lags behind the other features of Evolution. Another thought would be that most in the Linux community in general think more like the Fedora community in particular, and prefer open standards and protocols rather than closed, and supporting Exchange may feel like a betrayal of those standards?

I am *not* stating any of this as fact, just speculating why in the world the MAPI support so desperately lags in Linux, and Evolution. OS.X has had working MS Exchange support since August: Clearly no one in Linux land is feeling any heat of competition with Apple. I know Apple did not go the MAPI route with their support, but at least MS Exchange access works in OS.X, and actually works very well.

Knowing that the four fixes that should repair at least in part my broken Evolution are present in Debian, I dusted off the old Debian skills, and downloaded the 'new' 150 MB network starter CD, with graphical installer. Already this is light years ahead of the last time I installed Debian.

Debian Install

The new Debian graphical installer is nice, but it does not support my external monitor / keyboard / mouse from some reason. Not even as mirrored displays. That is really old school.

The first sticking point was that it did not have the drivers for my wireless card. I did not care, so I made it skip that and just used the wired interface, noting I'd have to fix the wireless later: it is only a 150 MB install image here. No way it has everything it needs out of the box, and I did not expect it too.

Next problem was my /home directory. I am installing this over the top of OpenSUSE 11.2 RC1 on my Dell D620 laptop. Gold comes out tomorrow, so if the Debian experiment flops, that will be my next install. The problem is that both Ubuntu 9.10 and OpenSUSE use Ext4, and Debian 5.03 150 MB installer disk only has Ext3. My home directory is formatted in Ext4, and Debian can't deal with it. I told it to ignore the partition, and now had a second thing to fix post install....

I picked the 'laptop' packages to add them to the basic desktop and core set, and turned it loose. The installer chugged along for about 30 minutes downloading and installing things. Finally it asked my if I wanted GRUB to understand the Windows 7 partition, and it was done. A quick reboot onto a fairly back-level 2.6.26 kernel (Ubuntu and OpenSUSE have 2.31), and I had a mirrored display and was able to log in to Gnome. The default Gnome desktop was clean, and the Debian default theme easy to look at if nothing earth shaking graphically. As an experiment, I pulled the CDROM, installed a battery, and the power manager instantly saw the extra battery. Looks like I had the laptop packages alright!

As Han Solo once said "Don't get cocky kid!"

Old Old School

Debian is an interesting animal. At any given time it has three versions: Stable, Testing, and "sid". I was looking at the current stable version, release 5, codename "Lenny". Lenny is really really out of date, once you get to looking. Gnome was at 2.22. That means 2.24, 2.26, and 2.28 have come out *since* Lenny. Lots of water under that bridge, including all the MAPI support in Evo. Ubuntu had revved three or four times since this level of Gnome. Also, there was no way to enable dual head support in anything I had installed: the monitor tools I was used to in OpenSUSE or Ubuntu were not installed.... of course, I had just over 900 packages installed, and Ubuntu and OpenSUSE default to twice that in their base installs easily. Another thing to hunt down...

To get to testing or "sid", you start with Lenny, and change the install repositories to enable allowing packages from further upstream. the Evolution MAPI 0.28.1 I want is *all* the way upstream, in sid.

sid is what Ubuntu is based off of, and it is quite stable over in Ubuntu, so my hope is that Debian is just very very very cautious, not that one of the reasons that Ubuntu is completely repackaged is because they had to rework *everything*. Even if they did, that would have fed back to sid, and so it should be fairly stable, if not perfect. I am not looking for perfect yet, just a working MAPI connection to Exchange.

I manually edited /etc/apt/sources.list and added sid, reloaded, and started to install Evolution MAPI. Synaptic can not deal with this at all, so I had to do it from the command line. su to root, and then apt-get install evolution-mapi

MAPI would not install, because Gnome was back-level, so that became 'apt-get install evolution-mapi gnome'. That broke another thing, so I added that new thing that needed explicit upgrade permission. And another thing. And another thing.

Oh. yeah. Now I remember why I had not done a Debian install in a while. It is coming back to me. I finally get enough things added that apt can figure out the rest, and installs 478 new packages out of sid, replacing over half of the packages from Lenny. Most of it is Gnome stuff. The general theory I have for this type of work is to only install the minimum I have to, to try and stay in the Stable tree as much as possible, but that theory is not looking good.... I guess at that point to get Xinerama going will take replacing xorg with the current version. Who knows what it will take to get the wireless going... But I stick to the theory. I want to see working Evolution before I get too wrapped around the axle about anything else.

Debian stops to ask me a few questions about restarting services and whatnot. Nothing new there: still curses based questions, even though I had done a graphical install. This many packages, with pauses to ask for things, takes a fair amount of time to get through... most of an hour in fact. Part of it is the size of the update, and part is the fact that the D620 laptop hard drive is well... a laptop hard drive. I while the time away by working on this post via Google Docs, and thinking about how to integrate Google Wave here.

Before I figure Google Wave out, the install finishes. I reboot, and X won't start. Nuts. From console login: 'apt-get install xorg'. 48 more packages. Much whining in the boot messages about needing to upgrade the kernel, but it boots, and goes into X. Opps: Forgot to install the MAPI package! 'apt-get install evolution-mapi'. 9 more packages.

While I am at it, I loaded up the firmware for the Intel wireless card via Synaptic It was easy, and the wireless now works... too well. Our Access point is outside the firewall, and the laptop *prefers* the wireless connection to the wired one. To get access to the internal network I have to disable the wireless and enable the wired, eth0 type connection. I see no easy tool for this, so I do it all from command line. Really starting to miss the spit and polish of Ubuntu or OpenSUSE for things like this.

Bingo

I can see my Inbox. I can use the actual server name in the account setup. The email addresses in the inbox are valid, reply-to-able addresses. The speed to load the Inbox is not great, but it is way faster than the last release which took forever to load the inbox, right before it crashed.

All of this waiting, just to get to a valid inbox. No GAL. No Calendar. Just a working if slow inbox. I should have been more specific when I said "Working". I want to be able to calendar, at the very least, and while I can use LDAP if need be for the address book, a more native GAL implementation would be nice.

And I am in a totally unsupportable place, with a hybrid of Lenny and sid. If you read through the Debian web pages about installing the Distro, they are quite upfront and even snarky about getting off into the woods if you are not a full fledged developer who can pull themselves back from the edge. You want stable Debian, you stay years back of the leading edge. Or you use a Debian based Distro like Ubuntu, although that last bit of advice is not on the Debian web site.

Back to waiting.. and got to get OpenOffice updated on Debian. OO 2.4 will not cut it when 3.1 is right there, just 48 more sid packages away... And OpenSUSE 11.2 Gold should be out today.

PS: Extra geek points for knowing where the title of today's post comes from.

I mentioned in my Enterprise Desktops: Linux, OS.X, and Win7 post that I never expected to see OS.X pass Linux in the race to MS Exchange compatibility.

OS.X 10.6, codenamed "Snow Leopard" got there first.

As a Linux maven, this has been a hard loss to accept, but as I also have a Mac, it has been an easy loss to accept... Yes: I am feeling very split-brain about it all.

Just to be sure, I loaded up Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, and updated to the very bleeding edge, to see if Gnome 2.28 / Evo 2.28 and its built in MAPI support was going to catch up, or even be close. But it has not. It is not even close yet. When I try to enter the server name or IP address in the setup dialog, it just crashes, and it does not even ask if I want to report the problem. It's Alpha, so I can not really criticize it. I was just hoping. I was just looking for a glimmer of MS Exchange 2007 interoperability light.

To be even more sure I loaded up SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED 11) and applied all the maintenance. I can enter the MS Exchange server by name rather than address, but the GAL (Global Address List) does not work, and calendaring hangs. I am told some have working calendars, so this does appear to be variable, but it does not work on my calendar, as built up over the years, so I assume that it will not work for others as well.

I also built a SLED 11 appliance with SUSE Studio (very cool) and had the same results.

Last try: I downloaded OpenSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and installed it, but that does not have MAPI in it at all yet.

OpenSUSE 11.2 and the GA of Ubuntu 9.10 are still months away, and I have no idea if full MAPI is going to make it even then. The forums I watch about the subject have been very quiet about MAPI status. The Wiki has:

• http://www.go-evolution.org/Evo2.28
• http://www.go-evolution.org/MAPIProvider

But the last updates there are severely out of date. I scoured the forums, and Googled with fervent hope, but at the end of the day, OS.X was there with fully functional MS Exchange support, and Linux is not yet.

Nope. This round goes to OS.X. That is not to say that the support for Exchange in OS.X is perfect yet. I found a bug with scheduling meetings this morning. I have not seen any public discussion of this problem yet either, but then 10.6 is brand new, so there may not have been time. It appears to be an issue with the Global Address List (GAL) looking up the name.

I am also having another problem, but this appears to be a MS bug. The 'affinity server' is, after 3 days of steady use, suddenly rejecting my password. It is my password though, and I can not seem to convince the affinity server that it is OK. Whatever this little issue is, it locks out my Mac from email, but Linux (using IMAP) and Win7 (using whatever RPC's and MAPI bits Outlook 2007 uses) are both still able to access the Inbox.

There is an easy "work around" though: Look them up in the address book, and then drag and drop them on the appointment. In retrospect this is probably what Apple thought people would do anyway, rather than trying to do direct adds in the meeting itself. Its kind of funny: the meeting invite is sent the second that the person is dropped onto the meeting, rather than when the edit of the meeting is finished. But it works, and very well.

All of this does not even count the fact that MS will release Outlook for the Mac too, so that there will be two ways to access the Exchange server on a Mac. Outlook does not arrive till the end of 2010 though, so the built in MS Exchange 2007 support in OS.X will have plenty of time to mature and have a great deal of uptake.

The reason that this all works is probably that Apple did not take the MAPI/RPC route with 10.6. They are using Web based API's. I traced out a conversation with MS Exchange just to verify this was true. In this regard it seems like that the MS Exchange support in 10.6 is a bit like the Exchange Connector support used to be in Evolution... except that was WebDAV based, and with MS Exchange 2007 WebDAV is dropped in favor of these new API's.

This is also why 10.6 only supports MS Exchange 2007 and not 2003 and earlier. When MAPI / RPC support is finally fully working in Linux / Evolution it will have that over 10.6: MAPI / RPC means that Evolution will be able to talk to any version of MS Exchange all the way back to 5.5 more than likely. But then Outlook will arrive in the Macstack at the end of 2010, and probably negate that advantage, unless MS releases a Web API only version of Outlook. They might... never know.

The Mac I am using for all this is a 3.5 year old unit, and 10.6 has also had the side effect of making the unit feel like it has had a new processor installed. The system has a 2.1 Ghz Core processor (not Core 2) and 2Gb of RAM, and while it has never felt slow, it now "feels" every bit as fast as my Macbook with 4GB or RAM and 2.4 Ghz Core 2 processors. I used the word "Feels" there very intentionally, since I have not done actual objective measurements. Still, Safari seems to snap open, and Filezilla seems to transfer things with great speed, etc. The mail.app is quick, and the interface clean. The emails are sent quickly.

Does all of this mean the Mac is now "Enterprise ready"?

I have read this question over and over in the trades, along with endless (and endlessly vapid, IMHO) 10.6 / Win7 "Shootouts" and "Death Matches" and other similar cruft.

The answer is of course "Yes". Unless it is "No" in your shop.

MS Exchange is at something like 50% market share in the email server space, so having this support was critical *if* you are in a place that uses MS Exchange. If you were in a place that uses some other email server, or maybe have it SaaS'ed out to Google Apps or something, then you already were ready to use a Mac in the Enterprise. Whether or not you do is probably more about the size of your organization, the enlightenment of your IT department, and so forth. I was talking to one person recently whose IT department had a very cool hardware standard for their laptops: They gave folks a budget and they bought whatever they wanted to schelp around. If they bought a Windows based unit, it had to be locked down with a corporate software stack, but OS.X or Linux were not nearly as restricted.

Right after I was told about this, I got curious what I could buy for their stated budget. I have done this a couple times in the past, but I wanted to be sure the numbers had not changed much. According to a couple of vendors online configurators, that I could get a Mac for about the same price when configured the same way. And I got the Macbook unibody to boot. To be sure, I could not buy a 500 dollar Mac laptop or anything: I was comparing 13.3 inch screened, 1033 Mhz buss'ed, fast, large disked, corporate units only. Combine this with what, at least for me, has been a high level of reliability / durability / schelp-ability, and I can see why some would want to bring their Macbooks into their office settings, rather than their normal habitats like graphics studios and print shops and Hollywood offices and other parts of the creative world.

In the very strict confines of an MS-infrastructure-only shop, Mac's were historically harder to use: Same as Linux. Also like Linux, Macs have the same coping mechanisms now. Examples:

• Office Apps:
  • OpenOffice  (Have had NeoOffice for years): I just loaded up 3.1.1, and it has had no problems with an MS formatted documents
  • iWork:
    
    • Pages opens MS formatted stuff as well, and usually with high fidelity.
      
    • Ditto Keynote for PowerPoint.
    • Numbers: I have had slightly less luck with Numbers. The problem is, as always, macros, although it also does not like outlined and sorted spreadsheets. Numbers is the new kid on the iWork block, and it is a great spreadsheet on its own: it is just not fully MS compatible. Yet.
      
• Browsers:
  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Chrome
  • Seamonkey
    
    • I like the Composer HTML editor. NVU stopped at 1.0 and its child Kompozer often goes stale (although I see some movement over in Komposer, and I am using both Composer and Komposer on this post on 10.6, to see what is what. Komposer is buggy and feature-full, and Composer is solid and feature-few. Sigh.)
      
  • And of course, Safari 4.

... and so forth: OS.X has benefited greatly from the Open Source world, to be sure.

And Of Course, with Web 2.0+ All This Matters Less Anyway

As the screams around the Internet reverberate every time Gmail has a multi-minute outage, it is clear that a huge part of the world now uses online infrastructure rather than dedicated, installed in the computer or personal datacenter based infrastructure. Out there in Cloudland, you need a computer to access the cloud, and it matters not if it is a Mac, Linux (or some varient / imbedded version of it), BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, or something else. All that matters is if you have a good standards compliant browser available for your platform. That was the idea behind the Netbook, and my Dell Mini-9 came with a 2GB SSD hard drive: Enough to run Ubuntu and a browser, and it works extremely well.

The more standard (as in Open Standard) the less the client platform matters. The trends are that the people using one platform will be able to communicate with those of all the other platforms, and never know if they are talking to someone like them or not like them, computer-choice-wise.

That is good for Linux.

Or, looked at another way: I can tweet from anywhere. And anything. Change "tweet" to be whatever you need it to be.

<I’m back! Had to go move an R&D data center from one place to another. Took a while...>

Read through any of my recent posts about Linux and MAPI and a picture should develop of hope that in the very near future, even in a shop that runs Microsoft infrastructure like MS Exchange that there will soon be new choices.

This does not even address the idea that one can feasibly use Google Mail and Calendar for everything that MS Exchange does now: I have a friend who in setting up a new shop went that way rather than choosing to build their own email infrastructure or go with a more traditional outsourced email solution like hosted Lotus Notes or MS Exchange.

It is also not really my way to criticize companies or products here. I do not think using a forum like this is appropriate for that. That and I think constructive comments are more useful. I have stated over the years my reasons for preferring Linux, and if you go far enough back in my posts I wrote a series that is the true core of it: Heterogeneity. In summary, a computer ecosystem, like desktop computers, is more vulnerable to attack when it is homogenous, and I saw that demonstrated during the Code Red and Nimda virus outbreaks when only MS Windows computers were affected, but everything else was working fine... and in fact I was using Linux to build software disks full of stuff for cleaning off the virus’s on the MS Windows computers.

This is not to say that Linux or OS.X can not get a computer worm or virus. Anything created by people can be hacked by people. Cross-platform attacks are an order of magnitude harder to create though. Shoot: These days most malware targets particular releases of MS Windows, such that Windows XP might be affected, but that same thing attacking Windows 2000 or NT fails.

Barriers Dropping

The big barrier to entry for using either OS.X or Linux as an Enterprise desktop has always been MS Exchange and its closed / undocumented protocols. As I have written here, the EU has changed that by forcing Microsoft (among other things) to document how MS Exchange “talks” to Outlook via MAPI and something like 85 other Remote Procedure Calls (RPC’s). When I say MAPI hereafter, I am including all the requisite interactions between server and client, even though it is not technically accurate to just call it MAPI.

This is of course different than using POP or IMAP protocols. MS Exchange supports them, but these protocols are for email only. Contacts, Tasks, and Calendars are “safely” locked away on the MS Exchange server where only those that speak MAPI and the related RPC’s can have full access.

Rather than having to slowly read wire traces and figure out how it all works (The way Samba was created: It can be done) there is documentation about how to interact with MS Exchange for the first time. I have written here about work under way in Linux to be able to take advantage of those protocols. Now it has been revealed at the World Wide Apple Developer Conference that OS.X 10.6, shipping in September of 2009 will also have MS Exchange compatibility. Around that same time, Windows 7 will go GA.

Windows Vista Service Pack 3

I have tested Windows 7 quite a bit: In my role as a senior technologist, I can not really have a favorite platform: One of the secret sauces of BMC is that we support a wide range of platforms. Opps... I probably should not have let that slip.

As a technologist, I also have and use Vista and XP and so forth. I have to say that I do not understand the positive buzz for Windows 7 relative to Vista. I also do not understand why Vista was treated so poorly. All of it seems to lose sight of history. Windows XP was a suboptimal place to be until Service Pack 2 came out. Ditto Windows 2000 and Windows NT and Windows 98. Vista was no better and no worse out of the gate than those. It had problems, but my Vista Service Pack 2 install is now pretty stable, and does not have the speed problems that Vista and Vista SP1 had. Throw another three years of development on top of Vista, and you arrive at Vista Service Pack Three, A.K.A. Windows 7. We have been here before. Windows 98 Second Edition anyone?

Here is another thing I do not understand: I read recently one pundit say that Windows 7 and OS.X were now just two flavors of the same user interface. Huh? I use OS.X all the time. I’m writing this post with my Macbook. I do not see the resemblance. By that logic all dogs and cats and horses and cows are just various looks on the exact same animal.

Just because OS.X and Win7 both have compositing video interfaces, they are hardly the same, any more than Compiz on Linux makes it the same thing as Windows or OS.X. Sure, you can theme up Linux or Windows to make them look a lot like OS.X, but they are not the same. OS.X and Linux are more the same, given OS.X’s BSD roots, but there are still enough differences that no theme will cover up.

Nor is it hard to jump back and forth between Linux, OS.X, and MS Windows. When you are looking at a composited GUI, and using a keyboard and mouse to interact, there are bound to be similarities in the usage paradigm. There is always some adapting: I have to get used to my older Macbook Pro not having all the trackpad gestures that my Macbook has for example.

Therein lies the point of confusion I believe. The way we humans interact with computers follows a fairly simple usage paradigm. Till we have voice control or mind / computer interfaces, all computer desktops follow from the current technology. Keyboards, pointing devices, and displays. Regardless of platform, people want to write code in languages they know and love: Perl, Java, C+, Python, and so forth. All of this leads by necessity to there be some similarity in how one interacts with a computer platform, no matter which one it is.

Windows 7 is not a bad place to spend time. It runs OpenOffice, Firefox and Chrome well. The new super-command-prompt A.K.A Windows Power Shell is more in line with what xterm/konsole/gnome terminal have been for years. Would have been nice to just have bash....

Win7 with Aero is nice to look at. Some of the compositing eye candy now does useful things in addition to just being chrome. Its hardware requirements are in reach of most current gear, although like Vista before it forget running it on something more than about three or four years old. Not gonna work well. It is possible Win7 is getting good press in part because the hardware of three additional years finally caught up to Aero and Vista. That and the UAC prompt has been tamed a bit.

Win7 without Aero (in the case of something like a low end video card or a virtual machine) is pretty much like XP but with all the menus jumbled about in some way that might make sense to someone someplace but I just use the search bar to find things anymore. The hardware activation stuff is a major pain: Change the video RAM: reactivate the Win7 guest.

Key for me after Nimda and Code Red is that after years of work (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/01/17/BU102125.DTL), Win 7 is less vulnerable to black hat attack than any of the predecessor versions of MS Windows.

OS.X 10.6

The choice of what makes a new release versus what makes a new point release is often very arbitrary. OS.X 10.6 and Windows 7 have a great deal in common on that point. The new OS.X, according to everything we have read, is going to be mostly focused on internal differences. Full 64 bit exploitation. New dispatcher called “Grand Central” that will allow OS.X to work better on multi-core systems (and one would think, something that the server version will need more than the desktop edition). Big focus on security loopholes. Not much new in the user interface.

Like Win7 could be thought of as Vista SP3, OS.X 10.6 could be considered more of a point release of 10.5. One OS.X pundit thought that was in fact the entire point of the new releases code name: Snow Leopard follows Leopard. The way that the 10.6 release is priced also seems to echo that: 29 USD rather than 129 USD.

Except for the part about MS Exchange. The new 10.6 version will run as a native client of MS Exchange. Email, calendaring, etc from OS.X with no third party software. If that works, then that is huge. That means my main office desktop is going to be OS.X or Linux. No more Windows virtual machines to get to my Calendar. No more webmail calendar interface that is intentionally low function to try an get people to use IE. OS.X as a native MS Exchange client is enough for me to call it a new release. It is enough that I will buy it day one. The fact that it will make my existing hardware feel like it is running faster will be a bonus.

Linux

As I write about here in “Adventures” quite a bit, MS Exchange client function is also coming to Linux. Very very slowly. What I never expected to see was OS.X pass Linux standing still in something like this: Linux has always been the OS platform that has worked the hardest to get along with everyone else. On Linux I can load up HFS drivers so I can read and write to non-journalized Mac disks. I can load up Macutils so I can format and repair Mac disks. I can load up Samba and NTFS and get along with MS Windows disks and Active Directory. Linux is always the kid trying hard to please everyone. Yet, as I write this, the MAPI functionality I have in Linux right now is more or less the same as what I had 6 months ago.  It is there, but it is not usable. I am trying to load up Fedora 11 to see if that will change anything: Ubuntu 9.04, Mint 7, and OpenSUSE 11.1 all work at more or less the same level as far as MS Exchange access is concerned. I can read email. I can send email as long as I type in the email address. I can not reply to email because all the email addresses in the RFC822 headers are munged. No server-side group calendaring. No server side contacts. Yet.

I use the word “try” about Fedora there because unlike OpenSUSE or Ubuntu on the exact same system, Fedora is not wanting to install at all. It does not like the disk format. ‘/boot’ has to be ext3 but ‘/’ has to be ext4. It really really wants to install everything in logical volumes, not hard partitions. I will get it installed, sooner or later, but it sure feels like a step back in time. Fedora prides itself as being the most bleeding edge Distro going, and that is why I hope the MAPI functionality is better than what I have seen before in Ubuntu or OpenSUSE, but it’s installer is not up to the other distros standards. A freind of mine described it as “fragile”, and now I see what he means. OpenSUSE 11.1, looking at the same system, picks a disk layout exactly like I would have done manually.

Like Fedora going in eventually, MS Exchange MAPI support will be in Linux eventually. When it works, you’ll know it here! My guess is that OS.X will beat it by at least 6 months. I could be wrong. Knowing OS.X is getting ready to pass them might set a few coding fires.

One last thing on this point: I have said it before in other posts, but it bears repeating here. This is all about MAPI. If you have Exchange 2000 or 2003, you are good to go on Linux. You still have the WebDAV access mode that MS eliminated in Exchange 2007, so the “Evolution Connector” plug-in still works, and you still have everything. Email, calendars, contacts, task lists, out of office settings... the works.

MS Exchange 2010

As if to acknowledge that choice of desktop client has entered the workplace (or perhaps that eliminating WebDAV came off as a bit surly in the marketplace), one of the new features of MS Exchange 2010 is going to be fully enabling the web client so that, like Google Mail, full feature functionality is available to everyone, regardless of platform. One will not have to run IE to see advanced/more fully featured webmail functions.

MS’s Outlook Webmail will finally be Web 2.0-ish. Reportedly. I have not had a chance to try it yet...

If it does work as advertised: If I can use Firefox or Safari or Opera to access a fully featured Webmail, then that will probably go further to cementing MS Exchange’s market share in the data center than any of the exclusionary things that have proceeded it.

At the same time, the ability to have diversity on the desktop will go a long way to containing future computer worms and viruses

I have, for years, with varying degrees of stability, been able to access my Exchange based Calendar and email from Linux via Novell (really, Ximian's) Evolution product. I have written about all that at length here.

No more. Welcome MS Exchange 2007. Goodbye WebDAV. Microsoft's grand experiment in email open standards is over, and where Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 were accessible via the WebDAV protocol, Exchange 2007 drops this.

I do not know why. It was not because it did not work.

WebDAV was part of how MS created Web access to the MS Exchange inbox, Contacts, and Calendars. E2007 replaces that with a heavy and light client. The heavy client only works with IE, and is all ActiveX stuff as near as I can tell. The 'light' client appears to be mostly an HTML effort, and works with Safari and Firefox, among others. The light client is noticeably faster than the old light client was, and is cleaner and brighter to look at. It reminds me more than anything else of the Yahoo webmail interface.

It is serviceable, and will have to do for now, because with WebDAV removed, all I can access from Evolution is the Inbox via IMAP. That is not insignificant either: IMAP is faster than the old MS Exchange connector was: Clearly a lighter protocol. I also have Win7 and Outlook 2007 if I need it.

It Could be Worse: MAPI / RPC *is* coming to Linux. Slowly.

MS kept their access protocols carefully undocumented, non-Open-Standard, and in fact kind of catch as catch can. Need a new feature? MAPI protocol was not envisioned for that? No big deal: Add a Remote Procedure call. In addition to the MAPI protocol itself, when Outlook and MS Exchange talk, there are apparently 150 or so RPCs involved.

There is nothing about any of this that would keep any host platform that can talk TCP/IP from talking to MS Exchange. Neither MAPI nor RPC's are the exclusive realm of MS Windows. What has kept it exclusive has been lack of documentation. If you wanted to implement an email client with Calendaring, Contacts, and Tasks that talked to MS Exchange the same way Outlook does you had to grab the wire conversations and figure out how they worked. What they were doing.

This can be done. It is tedious and time consuming, but the Samba project figured out SMB this way. It can be done. What WebDAV did for projects like KDE's Kontact and Gnomes Evolution is make it far easier to figure out things. The wire protocol was WebDAV. They could see the mailstore, the Contacts, and other objects on the Exchange server via WebDAV. They still had to figure out the interactions, but by being readable, it was far easier than trying to start at zero like one would have with MAPI and undocumented RPCs (And we are talking about the undocumented MAPI here, not the documented SMAPI from years ago)

Even as relatively easy as it might have been, Evolution was never all that stable (At least when using the Exchange Connector, and some point releases were better than others and depended also on the Distro in odd ways that I have documented here in the past), and KDE never called their MS Exchange / WebDAV effort anything but experimental, and my experience of it was that while you could read your calendar, you could never add events to it with Kontact.

The EU has changed all this. MS has been told that if they want to do business there they have to document things like MAPI and the RPC's they have kept so under wraps for all this time. They have. In fact, MS also worked with Novell to get Silverlight going on Linux (the so-called 'Moonlight' project) so people could watch the Obama Inauguration on the Internet with Linux.

Now both KDE and Gnome are working with OpenChange to get support for MS Exchange into their projects. The first MAPI / RPC support is set for Evolution 2.26, due in March with the rest of Gnome 2.26. It will apparently implement a subset of the RPC's required to get started at a basic level with MS Exchange server access. Some 80 or so of the 150 RPC's MS has documented. In support of this, OpenChange just release a new library of fixes and new feature function on January 20th, 2009.

I have an OpenSUSE 11.1 / Gnome 2.24 based system set up and ready to test the new libraries as soon as I get a spare moment from my regular day job. That link also has repos for Fedora 9, 10, and OpenSUSE 11.0. I am also tracking Ubuntu 9.04 since it should ship with Gnome 2.26.

KDE is farther behind on this that Gnome, but they never really had WebDAV working as well either. This article documents the KDE's current status. In related news, after the setback that was the KDE 4.0 release, it looks like KDE is starting to get their Mojo back in general. KDE 4.2 is supposed to be much better, and by the time the MAPI / RPC support is added they should be well on their way to being a fully viable desktop again. Not that they stopped being one, as long as you stayed in the 3.x tree. But 4.x should be back to having all the feature/function of the 3.x tree, with the new underlying architectural improvements in place. It was painful, but it looks like the environment is nearly back. Just in time for Gnome to have a spasm of architecture changes no doubt.

Aside: I have no problem really with what KDE did when they moved to the new 4.x series. I get that they had to make some underlying changes to position themselves for the future. I just think that 4.0 and 4.1 were still Beta's. I have not yet tried 4.2 to see what it looks like: I will as soon as I have a chance. If nothing else, I will be tracking how KDE adds in the MAPI / RPC functionality. I like having options. It is probably telling that KDE centric distros like PCLinuxOS have chosen to stay with the 3.x tree so far. The exact quote, in reference to their upcoming PCLinux 2009 release:

"We decided to use kde3-5-10 as our default desktop as the we could not achieve a similar functionality from kde4. We will however offer KDE4 as an alternative desktop environment available from the repo once we stabilize it."

Waiting Is....

Geek points! I got in a "Stranger in a Strange Land" reference! In this case, it is not martian patience, it is just that there is not choice. MAPI support is coming soon, but it is not here yet, and it is getting here far faster than it might otherwise have, since the various projects have access to the actual protocols this time around. It still will take some time. I fully expect that Evolution 2.26.0 will be followed by a series of point releases while all the bugs get worked out on this brand new feature set.

The funny thing about all this is that it probably still is only a short term thing before all the angst about these protocols fades from relevance. Cloud Computing, Google Gears,, SaaS, Linux based Netbooks, and all the current technology has us heading away these paradigms can not help but have an impact here.