What can you do when the company you work for (or should I say the people who manage the Internal Network) has decided to switch from Lotus Domino to M\$ Exchange 2007 ? Ouch ... I can't say that i'm personnally a great Lotus Domino supporter but it's stable system and a native client exists for all the current platforms (packaged in .rpm and .deb for Linux,as well as in Java installshied wizard for linux distros not using either rpm nor deb packages) .. But what when you have to switch to Exchange backend ? Up to now I always managed to have my professional laptop installed with CentOS and I surely don't want Windows on my laptop that i use for my day-to-day work :D

I had a quick look at the Exchange plugin that you can find for Evolution, but unfortunately that one (that uses OWA in the backend) can only be used against Exchange 2K or 2K3 but is incompatible with 2K7. Then i heard about rumours regarding a new Exchange/Mapi plugin (that requires a newer Evolution/gnome than the one provided in el5). I can't test it as it requires direct mapi access to the Exchange server and i'm forced (up to now) to use RPC over HTTPS . Damn. It seemed that the only solution was then to install Outlook with Wine on my CentOS laptop .. until i found DavMail : it uses OWA in the backend (and is compatible with Exchange 2k7 OWA) and acts as a IMAP/Caldav/LDAP gateway. Cool, so i can use my MUA of choice (tested now with Thunderbird but i want to test Mutt as well) to read my mails, consult/update my calendar and search/uses the Exchange Addressbook without having to install any M\$ component ..

So far, so Good ... thanks DavMail ! :D