Having an Evolution and Mail notification Problem?

[Les Mikesell]

Robin Laing wrote:

>> If you are just doing email it doesn't make much sense to be locked in 
>> to a proprietary server.  Unfortunately there hasn't been any real 
>> alternative to exchange or notes if you need calendar/scheduling tied 
>> to email.  Our company has widely distributed offices and depends 
>> heavily on conference calls with everyone calling a bridge number at 
>> the same time.  I'd never remember the times if outlook or my phone 
>> (treo w/outlook sync) didn't beep at me - and they change all the time 
>> as people have to reschedule.  Even if an alternative to exchange 
>> existed, it would be pretty hard to change all the infrastructure at 
>> this point.
>>
> 
> You are so correct.  I have never used any other feature than email. Any 
> calender function was working well with iCal.  Even my boss wants to go 
> back to Mozilla as Outlook has lowered his productivity.

The calendar feature really is valuable if (and only if...) everyone who 
works together uses it to schedule calls, meetings, etc.  This will only 
happen if the boss uses it.  When I was running evolution against 
exchange/owa it seemed to get the calendar right and even tied the 
alarms into the gnome toolbar clock.  But then it broke for a long time 
and I switched to imap access.

> His comment was about the Calender feature that only a few people 
> actually use is the reason by this forced shift.  An IT person told me 
> it was a make work project for a particular person.

Besides the usual calls/meetings/appointments that land in individual 
calendars of everyone involved, we have a 'scheduled maintenance' public 
calendar where all approved changes to our production networks and 
equipment are scheduled.  That's managed by a group that tries to 
minimize conflicts and do everything after normal business hours but if 
anything breaks you can look there and easily see what has changed 
recently.  It wouldn't absolutely have to be in exchange but it is nice 
that it works exactly the same as individual scheduling and adjusts 
automatically in response to emailed updates even if you haven't opened 
them.  But again, things like that don't work unless the boss enforces 
it - and for a small group in one place it might be overkill. We usually 
have 15-25 changes every evening.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com