Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Evolution 2.24 Going Live, HP 5735 Work Continues

After a one year and not always pleasant process we have reached a milestone with Evolution on SLED 11 that has the features and stability with which to deploy. The shot below is my calendar with data loaded from webcals and from the Groupwise backend.

Note to Linux desktop vendors: Having an email client, word processor and browser are the key elements to success in creating more customers. Specialty apps can still run on Windows, but these core applications need to be robust and feature rich in order to entice people to use Linux as their desktop.

The good news is that these patches will be coming for all customers on SLED, and also have mostly been merged into the community build.



I've moved over about 120 users to the new version, and the top below shows the load with 80 concurrent. The box has some kick, :) , and will easily be able to handle our maximum load of 300 concurrent.




I also have been working with HP to get some better performance out of the 5735 thin client. It has specs better than the 5725, but for some reason is slower in speed. I received a new build to test and am working on installing that now. I'm sure we will figure out the issue and be able to start deploying the newer model around the City.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd say that an email client like Evolution or Thunderbird is only part of the solution. In a world dominated by Outlook I think that the following functionality is required to level the playing field:

- support a directory supplied addressbook
- support meeting requests sent by an Outlook clients
- syncing contacts, calendars and todo lists with a mobile client

Afaik Evolution by itself can't do that and needs a backend that does. Groupware solutions from for example Zarafa, Zimbra or Scalix are required to make this happen.

Dave Richards said...

anonymous: I'm not familiar with the Exchange connectivity. Evolution provides citywide address books and also all meeting and free/busy features work with the Groupwise backend. We have mobile clients working fine by connecting them to Groupwise and using a third party vendor.

Open source backends don't appear robust enough for our needs last time we checked. Email is easy, calendar is what always the killer.

Hans Petter Jansson said...

Very nice. Congrats to you and the Evolution team!

By the way, great terminal colors :)

Randall Wood said...

BTW, Our company just got in pre-production models of he HP 5725/5735 replacement thin clients for testing. I understand that the 5735s might be EOLed soon.

Dave Richards said...

Randall: I'm hearing the same thing. It certainly keeps us on our toes. :)