Linux News,Tips & Tricks

For times immerorial, Linux users have had a problem with MS Exchange mail, Global Address Books and Exchange calenders. Users had to be content with accessing the email only through IMAP and by manually creating contact lists on their systems. The OWA will work well only with IEs . The moment it detectes firefox, it switches to the lite version which literally sucks. So linux users were left with no choice to .Well , this seems to have change somewhat. While looking through the internet, I stumbled upon this excellent piece of software via which you can access your mails,  your Global address List and Exchange Calender in no time.
Enter Davmail, a very simple java program which can really give MS outlook a run for its money.

• Prerequisite : Sun J2SE 1.5 or 1.6.
• You should first download and install Java, with the graphical package manager or through command line.
• Download the linux x86 DavMail package from here and uncompress it with your favourite tool. The standard package will run natively on x86, to use DavMail on any other hardware platform, replace the SWT with the right one from http://www.eclipse.org/swt/ or use the platform independent package.
• On Ubuntu and other Gnome or Kde distributions, just use the desktop launcher. On other distributions, try davmail.sh. You should now see the DavMail gateway icon in the tray .

• You will need to add this program on your startup list to make it start when your computer starts to prevent it from manually starting the program every-time.

• The application can be found under Application-> Internet->Davmail or try typing davmail after opening the terminal

• Before you add anything to the calender , rightclick on the davmail icon on your status bar and insert the OWA link of your MS exchange mailbox in the OWA box under the main tab.

• If you are using thunderbird, the lightning extension,needs to be installed to add calender features . After that you need to click on add a calender

• Select to create a network calender

• Choose CalDav format and specify location (adjust port to your settings):

http://localhost:1080/users/username@company-name.com/calendar

• Replace username with ur email address and add the above in the location box

• Choose a name, color and set the associated email address (as set in mail setup)
• Provide your credentials, login is Active Directory account name, i.e. ur full email address and password.
• Click on finish and you are done with your MS exchange calender setup.

Public Calenders

• You can also access public calenders created on the exchange server.
• Right click on the calender list to create a new calender and in the location box enter the following

http://localhost:1080/public/calender_name

Please note: Public calender support is still under testing and it may not work perfectly for everyone.

Global Address List

• Follow the screenshots to setup ur global address list

• Choose a name, host is always localhost, LDAP base context ou=people, adjust port to your settings and set user to your Active Directory account name, i.e. domain\account.

• Click ok and save it. then open the file again to download the addressbook for offline use.
• After this you can use the global address book

• You can download Davmail here.