Monday, June 21, 2010

Evolution 2.28 & 64 Bit OpenOffice Going Live Starting Today

Evolution 2.28
Those of you that have met me and communicate with me know that I'm pretty fair in describing good & bad experiences in working with technology. The road upgrading from Evolution 2.6 on SLED 10 to something newer has not been very fun and took 1.5 years, which is WAY too long. There were a few times in recent months where we had meetings and discussed moving to completely new solutions. We are using the Groupwise backend with very heavy calendaring and had a minimum level of features that we wanted to get included and working. Sometimes I still get the feeling that Linux vendors are somewhat caught off guard when you *REALLY* run desktop software not on MS Windows. Evolution is by far the best solution to deploy on Linux over the Groupwise Java client (which is absolutely horrid), and the web interface. I just wish that more resources were allocated to its advancement.

With SP1 of SLED 11 enough upstream patches have been merged that our features are working well enough to deploy. It's not perfect and some bugs remain, but users can perform their calendaring functions including meeting resends and retracts. I will be moving over the users to the new server and then doing a bit of QA testing on their accounts to ensure that everything is working.



OpenOffice 3.2.1 On 64 Bit Linux
We had an issue last week whereby hardware is failing on our production OpenOffice server. As luck would have it, the replacement computer had already arrived and was sitting on the loading dock. I did a review of all of the packages that we needed and determined that everything was available in 64 bit versions. The server was quickly built and will be put into production this week. Openoffice on this server is FAST. The composer UI of Writer is appearing fully rendered in about 2-3 seconds, and running so quickly that the splash page doesn't even appear at all. Very nice, and thank you to everyone involved with making my job easier. :)

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