I've been following the development of Evolution 2.0 on and off for some time, primarily having been interested in the improvements of its calendar and webdav support, as I want better interoperation between iCal and Thunderbird users. Yesterday I upgraded to it on our home computer.

The upgrade process went extremely smoothly. I have to say I'm quite impressed by the attention to ease of use in the various Gnome projects since the release of Gnome 2.0 a couple of years ago. Nearly all of the data from the 1.4 installation was migrated perfectly, although I did experience a slight hiccup in outgoing mail settings. I use two mail servers for work and home email, both of which require authenticated TLS SMTP connections. For some reason Evo 2.0 could not send email through either account until I revisited the account settings and changed the "Use secure connection" setting to "Whenever possible" instead of "Always".

The calendar interface with its multiple calendars, subscribable calendars seems like an improvement, although I have not yet tested publishing my main calendar. However, it seems that the publish/subscribe code can not use https URLs - if this is true, that's a disappointing miss, and effectively won't allow me to make use of it.

Running inside an otherwise Gnome 2.6 (FC2) desktop, I miss the Summary view and the Shortcut bar. I have several mail accounts configured, as in addition to the home and work accounts, I keep track of a few shared support mailboxes. I can no longer see the number of new messages for each inbox in one glance anywhere, as they don't all fit into view at once in the Mail screen with all subfolders visible.

I suppose this is a problem which will go away as Gnome tools gain support of evolution-data-server. I know the clock/calendar applet already shows calendar entries (although I have not yet tried it myself), but I'm not sure if the Inbox monitor (which I haven't used since it has required its own IMAP account configuration) has been converted to look at folders through e-d-s. I hope it has, or at least will be.

I've understood Evo 2.0 should be faster than the old version as well, but I have not noticed major differences yet. I'll probably get a better feeling of that once I upgrade on the work laptop, which I use more regularly for email access. All in all, a solid upgrade, but one which does not necessarily bring immediate user-visible benefits. Not worth upgrade if you otherwise stay in a Gnome 2.6 environment, but it is a good reason to look at upgrading to 2.8 completely.

Comment by Ryan on Sun, 21 Nov 2004 22:32:39:
I have run into the same issue where Evolution doesn't support calendaring over https. Very disappointing - and something I think would be rectified shortly?