For some reason unbeknown to me, the developers of Ubuntu 10.04 updated Gnome desktop environment to version to 2.30 but left the Evolution version as 2.28.  I think that this version of Evolution is really buggy and the decision was a very bad idea.  In this article I will show you how to upgrade your Evolution version to 2.30 and install the Evolution-mapi client so that you can connect to a Microsoft Exchange 2007 server.

To do this we will be using unofficial Ubuntu packages created and maintained by Jacob Zimmerman.  The packages are located on his PPA page.

Step 1:
Install Jacob’s PPA package repository on your system. Open up a terminal session and type the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jacob/evo230

This will install Jacob’s PPA repository for Evolution 2.30. It will also import the security key.

Step 2:
Update your computer’s repository information.
In the same terminal windows type:

 sudo apt-get update

Step 3:
Next type to upgrade Evolution from 2.28 to 2.30:

 sudo apt-get install evolution

apt will respond by telling you that there are several packages that need installed, upgrade, and removed. Hit the “Y” key to continue.

Now sit back and relax as apt upgrades to Evolution 2.30.

Extra:
If you are in a corporate/school environment that uses Microsoft Exchange 2007 for its email server you can install the evolution-mapi package to allow Evolution to communicate with the server. Remember this is still a very experimental package, however I have found that it is far better in version 2.30 than it ever was is 2.28.
Type this to install evolution-mapi

apt-get install evolution-mapi

This will also need you to hit “Y” to install becuase there are several new packages that get installed to support Evolution-mapi

You should now be able to fire up Evolution and configure it for you email environment.

Note about mapi-plugin:

Here is the response from the evo230 maintainer about the evolution-mapi plug-in

Hi Terry
I’m sorry that I had to remove the mapi package from the PPA for the moment. The latest version doesn’t build properly on lucid, and besides many people experienced problems with that package that could only be solved by upgrading openchange to version 0.10, which is also not possible for dependency reasons. Hope you understand.
Kind regards
Jacob
I will keep you posted if anything changes

Note:

The first time that I open Evolution after upgrading I just got a gray screen.  To fix this all I did was reboot.