Chapter 1. Getting Started with Ximian Evolution

Table of Contents
What is Ximian Evolution, and What Can It Do for Me?
The First Time you Start Ximian Evolution
What's What in Ximian Evolution

What is Ximian Evolution, and What Can It Do for Me?

Information is useless unless it's organized and accessible; it's hardly even worth the name if you can't look at it and be informed. The goal of Ximian Evolution is to make the tasks of storing, organizing, and retrieving your personal information easier, so you can work and communicate with others. That is, it's a highly evolved groupware program, an integral part of the Internet-connected desktop.

In other words, Ximian Evolution is a tool to help you get your work done.

Ximian Evolution is Free Software. The program and its source code are released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), and the documentation falls under the Free Documentation License (FDL). For more information about the GPL and the FDL, visit the Free Software Foundation's website at http://www.fsf.org.

Ximian Evolution can help you work in a group by handling email, address and other contact information, and one or more calendars. It can do that on one or several computers, connected directly or over a network, for one person or for large groups.

With Ximian Evolution, you can accomplish your most common daily tasks faster. For example, it takes only one or two clicks to enter an appointment or an address card sent to you by email, or to send email to a contact or appointment. Ximian Evolution makes displays faster and more efficient, so searches are faster and memory usage is lower. People who get lots of mail will appreciate advanced features like Virtual Folders, which let you save searches as though they were ordinary mail folders.