Evolution must fully Exchange?

As usual the very first thing you do when you walk into office is read the emails. Today I did just the same and to my surprise; I could not connect to my email server. Our email server is based on Microsoft. Since I don't run windows on my box, I don't have Outlook. The email client I use is Evolution. Its been working ok thus far. I can read and respond to email and access to calender services. I have been having trouble with global directory service, which I can afford to compromise since the organization is not so big. Anyway, seems our administrators been doing some work on the Exchange server over the week end, and the some settings on the web fount end has been changed. This was the issue, Evolution works with exchange over the web interface and now I am kinda off the email system until they fix it. The next choice is just use the web interface from a browser. Plus I still can't understand why the web interface is up but I cannot connect with Evolution. Obviously some settings has been changed, including the IP(maybe even the physical server?) and the port its running on.

After all this stuff; I went in to digg just to get an update on the news. Ah; guess what I found an article which kinda was addressing the same problem I was having. But this was talking about why people were slow in adopting Linux (or not) and the author brought up the Evolution and Exchange issue. Hmmm? Well I don't really agree with him, yeah its slow, but it works and I don't think there are many people who use the 100% full features of Exchange and Outlook. If we can read the mail and take care of the appointments and stuff, thats good enough for most. Plus for example in the case of this country, not many even run on Exchange. I think there is more then an email client which has limited access to exchange that is stopping people from switching to Linux. In my view I guess mostly people or the administrators and management is not fully aware of where Linux is today. I mean the things like Open Office and a stable Desktops, and networking environments (Windows connectivity via Samba,etc). I would say its the lack of awareness that is stopping from people to migrate. Most people just don't give it a try and see. Maybe they used a live CD and clicked around and came to conclusions. I wonder how many people really did try to install an alternative OS in the work environment and gave it a real try. To see how it is to live Microsoft Free, and in a FREE software world? I agree if you are into graphics Linux is still not the choice; like for PhotoShop and CorelDraw. But then again my question is: is Windows or Mac the best choice for these kinda applications? Next comes games, yeah Windows rules! But you don't need to play games at your office do you?