Yasha
It looks like office 360 supports legacy MAPI clients and thats good
news for you because there is a Linux MAPI client library which plugs
into several mail clients.
Although I've never liked evolution as a mail client there is a plugin
which comes with SL for it "yum install evolution-mapi"
In addition office 360 supports the new protocol "Exchange Web
Services" and though Ive never tried it on SL I do know that recent
versions of evolution do support it.
Also also I've never tried them but know there are plugins for Mozilla
Thunderbird and Seamonkey for "Exchange Web Services" as well

The old OWA web scraping clients aren't really needed any more and for
the mosty part should be removed from most if not all the mail
clients.

Also if you are really brave you can checkout the openchange project
which is where most of the client libraries are coming from their goal
is to make a open source replacement for Microsoft Exchange server and
the clients.


On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 9:26 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 12:10 PM, Chris Schanzle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> On 02/09/2015 01:40 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
>>>
>>> My university IT department, external to any academic or research unit,
>>> has made the arbitrary decision to force us to use a Microsoft Office365
>>> external distributed proprietary (cloud) service for official university
>>> email.  Although this service nominally supports IETF SMTP and IMAP
>>> protocols, it is abysmally slow when so doing. The campus IT spokesperson
>>> has explained that only a client compliant with Microsoft ActiveSync will
>>> fully function with this imposed proprietary closed system service --
>>> translation:  if one wants reasonable speed in email, use an ActiveSync
>>> client -- probably from Microsoft.
>>
>>
>> I think your campus IT spokesperson is wrong, or you are not paying enough
>> to get good service. :-)
>
> From direct experience with such email clients and Linux and Mac
> clients, they're quite right. It won't have "full service" unless it
> has access to the calendar and addres list functions. A pure IMAP
> solution, as some of us prefer, also won't have the "click on the
> group email address and have it expanded to all the group members
> automatically" function. That's why saying "it won't have full
> service" is weasel words.
>
> The OWA or Outlook Web Application used by various clients and by most
> cell phone applications for Exchange of any flavor is basically web
> scraping. It can get you *most* functionality, but it's never going to
> work as well as a native Windows client.