Going Full Mac (Part 2)
I have been using my MacBook now for about one month and I still tag my PC along when I go to the office. I’ve found that moving my Outlook to Mac isn’t quite as easy. I have expected this but not to the extent that I’m going through now.
Initially I thought that Entourage (part of MS Office for Mac) will be my ticket to freedom. Since it is a replacement for Outlook that was built by Microsoft for the Mac I presume that there will be no issues once I got it installed on my Mac.
Turns out I was wrong. The first issue was the edition of MS Office for Mac that I should be using. I had gone to a mac store and almost got the MS Office Home and Student Edition, which was reasonably priced. Looking at the comparison table on the back of the packaging, though, I found out that that edition did not support exchange server.
I didn’t know exactly what that means but just to be safe, I proceeded to look for the standard edition of MS Office which has the exchange server support. Well, I found it, but it costs me three times the home and student edition.
Ok, so I got my Entourage with Exchange Server Support, so everything should be hunky dory, right ? Wrong. For the life of me, I can’t seem to find how to synchronize my tasks and categories. I searched and searched and searched and finally realized that Entourage does NOT synchronize tasks and categories. Well that blew a big hole in my plan to migrate completely to Mac. I need the tasks and categories and Entourage apparently is not going to be the answer. Isn’t it weird that Microsoft creates an exchange client that does not support tasks and categories ? Or is this part of an evil twisted plan for sabotaging the Mac platform ?
Since I can’t use Entourage, I have to find another way of getting my calendars, contacts, tasks, emails, and categories into my mac.
I have two choices now from where I sit: Find out how to synchronize exchange with the Apple applications (calendars, tasks, etc), and/or install parallels and run windows within my Mac OS.
The quest continues…
Tags: mac, mac switch
December 1st, 2008 at 10:28 pm
pitty Entourage task & categories sync feature won’t be available in the near future
the Lead Program Manager for Entourage Andy Ruff said:
Half a decade ago, Entourage did not even talk to Exchange. We have been
consistently and regularly adding Exchange functionality to Entourage, many
of them in regular, free updates. 2008 brought a number of new features:
* Out of Office
* Kerberos Single Sign-on
* Free/Busy Detailing
* To Do flag sync
* Delegation over HTTP
We realize there are shortcomings and some of them are painful. However, we
want to make sure we build a reliable product. Not just check features. We
stepped back from features and took the time to improve the app¹s quality
and reliability. Without doing so, it would have been much harder to
deliver more Exchange functionality in the future as we plan to do. You
will find Entourage 2008 much more reliable when using existing Exchange
functionality such as calendaring and mailbox synchronization.
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Yup, kinda thought so… well in the mean time then Entourage is half useless for me.
I’ve installed parallels and added a Windows XP virtual machine. It looks like the pain is much less if I just maintain an outlook application on this virtual machine, rather than force mac to synch with exchange.
December 29th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Hi Dien Hong, looks like the next version of Mac OSX Snow Leopard will be able to solve your MS Exchange problem. Check out this site:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/