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…

Crossing over to Mac (Courtesy of laptopmag.com)

With the release of the new MacBook, I finally decided to bite the bullet and go all mac.  I wasn’t sure that all the things that I used to be able to do can be replicated fully in the mac environment, but I got a little fed up with going back and forth using Mac and Windows. So here’s the story of me switching completely to mac, the problems I encounter, and whatever solutions I found to fix them.

I had been on two platforms (Mac and Windows) for as long as I can remember.  I use Mac at home and Windows at the office.

Here are the list of things that I do on the mac:

• FireFox for web browsing
• iPhoto for all the pictures I’ve taken
• iTunes for all music/audiobook related stuff
• Pages, mostly in layout mode, to create documents
• Photoshop, for all the graphic tweaking stuff
• iMindMap, for all mindmap creations
• Dictionary and unit converter widgets

Here are the list of things that I do on my PC:

• Word, for all the document editing stuff related to work
• Excel, for all the number crunching stuff related to work
• Outlook, as a Personal Information Manager, and to connect to exchange server at the office
• Firefox, for all web browsing activities
• MindManager, for all mindmapping activities
• KlikBCA (with the VPN dialer) for all my banking needs.
• Blackberry sync to sync all PIM info into my blackberry

As you can see, prior to the switch, I had mostly segregated my office work from the rest of the things that I do in my life.  Bit by bit, however, I started to use the mac more and more even for my work related stuff, and so I started wondering how bad it would be if I completely switch to Mac.

Things that I thought I’d be able to switch completely to Mac with little or no worry:

• Word
• Excel
• Firefox
• MindManager

Things that I was a little worried about:

• Outlook
• KlikBCA
• Blackberry sync

Well, like I mentioned above, I bit the bullet and made the switch, even though I haven’t really found good answers for the things I was worried about.

On the next post in this series I’ll share the problems that I encountered when I first switched to Mac.  Hopefully these experiences are similar to others who are contemplating a switch and can provide a little help in making the transition a little smoother.