Looking for a Macintosh email/calendaring client

[Arlos]

OK, where I work is about 50% Mac and 50% PC. The Mac folks are using Entourage, which MS itself admits blows goats. So, I was hoping that someone could recommend to me a good Mac mail client that would not only work for mail, but that had calendering features that link up tightly with the back end Exchange servers.

From what I understand, Thunderbird works great for mail, but can't do the calendaring. Mail.app also works for mail, but a plugin that claimed it would handle the calendaring doesn't actually work.

So, any ideas?

-Arlos

[Lyion]

Google Desktop is the tool you seek, with it's web based calendaring support with a desktop plugin.

[Tossica]

Fuck Macs.

[Harrison]

*GASP* I agree with fuckface.

[Arlos]

Google Desktop may well not be a viable option for political reasons which NDA prevents me from going into the details of.

Also, remember whatever option we go with MUST tightly integrate with Exchange servers at the back end, as it needs to not only talk to the regular exchange server, it needs to talk to the Blackberry server as well.

Much as I might want to do away with macs, that is NOT an option. Lots of the developers are on the latest MacBook Pros and apparently love them as a development platform. So, saying FUCK MACS, while certainly arousing sympathy, doesn't help me much.

-Arlos

[Lionking]

Maybe this: http://www.zimbra.com/buzz/?gclid=COLao ... ZQodrWkA7A


???

[Tossica]

Outlook Web Access.

[Arlos]

We're using webmail as a backup for when Entourage is fubar, but it's not a workable long-term solution. We need something with the power and functionality of Exchange for the PC (though hopefully with less security holes), just for the Mac. Entourage is SUPPOSED to be that, hell, it's MS's own product, but they freely admit that it bloweth goats.

-Arlos

[Tossica]

We're using webmail as a backup for when Entourage is fubar, but it's not a workable long-term solution. We need something with the power and functionality of Exchange for the PC (though hopefully with less security holes), just for the Mac. Entourage is SUPPOSED to be that, hell, it's MS's own product, but they freely admit that it bloweth goats.

-Arlos

I've never used Entourage. What doesn't it do that Outlook does?

[Arlos]

Outlook doesn't have to use IMAP to talk to the Exchange server, from what I am told. It seems that clients that have to use IMAP are seeing massive speed issues, problems syncing up, etc. What will happen with the entourage users is they will request connection to the server, due to the latency it will time out, and the software will assume it's a login/password issue, and pop up a login/password box every 30 seconds as it tries to connect. Needless to say, it's somewhat disruptive to users' work flow to get interrupted every 30 seconds. More details about the back end of the Exchange infrastructure I don't really have, unfortunately.

-Arlos

[Lyion]

Google Desktop may well not be a viable option for political reasons which NDA prevents me from going into the details of.

Also, remember whatever option we go with MUST tightly integrate with Exchange servers at the back end, as it needs to not only talk to the regular exchange server, it needs to talk to the Blackberry server as well.

Much as I might want to do away with macs, that is NOT an option. Lots of the developers are on the latest MacBook Pros and apparently love them as a development platform. So, saying FUCK MACS, while certainly arousing sympathy, doesn't help me much.

-Arlos

Check out Evolution, the mail/calendar client that is native to Linux but runs on Macs.

Other than that, I don't have any other ideas, Arlos. Sorry.

[Arlos]

That Evoluton client looks pretty promising, actually. I'd never heard of it. I just passed it along. Thanks much.

-Arlos