Thanks! We do our best to help. I find that most Mac users are more than
willing to help if they can. Just finding someone that knows your particular
situation is the hard part.
For a while several of the Entourage developers answered questions on this
list about exchange. This was on their own time too.
FWIW, this news list is not an official MS support forum. It is only hosted
by MS.
MVPs also have jobs and other issues that demand their time. I do know that
some MVPs do have experience, but just don't have time to monitor this list
on a daily basis.
The Entourage Talk list is totally different from this list. There are many
users there with broad skills and understanding of Entourage. It's a
community of users. Many started out on the Claris Emailer list and moved on
to OE then Entourage. It's not as busy as the newsgroup and really a good
list overall. I suggest asking there for help.
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To Paul, Diane and Corentin <bonjour!>,
Thanks for clarifying some things about the News Groups. I'm really glad
you didn't see what I was saying as criticism of MVPs. And I appreciate the
time you took to craft your replies.
One point from Paul's post contains an assumption that my experience tells
me is not correct - you do not have to be a "substantial" company to run
Exchange. In fact MSFT have a specific product called Small Business Server
that includes Exchange that is designed to get SMEs into a 2000/3 Server and
Exchange. We recommend it to many of our clients. Its great for anyone who
has 10 or more employees, but even 10 is not necessarily the lower limit. We
only have 9 employees at present and we have used Exchange since we had only
5 people. Its had a huge benefit for us.
However, that was not the point of my post. Can I say this to close this
off - If I go to the Remote Desktop Client news group, or to the Exchange
2000 news group, I will find contributors there whose names are suffixed
with [MSFT]. My experience of these news groups is that anyone with those
initials works for Microsoft. They are specialists in the field, are
generally part of the technical groups attached to the product, and are able
to make a contribution that is often (though not always) above the level of
many MVPs. After all, think of the resources they have at their disposal.
In the Remote Desktop Client newsgroup, the contributors are all members of
the MBU team who worked on the RDC. I presume they are contributing because
of the complexity of the product, and the relative lack of skill for anyone
who is outside the MBU in this product.
I'd dare to suggest that the same conditions exist with Entourage X 10.1.4
Exchange Edition - almost no-one outside of Microsoft has any experience of
the product and the gnarly bits that need to be sorted out. So why are the
people who helped get this product to market and sorted out the gnarly bits,
not present here on this news group?
I have asked questions of MSCE types, and they raise their eyebrows, shrug
their shoulders and say "must be a Mac problem...". So, I've tried the paid
route. And here in sunny Australia, the attitude I get from Evangelists at
Microsoft Australia is "we're the Windows company...", with the implication
of we're not interested in your Mac problem. And guess what? They're NOT
interested!
You can imagine how encouraging that is when we are software developers who
integrate our software with many MS products on Mac and Windows, we
recommend their server products because they support cross-platform access
(our software is totally cross platform), and we communicate with all their
email clients on both platforms.
Anyway, I digress perhaps. But I hope you see my point. I think you are
under-resourced. I know we feel that we can not get support for the
problems we have had, and have had to slash and burn our way to solutions
which have really been workarounds. There are still issues with this
product, and no-one at the MBU is communicating back to us (the users in the
news group).
Anyway, keep up the good work. I REALLY mean that.
