Truth about Entourage and its Exchange support

[NetModem]

I hope this message doesnt make me sound very negative but after
fighting for months with Entourage I have come to this conclusion...

Entourage is not suitable replacement for a true native MAPI Outlook
Client for Mac. I don't understand why MS just doesnt take the time and
carbonize Outlook 2001 for OS X. Entourage's Exchange support sucks at
best. The whole idea of WebDAV is just not suitable for this. Having to
synchronize your mail to the Exchange server defeats the purpose of
server based Email storage. Now you have to store your mail in two
places. Outlook for Windows' MAPI support is much better at this. Not
to mention the constant database corruption when using Entourage with
networked home directories. We have several users who have daily issues
with thier Entourage database for no apparent reason. They also have
the size of the database just constantly grow to several gigs in size
and only have maybe barely 100 megs worth of mail on the Exchange
server. I have heard people say MS's stance on this is that they dont
support network home directores. Thats a lame excuse for thier
inability to fix the problems. Network home directories is a critical
part of OS X in the enterprise (dont laugh) in which case if your
needing Exchange support your probably on an enterprise network. If
this is the case just discontinue the product. With all that Entourages
Exchange support lacks such critical features as, out of office, being
able to manage Exchange distribution lists etc... I am pretty sure
nobody buys office just for Entourage, and with a non-functioning
Exchange support, you may as well use Apple Mail or OWA which are both
free just less functional. Hell OWA in Exchange 2003 isnt even as good
on Mac browsers as it is on IE for Windows. With all the effort MS has
put into stacking crap on top of crap with Entourages Exchange support
they could have done a real Outlook client for OS X and have a client
they could be proud to ship with Exchange Server. Instead we are stuck
with a half-assed solution. Am I the only one fed up with this?

Thank you for your time

 

[coffeegreek]

I hope this message doesnt make me sound very negative but after
fighting for months with Entourage I have come to this conclusion...

Entourage is not suitable replacement for a true native MAPI Outlook
Client for Mac.

Allow me to disagree. Entourage's WevDAV function is not only the main
reason I use Entourage but also the main reason I switched back to Macs
after a few years with PCs! All my colleagues using Outlook envy the
ability to have access to mail and everything else (contacts, calendar)
from the same interface whether you are at work, at home or anywhere in
the world. With Outlook (and Apple's Mail), if you are away from the
exchange server you can only use POP3 to get your mail, something that
most administrators will not allow anyway for security reasons. Or use
OWA, which is not as good (by the way, I agree with you that OWA is
horrible in Safari). I don't understand the problem with network home
directories (actually, I don't know what they are), but concerning the
database size problem, it only takes a few seconds to compress it using
the database utility.
George

 

[NetModem]

Allow me to disagree . Entourage's Exchange support is nothing
compaired to Outlook for Windows. This is not a Mac vs PC/Windows
argument. My argument is that Entourage can not compair to Outlook Mac
or Windows. The ability for Entourage to have access to mail outside of
the work network is only due to OWA being the WebDAV support and its
not complete since you cant have access to the global address lists via
LDAP because I dont know a single network admin that would open thier
directory services up to the world. As far as a consistant interface,
have you seen OWA in Exchange Server 2003 under IE on Windows. It looks
VERY much and functions just like Outlook 2003. But it only does this
in IE on Windows, for some dumb reason in other browsers its not as
hot.

Network home directories are basically a roaming profile for Mac/Unix.
Users home directory such as "/Users/jsmith" is actually redirected to
a server based volume and its mounted behind the scene and users work
off it this way. This allows our users to roam from machine to machine
and have thier home directory/profile follow them.

As far as the database size problem, this should not be a problem
Outlook for Mac or Windows doesnt have this type of problem and you try
telling 120 Mac users to rebuild thier databases several times a week
because it grows to over 2 gigs in size for no apparent reason eating
up thier server storage quota when they only have 100 megs worth of
Email on the Exchange server. It should not be this way. It gets old
very fast.