MacMail, Entourage, MS Exchange, Iphone

[Chiasso]

Help! :-) I have a few personal POP e-mail accounts and I use MacMail, ICal and Mac Address book and have no problems getting them to sync with my Iphone.

My problem is that my new job uses and Exchange server for e-mail. So I want to add that to my IPhone and ideally to my MacMail. The company IT guy wants me to switch to Entourage for everything... should I do that?

The last time I tried to add the Exchange email account to my MacMail I could receive mail but not send from that account. Any ideas as to if I can make that work and not have to deal with Entourage?

Thanks for any support you pros have to offer!
-Chiasso

[edadams]

Hi Chiasso

Entourage does work better with Exchange than Mail, more features are available, but IMHO Entourage is rubbish. Mail should work just fine if configured correctly. Your IT guy should be able to help you with config of Mail to send and receive properly. It depends on the network settings of the server. Your iPhone will also connect natively to exchange and work very well with it.

Good luck
Ed

[Tommo]

As a IMAP client Mail works well with exchange 2003 and in the near future the Mail client in 10.6 has improved support for Exchange 2007. If you are having trouble sending check that your smtp server does not require authetication. Personally I prefer Entourage to Mail, but it sometimes does come down to what you are used to.

As for the iPhone it should work fine, but it does rely on the some settings being switched on for your Exchange account which may not be.

[ora]

Yep, I've had similar experiences here.

Mail and Entourage 04 (and i suspect the iPhone) have limited exchange server compatibility via IMAP- they work for receiving and sending mail but don't expect the meeting invites, shared address boosk etc etc to work.

Apparently Entourage 08 has full exchange support, but you have to buy the 'full' not 'home and student' edition to get it and it is expensive.

Alternatively, get parallels and a copy of windows, and install Office for Windows in a virtual machine, which I have found easier when working with PC only organisations.

[Tommo]

You could save a bit more, Outlook 2007 works under Cross Over without the need for a Windows licence.

[ora]

Ooh, thats interesting Tommo. I never bothered with crossover as when I looked at it its support for office 07 was minimal. I even have a free license for Crossover from soem giveaway.

That said it woudl be the third virtualisation env on my Macbook - after Parallels runnign XP and vbox running Ubuntu.

That reminds me actually, if you want to save on the virtualisation rather than on Windows (say you have a copy of xp already) virtual box is now free from Sun for personal use.