6.4 Supporting Apple Macintosh

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Four options are available to connect Mac users to Exchange. These are:

• Outlook for Mac: Microsoft released Outlook 2001 as part of Office 2001 for Macintosh in November 2001.

• Entourage: the new Mac PIM and email client

• Web browser: the obvious candidate being IE

• Any other IMAP4 or POP3 client that is available for the Mac. Microsoft provides a version of Outlook Express for the Mac. Eudora (www.eudora.com) is another popular option.

Another less obvious option is to install Citrix terminal services and use a Mac thin client to run Outlook on the server. This method allows users to access all of the features of Outlook at the expense of substantial extra load on the server. Your options may be constrained by the version of Macintosh that you run. For example, Outlook 2001 is only available for Mac OS 8.6 or above, and Microsoft designed the latest version of Entourage for Mac OS X. Older Macs may be limited to a browser or POP3 client.

Entourage is part of the Microsoft Office Version X application suite. It is broadly equivalent to Outlook and supports email, address book, calendar, tasks, and notes. Entourage connects to Exchange via POP3 or IMAP4 and can use LDAP for directory access, just like Outlook Express. However, because Entourage does not support MAPI, it suffers from the same limitations as other IMAP clients around extended MAPI-centric functionality, such as calendaring.

Outlook for Mac is closer to its Windows cousin than Entourage and supports features such as PST files that are format compatible with Windows. The latest version is a huge improvement over the initial releases, which were slow, buggy, and featured a bad port of the Windows interface. Unlike Entourage, Outlook connects to Exchange with MAPI, so its messaging functionality is more powerful and complete. Outlook is also better at sharing calendars with other Exchange users across the Windows and Mac platforms. Outlook is a Mac OS 9 program, so you have to run it in "classic" mode on OS X, which slows performance. In addition, some of the changes that Microsoft made to get MAPI to work over the network make Outlook a bad choice for OS X users.

Microsoft plans to release a new version of Entourage toward the end of 2003. This version uses IMAP4 to connect to Exchange for messaging and HTTP-DAV for calendar and scheduling, which addresses one of the major problems that Entourage users have today. Exchange 2003 supports Entou- rage, but you otherwise need to run Exchange 2000 SP2 and install a special Exchange update for Entourage X. Until then, if you want to use the latest Mac client on the latest operating system but still participate in group calendars, you have to run both Entourage and Outlook and take a performance hit at the same time, which is not a good situation.

In some respects, Microsoft has caused confusion in the user community through the presence of Entourage and Outlook for Mac. Outlook exists because of its history as part of the Office suite, but Entourage is the only email and PIM application included in the Office suite for Mac OS X. Entourage does not use MAPI, so Outlook for Windows users find it limited in functionality. It is clear that Microsoft's long-term focus is on Entou- rage, and the new release will go a long way to delivering the equivalent functionality to Outlook for Windows on the Macintosh platform.

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