I want a Mac, but my company is stuck on Outlook for email and scheduling.

[Glenn Carnagey]

On Nov 27, 2007, at 3:16 PM, Charles Dyer wrote:

> On 27 Nov 2007, at 12:34:18, Roger Howard wrote:
>
>> Charles Dyer wrote:
>>> Is Outlook's web mail full-featured?  could she get by with that?
>>>
>>> OWA is... painful.
>> It's funny, I guess I'm a contrarian by nature - in my last job I  
>> had a Mac and a PC, and on the Mac (Intel based) I had a choice of  
>> Entourage, Mail, or OWA. I figured I'd use Entourage, but after a  
>> while I ended up using Mail for almost all my basic mail  
>> activities, and OWA for everything else - never found it painful -  
>> was able to schedule reliably, it was a suprisingly capable Web UI  
>> and had no hint of ActiveX-encumbered features that I could see.
>>
>> My vote in general would be to use OWA at this point in time. Of  
>> course it largely depends on the type of user - if you're just  
>> doing mail then pick your favorite mailer and be done... but if  
>> you need good calendaring well ultimately I preferred OWA. I can't  
>> list all the reasons why anymore, but I know after a month or so  
>> trying all the options I ended up with Mail+OWA.
>
> The main problem I've had with OWA has been that half the time  
> neither Safari nor FireFox will work properly with it. The first  
> big problem is just logging in; they'll try, and report that  
> there's no OWA server there. Safari will say that sometimes this  
> means that the server is busy, try again... and lo! if I try again  
> immediately, it goes through this time. The thing is, it does this,  
> at random, for all kinds of connections: mail, calendaring,  
> whatever, after a period of time dependent on the server. Given  
> that the problem changes with different servers, I suppose that it  
> could be due to some setting on the server side, and if whoever was  
> running the server knew what he was doing this would go away... but  
> as it doesn't happen with MSIE, each and every time I've brought  
> this up with the admins of the various sites they've said that it  
> must be a Mac, or a FireFox, problem, and have refused to even look.

I use it all-day-every-day.   Basically I use AppleMail to manage all  
my mail acc'ts, but OWA for @work exchange mailing lists and  
calendaring, the OOO tool etc.  Often I use Good on my Treo for the  
OWA functions, whichever is handier.

I have not seen your particular issue, what's there works fine for  
me.  It smells like Cisco VPN keepalive issues, is that involved?    
However, like Sharepoint, there is a long list of functions that do  
not work because they require MSIE on Windows (AKA Active X).   I use  
RDC into a windoze into a terminal server when I must use those  
functions, and for Project and Visio.

I have never seen an Exchange server set up with POP...   But I'm  
fine with what passes for IMAP support, it works.

g./