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We run exchange 2007 and have macs, we don't want to buy office just for entourage but we can't find an alternative.

Apple's mail stops working randomly, Thunderbird doesn't let us see sub folders in the inbox and Zimbra doesn't seem to sync with sub folders (at least we can't get it to work). The outlook webmail on mac (firefox or safari) is rubbish.

Is there an alternative or do we need to buy Office?

sysadmin1138
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Charlie Bear
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6 Answers6

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You can purchase Entourage as a stand-alone application through Microsoft volume licensing. With 3 years Software Assurance (probably worth it, since Microsoft has consistently improved Exchange support through various iterations of Entourage) it should set you back less than $110/seat -- significantly less expensive than the full Office suite. Without SA IIRC it's about $80/seat.

user6622
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I'm not sure of an alternative but Apple has confirmed that there will be native support for it in Snow Leopard, and while there is no launch date of Snow Leopard many signs are pointing WWDC which is only a couple weeks away. Even if it is not released on June 8th, more news of its release will surely be discussed. In the meantime here are some posts in regards to the new support for Exchange 07, although I don't know how accurate they are:

http://www.macwindows.com/column_snowleopard_exchange.html http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/06/will_snow_leopard_be_the_end_of_entourage.html

mrTomahawk
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  • everytime a new version of osx comes out my mac users tell me that we should get it because of the enchanced exchange support. It looks like it might happen this time but i won't believe it till I see it. – Charlie Bear May 27 '09 at 15:06
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Evolution - the Gnome desktop environment's email client - is available on Mac. It doesn't look like a typical Mac application, but still it might be an alternative. The latest version is suppose to have Exchange 2007 support, but there are some features which is missing. You'll find an overview here.

tronda
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See this related question here on ServerFault.com:

Mac and Exchange Server 2007: Entourage or wait for Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)?

Community
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splattne
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I don't mean to turn your question into a separate discussion, but I've seen Entourage absolutely wreak havoc with Exchange 2003 calendars. I've seen Entourage repeatedly overwrite and delete calendar entries, presumably because it thought its data was correct and the Exchange server's data was not. This situation was complicated significantly by multiple delegates running Microsoft Outlook, as well as BlackBerry Enterprise Server and multiple copies of Entourage (on different Macs) accessing the same mailbox. I wasn't close enough to the situation to have called Microsoft, but from what I gather, they weren't able to provide solutions.

This may sound crazy, but I'd actually recommend Parallels or VMware Fusion and Outlook 2003 or 2007 over Entourage. I believe (but don't know for sure) that was the ultimate solution in the above-mentioned case.

Carl C
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  • i've tried them all now and none are good - Entourage was ok for us on 2003 and is ok on 2007 but we don't want to buy more copies just for that. I agree that it isn't the best and is amazing that MS won't make an outlook for mac that works and looks like the pc version. Hopefully snow leopard will be the answer. – Charlie Bear Jun 06 '09 at 09:09
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MS grants 1 licence for Outlook/Entourage per Exchange CAL purchased. You did purchase Exchange CALs in addtion to the Exchange Server licence/s, right?

ThatGraemeGuy
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