Monday, April 19, 2010

Other: Ditching Detourage

Of course, last week I bitched about what a piece of crap Microsoft Entourage is. Today I actually found something which might make it possible for me to get the full Exchange calendar functionality, including checking invitee availability, while still using Mac Mail and Ical. It is this absurdly-klugey-to-set-up app called DavMail, but after a couple hours tinkering with it, I think it actually works. At least part of the time anyway.

Now I just need to re-do all my rules in Mail, which actually kind of sucks since it doesn't look like its logic is any better than Entourage's. But at least it has real threading. Sort of. I just get far, far too much mail at work to deal with a half-assed mail client. Let alone a one-sixteenth-assed mail client like Entourage.

2 comments:

Heather Sherman said...

Huh. I meant to comment before, but I'm behindish. I use Exchange with Snow Leopard, Mail.app and iCal and it "just works" (well, to the degree that exchange calendaring works at all, which is, well, NOT WELL.)

In iCal you can add an "Exchange 2007" account. I vaguely recall I did this separately from the Exchange account I added to Mail.app, but I could be wrong.

Of course, if you're running an older version of exchange, I'm not sure if it will work.

The only thing that confused us at first was how to display other people's calendars. You go into "preferences/accounts/exchange account/Delegation" and add them (it seems descriptively backwards).

iCal also supports google calendars directly over caldav, so I can see AND manipulate events in all my calendars (work, personal, noelle's school, etc.) in one place at last.

Karen said...

Ah, but see, I was given a used MacBook Pro which only has OSuX 10.5 on it. From what I can tell, iCal with Exchange support only shows up in 10.6. My crappy iCal 3.0.8 can only deal with crappy CalDAV calendars.

I wonder what it would take to get IT to upgrade the OS on this thing. Probably voodoo. I guess I could start with a request ticket, though. If I can figure out which of the six billion internal ticketing systems is the right one...

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