Personal Information Management in Mac OS X
Nice title huh?
Now that Novell has announced their very nice Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server, which makes Evolution play happy with Exchange and Groupwise servers, you have to wonder where this functionality is on the Mac these days. When we start talking about integrating this behavior into Apple's Mail, you start running into the shortcomings of Apple's implementation of Mail, Address Book and iCal. While they are all pretty respectable for the needs of the casual home users, professionals need something far more robust.
Perhaps it's time to make an Entourage killer. Integrate Mail, Address Book and iCal. It's been a long time coming. This makes it a lot easier to replicate the functionality of Exchange and Groupwise in a way that is sane and usable.
iCal is miserably underpowered for any kind of real use. While the multiple calendar idea is cute, it clashes with calendar management on almost every other calendar device. Use event categories. There's nothing wrong with them. To do management is also so crippled as to be not much better than a flat text file. Also its notifications are still spotty. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Address Book and Mail are fairly feature complete to deal with relevant exchange and groupwise integration with only minor patch ups like adding multiple addresses for individual contacts.
Perhaps this is one of the things they are working on for Tiger. I certainly hope so. The ability of Mac OS X machines to seamlessly integrate into Exchange and Groupwise environments would be a big boon for Macs in the Enterprise.
Posted by Joe Mullins at May 11, 2004 04:50 PM | TrackBackI was just thinking the same thing as I was trialing the new Office. I want to like Entourage - it's fully integrated as a PIM and works pretty well, though with IMAP it sucks compared to the way Mail handles things with unified inbox and minimal connection errors.
I'd love to see addressbook and ical or enhanced versions all pulled together with Mail to make a great place to manage your daily flow... No idea why they wanted to have separate apps, It feels more natural when you can do it all from a single console.
Posted by: Jonathan Greene at May 21, 2004 07:24 AMI agree. I never liked the way that Entourage supported IMAP. If MA had not been so half hearted with it's exchange support, I don't think it would be such a big issue. But the fact that there are so few decent OS X options for interacting with Exchange Servers leaves open a big opportunity.
Apple already has most of the tools in place. While iCal needs major work, Mail and Address Book would only need minor changes to make them work as a real suite. The pay off would be Macs that integrated into PC environments with very little effort. Something Apple is very interested in.
Posted by: Joe Mullins at May 21, 2004 11:50 AMhttp://techgoesboom.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/217
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