MBA MS Office Outlook Gotcha...

[Alpha4]

Just bought an MBA 11 128GB 4GB Ram. At the same time I bought Office 2011 for Mac.

As most of you probably know (I'm only an occasional OSX user), MS Outlook in Office 2011 doesn't communicate with Exchange 2003. What a Gotcha! My fault, I should have researched for any issues.

As you might imagine Exchange 2003 is exactly what our company has. I have tried Davmail with Imap on Outlook and it does email, but things get messy with Calendars, Contacts, Meeting Events, Notes, etc, So it's the Win 7 virtualisation route for me.

However, I only need to virtualize for Outlook, so any suggestions as to optimum set up please? Plus, I suppose I have to buy a complete MS Office for Windows just to get Outlook, or can you get Outlook as a stand-alone?

Any thoughts or help gratefully received. Thanks.

 

[Ainkor]

Feel your pain man! We only have an Exchange 2003 server too and here is what I did:

Buy Office 2008. I think I paid about $40 on eBay for it. I use office 2011 for excel and word (hugely improved! and I need macro support) so I just installed *gulp* Entourage. OK, I said it. It's really not too bad though. There are some quirky things about it but It's as good if not better than Outlook 2003 if that means anything to you.

Make sure you don't get the student and teacher edition though, that doesn't support an exchange server.

BTW, if your laptop is plugged in all the time, using parallels isn't that big of a deal. heck, an XP install with 1 CPU and 512mb of ram would suffice for email. I would try what I am suggesting though. Keep in mind though it will cut about an hour off the run time on battery.

Here is another little trick that works too, but it's a huge work around:

Still need Office 2008 (Entourage). Set up Sync services (contacts and calendar) and use IMAP from Outlook 2011. Its a VERY hacky way to get almost native Exchange 2003 server support

Outlook 2011 isn't that much better than Entourage IMO though.

 

[TheRealDamager]

Quit that job and go to a company that isn't running a 10 year old version of Exchange!

 

[Alpha4]

Quit that job and go to a company that isn't running a 10 year old version of Exchange!

If they didn't pay me so much.......

 

[BobbyK]

O2m

Mac Mail is the better option. You should just convert using O2M. Its a simple product at a GREAT price that converts all your Outlook data to Mac Mail. www.littlemachines.com. I converted last year and have been so happy with my new machine.