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Please help a newbee (find a PIM/email application)

L

loftyguy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 16, 2007
3
0
My transition to Mac is almost complete, I traded my IBM ThinkPad for a MacBook Pro. One issue that I have not resolved as of yet is the Outlook thing. I am a salve to MS Outlook and though some people call it a bloated virus magnet I never had a problem with it and I use live and die by it. Right now I am using Entourage and I hate it I have tried …

http://www.zimbra.com/community/
http://chandler.osafoundation.org/
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/
http://www.eudora.com/

I am not a fan of the Mac’s Ical, Mail and address book. It is annoying that Mac’s in all their glory cannot have an intergraded PIM. I worked for years as a suit and tie guy in the corporate world and PC’s ruled, now I took a job in education and it is a total driftnet environment. I am liking the more laid back vibe and not wearing a suit and tie ever day kicks ass, but I am trying to bring a bit of the corporate structure in to a world of academia and I feel a PIM is paramount in that. If any one has any suggestions for an email/pim application for Mac I would be forever in your debt.
 
Welcome to Mac!

You pose a very good question. I also like Outlook, in particular Outlook 2003.

I really don't have any other suggestions right now--you have tried a lot of the popular solutions available. I really hope that Apple would combine Mail, iCal and Address book.

Check out Elements by Ntractive. It's not available yet, but it does look very promising.
 
loftyguy said:
My transition to Mac is almost complete, I traded my IBM ThinkPad for a MacBook Pro. One issue that I have not resolved as of yet is the Outlook thing. I am a salve to MS Outlook and though some people call it a bloated virus magnet I never had a problem with it and I use live and die by it. Right now I am using Entourage and I hate it I have tried …

http://www.zimbra.com/community/
http://chandler.osafoundation.org/
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/
http://www.eudora.com/

I am not a fan of the Mac’s Ical, Mail and address book. It is annoying that Mac’s in all their glory cannot have an intergraded PIM. I worked for years as a suit and tie guy in the corporate world and PC’s ruled, now I took a job in education and it is a total driftnet environment. I am liking the more laid back vibe and not wearing a suit and tie ever day kicks ass, but I am trying to bring a bit of the corporate structure in to a world of academia and I feel a PIM is paramount in that. If any one has any suggestions for an email/pim application for Mac I would be forever in your debt.
Click to expand...

What do you hate about Entourage? It almost looks the same as outlook. Plus you can setup rules and all that stuff as you can in outlook
 
What do you dislike about Entourage? It is practially the same as outlook, I use it all day at work with Exchange which has its own issues.
 
Other than a couple of interface things, Entourage is basically Outlook 2003. Plus, if you use .Mac, it works really well for syncing your address book, ical, and email. Its not the best solution available (personally, if I could get an exchange server up and running, it would be wonderful IMO), but it works.
 
If your place of work/school uses MS Exchange Server, then I think you are better off sticking with Entourage for now.

Additionally, get Parallels and use Outlook in coherence mode. You will be amazed how smooth it will be. You will be back on your IBM for purposes of Outlook, yet have all the advantages of OS X for everything else you do.
 
loftyguy said:
I am not a fan of the Mac’s Ical, Mail and address book. It is annoying that Mac’s in all their glory cannot have an intergraded PIM.
Click to expand...
I'm not really a huge fan of having to use three separate applications to manage my PIM either, but the PIM data itself on the Mac seems very integrated.

For example, neither Mail or iCal have any problems accessing your contacts stored in AddressBook, and it's not like you have to sit there and wait for AddressBook to launch when they do -- the data just pops up.

Also, remember you don't have to remember to launch iCal in order to receive your calendar alerts -- they'll pop-up just fine even if iCal isn't running.

When I first got my Mac, I thought I had to have Mail, iCal and AddressBook running all the time for things to run smoothly, which seemed like a huge waste. Now I just have Mail running most of the time, and only find myself popping into iCal and AddressBook occasionally.

I'll be interesting to see if the next version of OS X integrates the applications any tighter.
 
thanks...

I am not sure if I am just being whiney but Entourage just dose not have the same “feel” as Outlook, for that matter none of the Office applications have the same feel as their windows counterparts. I know this is not a Mac issue it is the way MS made them.

It is the little things that get to me, like I have to right click to turn an email into a calendar/event/task and I can no just drag it. Why can’t I drag an email into a folder off the exchange and into my personal folders, I mean I can but it leaves a copy in the inbox. Why can’t I have email delivered to my personal folders (we have very limited space on the exchange side)? Why entourage has no home page. I am not sure about forms as of yet I have not had a chance to play with it yet. The views are not the same as in Outlook and junk mail filters are a total joke.

I have Parallels and it is slower that molasses on a cold winter morning. I have the 2.16 15inch MacBook Pro with 2gigs or memory and Parallels freezes my computer, I have to force quite it more often than not.

I thank all of you guys for your sujestions and I will check out the links….
 
I have the same MBP as you, and Parallels (running XP) is very snappy. XP feels native speed, and it doesn't slow down my OS X at all. How much memory did tell Parallels to make available to your Windows virtual machine? Is there some change you're running one of the beta releases of Parallels vs. their stable release?

As for the Office stuff, maybe the new version of Office for Mac (out later this year) will close the gap between Entourage and Outlook some more.
 
aristobrat said:
I have the same MBP as you, and Parallels (running XP) is very snappy. XP feels native speed, and it doesn't slow down my OS X at all. How much memory did tell Parallels to make available to your Windows virtual machine? Is there some change you're running one of the beta releases of Parallels vs. their stable release?

As for the Office stuff, maybe the new version of Office for Mac (out later this year) will close the gap between Entourage and Outlook some more.
Click to expand...

I use to have 604mb that is all that is allowed and I use the 1970 build, i am not sure if I am doing something wrong I am very new to mac's
 
loftyguy said:
I use to have 604mb that is all that is allowed and I use the 1970 build, i am not sure if I am doing something wrong I am very new to mac's
Click to expand...
604MB should be fine. At some point, there was an issue where if you gave a virtual machine more than 512MB, it could really slow that VM down. I'm not sure where along the lines that issue got fixed.

Build 1970 is their "stable" one. If you've got some time, try downloading RC3 of their upcoming release. It adds a huge amount of new features, and since it's their third release candidate, it should be fairly stable (although R3 just came out today).

http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/beta_testing/
 
We used Now-Up-To-Date Extensively before implementing an Exchange Server and moving to Outlook. At that time, Outlook was far behind what we could do in Now.

But that isn't going to help you with Mail.

http://www.nowsoftware.com/

I thought I was going to miss Outlook (for mail - never learned to like the calendar) - but I don't!!
 
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