Microsoft Owns Us

I work for a Fortune 500 company in Salt Lake City, Utah - well, okay, that's where I used to work. I still work for them, but 230 miles south of Salt Lake in Cedar City. Our company is in the middle of a migration from Lotus Notes email to Exchange email. What does that mean? It means our headquarters' IT department is heavily influenced by the demons in Redmond. But, that's okay. We adjust, we move on. Our IT department in SLC consists of seven individuals who are very talented and dedicated at their jobs. Despite the fact that this migration - imposed upon us by our corporate offices in Wisconsin - has us feeling like we just time-warped back to 1990, we are positive and helpful through it all.

I at least can take comfort in the fact that IBM Lotus Notes for Mac stinks in comparison to Microsoft's Entourage 2008 for Mac. At least Microsoft went through the work of making an Exchange client that was built from the ground-up for the Macintosh computer and by Macintosh users. IBM has the same old tired developers porting their PC version over to the Mac and it shows in both performance and style.

Though not officially supported, I am thankful that I am able to use Entourage to access my corporate mail servers and use the same calendar & scheduling features as my other coworkers who use Outlook for Windows. I find Outlook 2007 to have a very old interface. It reminds me of when I used Microsoft Mail in 1994 at Packard Bell. Some of the same icons are used in Outlook 2007 and the interface just feels old. Entourage has a more updated look and feel and is a pleasure to use.

Our corporate IT department will also not allow the use of iPhone's for accessing the email servers. They only allow devices that use ActiveSync and that includes Windows Mobile devices and Blackberry devices. Of course, after June of this year it should include iPhones as well. However, before they will allow us to use our iPhones we have to turn over ownership of our iPhones to our company. Well, I don't think I'm going to do that as I don't want them having that much control over my phone with the ability to add crippling software - such as unnecessary virus scanning or encryption software. We have already had the experience of encryption software forced upon our PCs at work and it has been a nightmare.

Having said that I am looking at alternative solutions such as third party services that will allow you to use your iPhone with Exchange via OWA (Outlook Web Access). That should work well. As a matter of fact, that is how Entourage 2008 for Mac works. You point it to your OWA URL and away you go. The third party I am currently looking at is Synchronica. Depending on the cost, I may go ahead and pay for this service myself and just bypass corporate IT altogether.

We'll see how things go. There are a lot of options to explore when working with a company that is so heavily focused on Microsoft products. I'll post more of my experiences as they arise.

I welcome any comments or questions on working with a Mac and Apple technology in a Windows world, so send them my way.