Other options other than Entourage for email cline on Mac OS X (Tiger or Panther) pointed to an Exch

Just wondering what my options are for an email client on Mac OS X.
We've been using Office 2004 (pointed to an Exchange Server) for
about a year now and have had serious issues with the application.
I'm looking for alternatives, and if there is any alternative that
can also handle the Calendar and archiving from an Exchange Server.

We have a mixed environment which includes Mac's, PC's and Linux.
The majority of computers here on campus are PC's (roughly 3200
pc's). We have about 220 Mac's and about 110 Linux boxes.


Any help or suggestion would be appreciated,

David

 

Topic line should read:Other options other than Entourage for email
client on Mac OS X (Tiger or Panther)

 

What kind of issues (problems) are you experiencing with Entourage?

 

Do you really care about answers from people who aren't clever enough to
figure out what you meant with your typo?

 

-Beach-ball of death on several users workstations
-Slowness when updating email boxes
-Unable to read .pst files
-One user can only update his mailbox by closing and then re-opening
his entourage for it to sync no matter what we try to do the issues is
never resolved.

Besides that, Entourage is a very watered down version of the True
Outlook client. I know at some point and time there was a movement to
port over a True Outlook client, but I haven't heard much on that front
for awhile.

 

The lack of responses is largely because there really aren't any.
Microsoft Exchange is a proprietary protocol. Microsoft hasn't really
made it easy for anyone else to implement it without reverse engineering
the protocol and risking lawsuits.

If you drop down to IMAP or POP3 your options open right up (but you
lose exchange calendering and other Exchange proprietary features), but
as long as you are on Exchange server you are pretty much limited to
what Microsoft makes availalbe -- in this case: Entourage.

Solving your Entourage issues as best you ca is probably your best
solution; as I doubt you are considering dropping Exchange Server at
this point in time.

 

For basic e-mail functionality, stick with any IMAP or POP client. OS
X's native Address Book can sync with the Exchange address book, or you
can use a third-party utility such as AddressX from Snerdware
(http://www.snerdware.com). To integrate your calendaring and tasks,
turn again to Snerdware for version 3.0 of GroupCal, which allows iCal
to integrate with Exchange for calendaring and task synchronization.

HTH.