Microsoft makes up its mind about an Exchange client for OS X.
But I've already made the move to Microsoft Entourage. In its current form as an IMAP client, it works well. It integrates with Exchange meeting requests and has an appointment notifier that gives you meeting reminders even when Entourage is off.
There are a few bad points, such as lack of Exchange calendar integration. Entourage uses its own, which means you could have three or four independent calendars--iCal, Entourage, Palm Desktop, and Outlook 2001's--on your desktop.
Sounds like Microsoft will add the needed integration in a summer update, so I needn't worry much there. The app is generally well behaved. Outlook 2001, on the other hand, doesn't do well in places where DST isn't observed, causing your messages to be 1 hour ahead. That's bad.
I noticed that Apple has announced the Xserve RAID. Impressive piece of hardware for businesses without a mass storage device. Some clients, however, may already have a storage area network and don't need the RAID. I greatly appreciate Apple's use of Fibre Channel as the connectivity for the RAID. That compensates for the slightly slower ATA drives in terms of general data speed.
I used a FC card in the Xserve loaned to us from Apple, and it was a marvel of simplicity. ATTO made the card we used, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple had asked that company to create OEM cards for their Xserves. Apple has used ATTO SCSI cards in other products.
An Apple rep contacted me today, following up on some leads I had but can't do much with at the moment. He noted that Apple's LDAP to Active Directory documentation has improved. I would greatly appreciate seeing it.
The increasingly popular Safari browser received yet another update. This one is available from Software Update, no restart required.
This is one of many recent examples of amazing speed turnarounds for software updates. This frequency of updates is more akin to what you'd see on a popular open source project like Linux. Is Apple getting into the "faster-faster-better" line of thinking found in the OSS world?
Hope so. If you can't be stronger than the competition, be faster.
10:21:42 PM 
|
