I recently attended Apple's tech talks about the upcoming OSX Leopard 10.5. One of the the presentations was on Apple's new iCal Server and while most of what was discussed is covered under NDA I can say I was extremely impressed and look forward to these new features. And then very dismayed.
Evidently Apple is a member of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (http://www.calconnect.org/). This is a group of Companies, universities, and open source projects that are 'focused on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies.' Obviously Apple is working towards making iCal Server work with many third party software providers. Unfortunately Microsoft is not a member of this consortium. Despite this lack of membership I sincerely hope that the MS MacBU is working towards making Entourage compatible with iCal server. It would be a distinct shame if they looked at iCal Server as a competitor to Exchange and chose not to support it. Obviously the time to include such support is now. Apple has released the specs to developers and the next version of office is just months away. Please, please include iCal support. I will be honest if Entourage does not support iCal Server I won't be ditching MS Office from our office. I will definitely ditch the calendar portion of Entourage though and I will look very hard at keeping the mail portion as well. If I am forced to use two applications for mail and calendaring there is less incentive to stay with Entourage. Personally I think this is an amazing marketing opportunity, why use two applications, Apple Mail and iCal, when you can use one, Entourage? Kind Regards, - C. Thomas -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
