minirant
March 27, 2004
i love open source software. love it.
and this time, i’m not being sarcastic when i say this. most of the open source software projects i come in contact with – linux, bsd, mozilla, apache – are the best at what they do. especially the server side of things.
(openoffice sucks rocks, especially on OS X, but still, it’s a start.)
anyhoo, the reason for this outpuring of love? i’m helping my office move from crappy microsoft outlook 2001 to slightly less crappy microsoft entourage X.
after much cursing and gnashing of teeth, our inept windows network admin finally managed to get the server working properly – i say she did, but it was the consultant she has do everything for her that finally figured out the permissions problem. so the time has come to migrate from outlook (classic, hella crappy to entourage (OS X native, slightly less crappy)
but there’s no mechanism for such migration. none. microsoft admits in their support materials that no program except outlook can read the outlook mailbox files. not even microsoft entourage, the outlook replacement microsoft is pushing mac users to adopt for connecting to an exchange 2000 or later server.
more cursing and gnashing of teeth.
but wait! what do i find in my research, but a solution! open source software to the rescue!
seems open source godsend mozilla can read the outlook mailbox files, and convert them to standard, universally adored .mbox format files.
and entourage can import mbox files.
but then, so can OS X’s mail.app. and with some inexpensive utilities iCal can read and post calendars to an exchange server.
so wait… why are we using entourage?
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