Scalix Forums

A more fully function connector is need for MAC users, any plans to provide a connector for Entourage or a more fully functional MAC OS client (other than the web interface)?

thanks,

ca

Unfortunately, even if we wanted to provide a Connector for Entourage, we couldn't. Unlike Outlook on Windows, Microsoft does not offer a full MAPI or similar API to write connectors against. Basically, the same is true for other Mac clients.

In addition, while I personally use (my primary machine is a 15" PowerBook) appreciate the platform - most people at Scalix who know me actually can't hear all my Mac-speak anymore - from a business perspective, things look a little different. Market share is relatively small among our main customer base, as a fact.

Having said that, things will be looking going forward anyway. In Scalix 10, we have introduced iCal support; this means if you use an Ical capable Email client (such as Apple Mail starting with Mac OS/X 10.4 Tiger or Microsoft Entourage), you will be able to accept and issue invitations for meetings. The resulting calendar entries, however, will be stored locally on your client system. Still, this should be helpful for many users.

Future releases of Scalix will offer more standards-based interfaces to the system, eventually this should help the Mac platform as well.

As a sidenote, Evolution is available as a X.11 based version running on Mac OS/X; our Evolution connector is actually released as open source. I'm not aware of an existing binary port, but this should be relatively easy to archieve. Unfortunately, as it is running under X.11, UI integration of Evolution is not that great...

Hope this helps anyway, cheers,
Florian.

-speak anymore, being a Mac user myself, it's relatively small market

Just being curious: What is your personal solution to group calendaring on the PowerBook? The Scalix WebFrontend?

We have SLOX companywide (which I despise) and Exchange Server in my dept, but that is still 5.5 and we cannot upgrade coz IT central favors SLOX :-(

My fave is PowerBook, too, so I have been looking for a Mac-compatible solution for our dept for quite a while --- with the end result of using Outlook with the old ES under VirtualPC ... not elegant, but effective. However: no VirtualPC yet for OSX on Intel.

Cheers,
Wolfgang

WEschner wrote:Just being curious: What is your personal solution to group calendaring on the PowerBook? The Scalix WebFrontend?

Yes - I'm a heavy SWA user; if it's only eMail I use Thunderbird. I also download my Scalix Server Calendar into iCal using the webcal download, but that's read-only, unfortunately.

At the moment, I must admit, I have temporarily switched over to a Windows based portable (IBM X41 tablet - highly recommended, probably as good as it gets in WinWorld) and play around with Outlook 2003 and the latest dev version of our MAPI connector that finally supports a transparent local cache for easier offline working. Going into Beta soon. :-)

WEschner wrote:My fave is PowerBook, too, so I have been looking for a Mac-compatible solution for our dept for quite a while --- with the end result of using Outlook with the old ES under VirtualPC ... not elegant, but effective. However: no VirtualPC yet for OSX on Intel.

I think the VirtualPC solution will become much more usable performance-wise - however, it's going to be a complete rewrite. My hope in the backend would be that VMWare comes out with a Mac product; then I could finally get rid of my additonal Windows Laptop that I currently use for Scalix demo and testing.

Florian