With Fruux‘s new version, teams can jointly manage address books, calendars and to-do lists, with supported platforms including iOS, Mac OS X, Windows, Android, Linux and BlackBerry. The service also includes a team-management web interface and scheduling support – if a meeting is created in iCal, for example, team members will get requests to find out about availability.

Compared with Fruux Pro, which includes unlimited storage, contacts, calendars and tasks, Fruux Team also adds dedicated support.

There is one big gap in Fruux’s support: Microsoft Outlook. Fruux uses the open CardDAV and CalDAV protocols, and Outlook famously uses the proprietary and license-fee-bearing Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) instead.

However, after Google recently said it was dropping EAS support for Gmail on Windows Phone, Microsoft was sent scrambling for a fix, and that solution seems to include the integration of CalDAV and CardDAV support into Windows Phone.

“That’s great for us,” said Fruux CEO Dominik Tobschall, who noted that this probably meant Outlook would get CardDAV and CalDAV support sooner rather than later.

Team support is a major shift for Fruux, taking the service from a mostly personal syncing tool to one explicitly tailored for teams. Clearly aimed at business users, Fruux Team costs €4 ($5.45) per user per month.

The company is making money elsewhere, though. Tobschall told me that the service is being resold in volume by ISP partners and also being integrated as a white-label sync feature into third-party software (an example here might be a CRM application). However, he was loath to name names.

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So what is the solution?  Knowing family members’ busy schedules can be more than useful, it can be a way to stay connected with one another.  Thankfully, there is more than one way to keep an entire family up to date with the various events we have in our lives. The following is a list of three different techniques that members of an iCloud-using family can stay connected and share their schedules with one another.

Create one family calendar account

Having a single family iCloud account set up on all of your Apple products is one such technique.  Anyone can add any event at any time and everyone will see it instantly.  This may be the easiest way to go, but it does require some initial setup and configuration.  Here is what you need to do to set up a shared iCloud account on your family’s devices:

• On the first family member’s device you are going to create a new AppleID at and set up an iCloud account associated with that AppleID.
• In the System Preferences of each family member’s Mac, add a new account using the AppleID and password you just created.
• In the Settings of each family member’s iOS device, add a new account using the AppleID and password you just created.
• On all devices, ensure that the Calendar option is turned on in each account’s respective mail settings.

Once all of the devices are configured, you just start creating calendars and adding events as if it was your own personal account.  You can even use this one iCloud account to share notes, reminders and contacts.  Basically keep all of your family’s business up to date and in one place.

Share multiple calendars for common events

Sharing calendars requires everyone to share and subscribe to each others’ calendars.  Not exactly practical for everyday events, but it may make makes sense for stuff that is set in stone like school calendars, holidays and game schedules.  These events may not limited to just one family and can be shared with just about anyone.  Sharing all of the events that you add to a particular calendar can be accomplished by performing the following tasks:

• Create a New Calendar in iCal.  Choose the account you want to share from.
• Select the Calendar you created in iCal’s Calendar List View on the left and then select the Share Calendar option from the Edit menu.
• Determine if you want to share the Calendar with everyone, or just a few individuals from your Contacts List.
• If sharing with everyone, copy the Calendar’s URL by right clicking on the Calendar entry you created in iCal’s Calendar List View.

Subscribing to a shared calendar is accomplished by selecting New Calendar Subscription from iCal’s File Menu.  On the screen that pops up, just enter the Calendar’s URL that you want to subscribe to.  Keep in mind that this technique will share all events added to that particular calendar.  So you will want to create multiple calendars for each of the social events that are important to the family.  Currently, sharing and subscribing to shared calendars can only be set up via iCal on OS X.  And any shared calendars that you manually add on any of your iOS devices will not push to iCloud.

Send invitations on special occasions

There are still times when sending an invitation does work: For invitees that you do not want to let create and edit events on your shared family calendar, and those one-off events that do not make sense to create their own shared calendar.  The benefit of using iCloud’s invitation system is that you can also see who has accepted, who has declined, and who has not done anything at all.

• Create a new Event and enter in the title as well as a date and time for the new event.
• Select Add Invitees and enter in the e-mail address of those you wish to invite.
• Send the invitation.

Recipients of an iCloud invitation will be able to RSVP by accepting, declining or indicating that they might be attending the event.  Two things you need to keep in mind when inviting someone to an event: what account you are using to create the event with, and where the invitees have their accounts.  Not every email service supports calendars, and not every calendar supports the ability to invite others to an event.  When sending from your iCloud account, the RSVP status of the invitation will be managed regardless of what email system the recipient is using.

With these three techniques, you should be able to manage your family’s busy schedule.  Each one can be used separately, or you can use a combination of the three depending on what you hope to accomplish.  Try one out just to see if you feel it will help everyone know, where everyone is at.  It may surprise you when you see how many events your entire family manages each week.

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Now with OS X Mountain Lion, which should arrive some time this summer, true feature parity for Notes, Reminders and Notifications comes to OS X. I’ve spent some time with the new features, and I’m eager to share my experiences with you.

Notes

Notes syncing from iOS back to OS X has always struck me as a tacked-on feature, with notes buried in Mail.app, making viewing and editing notes awkward and unpleasant. With Mountain Lion, notes get their rightful position in their own app. The Mountain Lion version is a near-duplicate of the iOS version, and I do not view that as a criticism, because Notes on iOS is very elegant in its simplicity.

What I found interesting is while Notes can be turned on and off via the iCloud System Preference, it apparently still uses IMAP for some of the backend transfer as I was asked to enter in my passwords for my Gmail accounts. Notes appear to sync quickly, within a minute or so of being edited.

I’m really excited about Notes being easier to use in OS X. I swap between Evernote and Notes for my note-taking needs, with Evernote getting my article-length notes clipped from the web or imported PDFs, and Notes getting my day-to-day notes, like what printer my Mom has, dial-in codes for meetings, meeting notes, etc.

Reminders

Reminders, formerly To-Dos, made a lot of sense living in iCal pre-iOS. However, the Calendar iOS app never had to-dos, and with the advent of the Reminders iOS app, it became very uncomfortable having them stored in iCal. I always found iCal’s handling of to-dos unwieldy, and being stuck in a small pane off to the side didn’t help. It’s been said that the areas of OS X and iOS that are the most polished are the ones Steve Jobs was very involved in — if so, I’m fairly confident the man never managed a task list in iCal.

Now with Mountain Lion, to-dos are moved to their own Reminders app, and life couldn’t be better. It’s a nearly identical copy of the iOS app in looks and function, with two big differences: on OS X you can choose if a list is on iCloud or your Mac, and I cannot see a way to set a location-based reminder. While OS X isn’t really location aware (even though it does have Find my Mac), it would be nice if I could set a reminder in OS X for something I need to do at work and have my iPhone remind me when I get there.

Overall, I’m happy with Reminders in Mountain Lion as it allows me to easily manage my to-dos. While I still expect to handle most of my project-level task management in OmniFocus, Reminders will be the app I use to remind me of life’s daily minutiae.

Notifications

The last of what I call the Big Three features to migrate from iOS to OS X is Notifications. Users of Growl will find Notifications very similar as notifications are displayed in the upper right-hand corner. As with iOS, you can choose if an app displays a banner, an alert that shows up in the middle of the screen, a badge icon, or all three.

Right now, obviously, only the apps built into Mountain Lion are supported. According to this piece by John Gruber, only apps acquired from the Mac App Store can send events to Notifications. As an aside, you can configure Mail.app to only alert you if you receive an e-mail from someone you have flagged as a VIP, which helps cut down on the popup clutter.

So far my experiences with Notifications have been light, with not many apps supporting it. I’m not sure if Notifications will ever fully replace Growl for me since not all the apps I rely on Growl for are available in the Mac App Store.

Final thoughts

Apple’s headline on the Mountain Lion web page is “Inspired by iPad. Re-imagined for Mac,” and that’s pretty much true based on my usage of it so far. I’m happy there is feature parity between iOS and OS X for Notes and Reminders. If you don’t complement your Macintosh with an iOS device, you may not derive the same excitement I do from these new features. But if you’re a  heavy user of Notes and Reminders you will be thrilled that these apps are now on OS X.

One hope I have, with OS X moving to a yearly upgrade cycle, as iOS has always had, is that features that complement each other on both operating systems will be released at the same time, and not with the lag we currently have.

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The program has three major components: Calendar Cleaner, Contacts Cleaner and Sync Tune-Up. If you want just one of the components, you can purchase the first two separately at the Mac App Store. However it’s likely you’ll need all three so I recommend the buying the full package.

Contacts Cleaner looks for issues that could cause errors such as invalid characters, malformed phone numbers as well as duplicate information. What I like about this program is that it not only finds the errors, but tells you why it thinks they represent a problem. For example, I’d often put “husband and wife” in the First Name field, but Contacts Cleaner warns me “This contact has a space in the first name. In some cases these names can become transposed after syncing with Google.” Sure enough when I went into Google, I noticed that problem.

Calendar Cleaner does similar checks for errors that can occur with your various sync destinations. My calendar was fraught with malformed recurring events that wouldn’t sync, and a pass by Calendar Cleaner fixed those in no time.

Both programs give you the option of opening the item within Address Book or iCal in order to make sure you know what kind of change is being made before you authorize it. Apple’s Address Book application looks for merged items itself, but doesn’t give you options to control what is merged. iCal users have no built-in options to search for duplicates and merge events.

Finally, Sync Tune-Up (only available as part of the bundle) gives you a front end for more fine-grained control over fixing your sync-related issues, such as de-registering individual devices and software, or the “nuclear” option which rebuilds the entire sync database. If your sync is taking extra long or you’ve made a bunch of changes with your devices or accounts, a nice reset can do you a world of good. A good indication of problems can be found by looking at your console logs and looking for mentions of the “truth” and too much vacuuming.

The more you sync, the more likely it is that problems will occur. To prevent or repair these problems, Spanning Tools is a great option.

Disclosure: Spanning Tools provided a copy of the software for review purposes.

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1. Remove icons from Launchpad. Right now, the only icons you can remove from Launchpad are apps installed via the Mac App Store. If you remove the icon, the whole app is removed. In a way, this makes sense: they want to transfer the same ease-of-deletion from iOS to OS X. The problem is, if you have a ton of what Lion sees as apps — in my case, all the old World of Warcraft patches showed up in Launchpad — you’re going to have a mess. I can’t hide the apps completely, so instead I performed the digital equivalent of stuffing them in the closet. I created a single folder, moved any non-app programs into that, and stuck it on the last page in Launchpad.

2. Reveal your Home Library folder. I’m not sure why Apple hid this, but there are two ways you can get to it. The first is to go to the Finder, open the Go menu, and choose “Go to Folder.” Type in ~/Library/ and hit Enter. This will bring you to the folder. If you need to get there more than occasionally, or have an app where the hidden flag is causing problems, you can make it visible by typing in “chflags nohidden ~/Library” in the Terminal.

3. Make an app open in all spaces. This tip only works if you have multiple Desktop spaces. To add a space in Mission Control move your pointer to the upper-right hand corner and click on the large Plus icon. Then, right-click on the apps’s icon in the Dock, choose Options, and “Assign to: All spaces.” As a bonus tip, you can also create an empty space to quickly flip to an empty display if you need to.

4. Remove icons from the Sidebar. I’ve run into a few instances where dragging an icon off the Sidebar doesn’t actually remove it. If this happens, right-click the wayward icon and choose “Remove from Sidebar.” If, like me, you ended up with some Sidebar folders pointing to now nonexistent folders and can’t remove them at all, renaming the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist file in ~\Library\Preferences folder (it doesn’t matter what you rename it to) and rebooting will restore your Sidebar to default icons.

5. MobileMe Calendar syncing is now set in iCal. This one threw me at first. In Snow Leopard, you set MobileMe Calendar syncing within the MobileMe System Preferences pane. Now, it’s under iCal’s preferences under Accounts. I imagine this is because iCloud will render the MobileMe preferences pane obsolete.

These are five quick tips I’ve found to help me ease into Lion. What tips do you folks have?

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Backup, Backup and Backup

No matter what backup solution you use (Time Machine, online, manual), now is the time to run a full backup just in case. Additionally be sure you’ve synced all your iOS devices to your Mac. If you do “over the air” syncing you should be fine.

Just to be extra safe, I ran two additional backups within iCal. Under the File Menu in iCal is the Export Function. First, create a full iCal Archive under the Export Menu. That backs up your entire iCal calendar list en mass. However, I alo backed up each and every calendar to an .ics file by choosing each one and then going to File, Export, and then Export. This backs up each calendar manually.

Log Into MobileMe and Begin the Process

Now that you have triple redundancy on your calendars, you can begin the process. Log into your MobileMe account via Safari (just to play it safe don’t use alternate browsers) and then click the icon in the upper left for iCal, which is the familiar spiral day-at-a-time calendar icon. You should be presented with a window reminding you to “Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar.” Click “next” and you’ll be presented with the system requirements. Since CalDAV only works with Leopard or Snow Leopard, Tiger’s been fully de-clawed for iOS. If you fail to move to CalDAV your MobileMe calendar sync won’t work unless you move to 10.5 or 10.6 and if you do, Tiger will no longer sync without a third party helper like BusySync.

After confirming your devices meet the requirements, click “Upgrade Now” and the process begins. You’ll see a series of conformations that the calendars are being prepared and upgraded.

What’s happening in the background is your existing calendars that were synced with your computer and MobileMe are making their move off your computer and into the cloud. When complete, your calendars exist on MobileMe servers and your iCal merely provides another way of accessing them. Your iOS device should be smart enough to notice the change and modify itself as well. Now your calendars will exist on MobileMe’s servers and your other devices merely access the data, similar to the way IMAP works for email. Syncing is virtually instant since modifications are transferred directly to the cloud.

Trust, but Verify

Just to play it safe, I had some preset test routines ready to make sure everything when smoothly. I waited about 20 minutes to do the following to make sure all the changes propagated:

1. Add an item via iCal and verify it shows up on my iOS and Mac OS devices and MobileMe’s website
2. Add an item via each iOS device and verify it shows up on all other devices
3. Modify an event on each device and make sure that change shows up
4. If you have any calendars shared with someone, make sure they follow steps 1-3 for your calendar and you do the same for theirs, after they’ve also performed the upgrade

Snags, Errors, and General Weirdness

If all goes well, you are done! However with computers, everything doesn’t run so smoothly all of the time. In my particular instance one of my calendars was somehow corrupt enough to not make the move to the cloud, but I could still access it on my desktop. I kept getting errors in the upgrade process until I deleted the calendar from my desktop. After the upgrade was complete, I then imported the .ics file I backed up earlier manually. It work, but if it hadn’t, I was going to use Time Machine to restore a version that wasn’t corrupt and then I’d again move it to MobileMe manually.

I was a big user of BusySync and BusySync has specific instructions and caveats on how to make the move with their software. As for other secondary services, I’m disappointed that syncing with Google became more complex after the upgrade. I had to manually add my Google shared calendars.

Once the upgrade is complete, the way others subscribe to your calendar has changed. They now can have both read as well as write access to your calendars and most likely you’ll manually have to invite them to your calendar by using the Share command under the Calendar Menu within iCal. I had to manually re-invite people.

Another snag I personally ran into was on my MacBook, when I first launched iCal, it kept all the old calendars and then MobileMe created the proper CalDAV settings automatically but kept those old local calendars so everything was duplicated.

Two great websites to help ease the transition are here and here. If you ran into any snags or have any suggestions about upgrading your MobileMe calander, be sure to let us know in the comments.

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Icon Garden

Any discussion of Apple’s icon design should begin with a discussion of some of Apple’s most infamous 8-bit icons from its original GUI. Apple used to feature large versions of these in its icon garden at 1 Infinite Loop, however at some point around 1998, Apple removed the icons. Featured amongst the garden were classic icons, such as the eraser, hand, stopwatch, and even Clarus the Dogcow. (Moof!)

Check out how the paint bucket is "filling" the grass with green and the paint brush and pencil have just finished "creating" the flowers.

Whoa! The eraser is erasing the flowers!

Similar Colors

Depending on how cluttered your Dock is, you may or may not have noticed that the most prominent colors chosen by Apple for its icons is from the blue family. This trend was originally favored in Apple’s hardware (the original Bondi blue iMac, for instance). Associated with the sky or the ocean (a la OS X’s original UI codename Aqua), the blue also evokes a sense of stability, trust and calmness. (It really does make the infamous Blue Screen of Death a lot less harsh than if it were red.) It wasn’t until the release of Leopard that Apple shipped with a default desktop background that wasn’t blue.

Evolution of Icons

Some icons in OS X have evolved over time. Occasionally there may be some rhyme and reason to changing icons, such as the inclusion of the video camera for when iChat AV was originally launched, or the major redesign of iMovie between iMovie HD and iMovie ’08.

Other times, icons are seemingly changed sporadically, like the evolution of the iTunes icons. Originally every new version came with a new icon, but even that trend has wavered.

Other applications have also seen different icons with new versions, such as Backup, iDVD, iPhoto and Keynote. Though the Keynote icon has not seen a drastic change since Keynote ’08, the version that ships with iWork ’09 updates the date of the fourth-quarter report on the icon to Q4 2009.

Alternative Uses

Some icons depict their contents, such as the icon for a photo or a typeface. Other icons present users with dynamically updating information, such as the iCal icon which changes to reflect the current date. Other icons “change” by badges that indicate various information (unread emails, download speeds, etc.).

Another example are icons for exported vCards. If you have set them up in Address Book, they will export with their photo in the icon.

With the introduction of Snow Leopard this fall, users will once again begin to find new uses for icons, as the operating system allows users to preview media directly on the icon itself.

Bonus iPhone Icon

If you haven’t had a chance yet to take your iPhone or iPod touch into Starbucks, when you do, you’ll notice a new icon in your iTunes Store app. Specifically the Starbucks icon, and it is the only navbar icon on the device that exists in full color and not the usual masked blue color as typically seen.

Have you noticed any other unique or interesting icon changes or features?

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I’ve never been as organized as I currently am with the combination of my MacBook Pro, iPhone and Google Calendar. Sure, before I crossed the line to Apple, I had tried to use Thunderbird (with Lightning’s Calendar plugin) to keep organized, syncing to my Windows Mobile phone, but it was always clunky and slow and not worth the effort when things didn’t “Just Work.” Since tasting the sweet Apple pie, I now have multiple Google calendars shared with my wife and synced to both of our Macs and iPod touch/iPhones with Spanning Sync. We are now totally organized, and it’s awesome.

However, like any data system, it’s a case of garbage in, garbage out. The combination of data corruption and synchronization is one that can wreak total and utter havoc on the most organized of people, rendering us as useless as a fish out of water. To combat the potential of this scenario, the folks over at Spanning Sync have released a public beta of its new utility, Spanning Tools.

Spanning Tools is a preventative maintenance suite, analyzing your critical data, alerting you of potential problems, and allowing you to take the appropriate action to eliminate the threat before it manifests in corruption. Spanning Tools comprises three separate utilities.

Calendar Cleaner

Calendar Cleaner scans your iCal databases looking for duplicate events and those with malformed dates. It strongly suggests backing up your iCal database first — neatly providing the backup and restore functionality within the application.

Contacts Cleaner

Like the Calendar Cleaner, the Contacts Cleaner scans your Address Book for dodgy data in your contacts. It checks for duplicate contacts, duplicate email addresses, contacts with only a single name or a space in a name field (which can cause problems with synchronization). In all cases, you have multiple ways to fix the data (such as using “???” for a blank name, converting to a company contact, removing the space, replacing it with a hyphen, etc). As with Calendar Cleaner, it also has built-in Address Book backup and restore functionality.

Sync Tune-Up

The last utility, Sync Tune-Up, provides a window into Apple’s Sync Services, allowing you to see exactly what applications are registered with the service and have access to your data. This gives you an easy method to disable a rogue application that you think is causing a problem, or that you just don’t use anymore.

Sync Tune-Up also provides some last-resort trouble-shooting options to Reset your sync data if things have stopped working completely.

Great Potential

Spanning Tools has great potential as a preventative maintenance utility with critical organization data. I consider it akin to keeping the chain well-greased on your bicycle. The folks at Spanning Sync haven’t announced if Spanning Tools will be a paid product when the final version is released — but in the meantime, the public preview has worked flawlessly for me by identifying some potential issues and presented suitable fixes. I can sleep a little better at night in knowing my organizational data is solid.

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Even though Apple builds great products for the consumer, the company often misses the boat with business users. Snow Leopard stands to make serious inroads with Mac users in wingtips and pinstripes with native support for Microsoft Exchange Server. Mail, iCal, and Address Book will all be updated to talk directly with your Exchange account and in some cases, may work better than Entourage.

The Long & Winding Road

It’s taken a long time to get to this point, but the Mac has a long history of working with Microsoft. I think a little history is interesting here to show how we’ve arrived at Snow Leopard.

The Mac has had Microsoft Office almost from the beginning (Word and Excel for Mac were first released in 1985). Jaguar added LDAP access to Address Book. Panther introduced Windows Printer Sharing and Active Directory support so that you could log into a Windows Domain from a Macintosh. Tiger introduced Exchange accounts in Mail (though with IMAP access only) along with much improved support for Samba and Windows file sharing. The move to Intel gave us virtualization of Windows apps.

Leopard brought Boot Camp, of course, but this did nothing to help integrate Mac OS X itself into a Windows environment. But under the hood some exciting things were happening. The Address Book and Calendar stores were updated to offer better programmatic access and the Sync Services framework was updated. The result was that Mail and iCal were better at sharing data with each other and we got to-do items that were shared between those two apps. iCal was updated to access outside CalDAV accounts and Mail got Notes that (eventually) were able to sync with the iPhone.

The iPhone OS 2.0 firmware update pushed Exchange integration to new heights because Apple chose to license the ActiveSync technology from Microsoft. This put the iPhone on a level playing field with Windows Mobile devices and Outlook when accessing information stored in Exchange.

Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard brings all of this together: integrated email, calendar, and address book (with to-do’s and notes) with access to outside accounts and the ActiveSync technology used in the iPhone. In fact, Apple is touting that the Mac will now have out-of-the-box support for “Exchange Server 2007, something that Windows PC’s don’t have.” The requirement to use Exchange Server 2007 might disappoint some that are still on 2003, but it makes good sense when you consider that 2007 has the new Business Logic Layer that provides a consistent view of your mailboxes from any device and takes a lot of work out of writing client software. In fact, Entourage has been testing a beta version that also requires Exchange 2007 in order to take advantage of this technology to make Entourage behave more like Outlook does on a Windows PC.

Entourage?

Personally, I hope for Entourage to die a slow and horrible death. Having been on the support end of things, I have seen how hard it is to make Entourage work reliably. And when it fails? Look out, because all of your email messages, contact info, tasks, calendar items, etc. are stored in one big database file. Lose that file, and you’ve lost everything. And backing it up with Time Machine means you have copied a multigigabyte file to your backup drive every hour.

Recovering from errors in Mail, where each message is an individual file, is much simpler and it works beautifully with Time Machine and Spotlight because of this file structure. I know there are people that like the consolidated view of all information in one application, but I suspect that this preference comes more from force of habit after using Outlook than any real advantage.

So can Mail, iCal, and Address Book replace Entourage? I think so.

Mail

Mail provides access to your Exchange account right along any other IMAP or POP3 accounts. As a Mac user, you get all the cool Mac features like data detectors, Spotlight, and Quick Look. I’m impressed that Quick Look can display previews of Office documents even if you don’t have Microsoft Office for Mac installed on your machine. This might be a good reason to give iWork another look.

Quick Look

iCal

iCal will seamlessly blend your personal local calendars and your Exchange calendars in one view. I liked how the WWDC Keynote demo showed how iCal could intelligently schedule meetings to avoid conflicts, just like Outlook. And of course it’s still integrated with Mail and Address Book so you can see your to-do’s here or in Mail, and you can auto-fill addresses from Exchange.

Address Book

OK, contacts are not very sexy, but I do like how you can access the Global Address List from within any app that can talk to Address Book. That means Mail will auto-complete addresses as you type messages and iCal will auto-complete names as you create meeting invitations. I suppose it might mean that other apps like Delicious Library that integrate with Address Book will let you keep track of DVDs that you loan to people at work, even if they aren’t in your personal contact list. I also like how smart groups can blend your personal address book with the Exchange contacts. Very slick.

The Future of Microsoft Office

I see a big problem coming for the MacBU at Microsoft. One of the primary reasons to purchase the full version of Microsoft Office (the only reason?) was to get Exchange support. Now that Snow Leopard will include Exchange support natively, I suspect a lot of people will choose to purchase the Home & Student Edition, despite the language in the license that prevents you from using it for work-related activities. A decrease in revenue would naturally lead to a decrease in funding for future development. Despite my feelings about Entourage, Office is pretty useful. I hope that Apple pushes them a little hard (iWork updates will help too), but I hope they don’t push so hard that Office is abandoned. I have felt like Entourage has languished along for a few years now and if I don’t get my wish for it to just curl up and die, then maybe we can get a better, more reliable Entourage for people who want to use it.

The Future of the Mac at Work

I suspect that despite my enthusiasm, the initial support for Exchange in the first release of Snow Leopard is going to blow. I would advise caution about committing to abandoning Entourage, or a large-scale migration from Windows PCs and Outlook in 2009. The bugs, and there will be bugs, will get worked out though, and 2010 could be a very exciting year for the Mac in the business segment.

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