We recently had a client ask about using Microsofts new Outlook for Mac on our hosted email and collaborations services, here’s the short version of the quick look into this.
Basically Outlook for Mac 2011 doesn’t support and calendaring standards (put in place by the Internet Engineering Task Force) that allow you to do this. You’d have to be connected to an MS Exchange server, which leaves a couple of options.
- Use Apple Mail, Calendar and Address book which all use standards based features, as does Cleartext and setup as per using iCal in Thunderbird for example
- Do some research (the new Mac app Store?) and try to find an alternative desktop/mobile solution that does what you need whilst still on Cleartext, unlikely to be out there
- Select an MS Exchange hosting service which will give you this but you’ll loose all the Cleartext OS and mobile neutral goodness and will lock you into Microsoft stuff!
Part of the driving force for setting up Cleartext in 2005 was that we saw a need to offer standards based services to small to medium business because Microsoft was doing such a bad job of providing open platforms that connected to other systems using internet standards and such a good job of locking people into their offerings, neither of which is very helpful when trying to run a business.
I think we’ve been justified in this approach as we’ve got a loyal client base and have seen Microsofts market share dwindle in the face of competition from companies like Google and Apple, but we realise that there are many people out there that don’t really care about long term IT strategy and just want a problem ‘fixed’ with IT.
This is why companies like Microsoft are able to continually put sub standard products into the market place, not helped by the fact that it’s quicker to hack some code together to provide a solution than it is to plan it around formalised protocols etc. We see similar issues in the IM space, web developers regularly create ‘new’ instant messaging platforms using web protocols (HTTP) rather than doing some research and discovering that there’s a standard protocol for IM called XMPP, just like there is for email called SMTP, POP3 and IMAP.
So the long and the short of it is that we do offer what the client needs, meeting bookings with sight of peoples free and busy time but you’d have to move to a standards based platform to use our standards based services, that is Apples built in apps (which are actually very nice to use) or something similar like Mozilla Thunderbird.
The internet was designed as an open interconnected platform but unfortunately there’s a history of companies trying to lock it down with proprietary protocols and ‘lock in’, companies like Microsoft and now oddly enough Twitter and Facebook (Microsoft part owns Facebook).
We’ll continue to be an ‘indy’ software as a service or ‘cloud’ company and we’ll always put three things into our offerings, service, security and STANDARDS.