Mac on PC Corporate network

DolbyDigital

I am working on this huge project which will see our design Mac laptops get added to the corporate PC based network.

The only problem is that we need to be able to access our corporate email (Exchange server) from home...

The I.T. department is not willing to allow a VPN connection from a Mac (for whatever reason) - The VPN hardware that they are using is antiquated, but it is reliable, as they have around 1,000+ sales consultants using it to retrieve their corporate emails on their Dell laptops...

What are my options here? Can I run a license of Windows XP in parallel on my Mac Book Pro, and have it handle the VPN connection, or will this likely not work because of some hardware issues?

I tried setting up an Out of office rule in outlook on my PC (which will be removed once the Macs go on the network) which would forward any email that I received to a gmail account, thinking that once we started using Entourage, I would do the same there...but I think the server has the forward feature disabled to prevent sensitive data from going out into the wild...as none of my emails are making it to my external email.

I realize that without intimate knowledge of the company's security features, it might be hard to answer, but what other options do I have?

Gyral

Have you tried to see if they have the Exchange mail browseable via internet access? My own company has it where we can check our email through the web when not on a computer hooked directly into the network. This is how I check my email from home on my Mac laptop.

Eggplant Wizard

Entourage is a turd sandwich. Its Exchange features are crippled, and the few features it does have are extremely sensitive to the version and settings on the Exchange server. Outlook web access is your best bet for dealing with email. That's been my experience.

DolbyDigital

Thanks for your replies.

Sadly, web access is not available. They are looking at potentially doing that NEXT YEAR.

Yeah...this company is behind the times...

olol turd sandwich...are there other Apps that will do a better job?

antifood

I am puzzled why they would not allow for you to use vpn in osx. Is it pptp or ipsec? About Entourage: With a few simple tweaks, Entourage 11.2 works surprisingly well with exchange.

Eggplant Wizard

Sadly, I don't think there exists a full Outlook-like Exchange/MAPI client for OS X. I'd love to be proven wrong. This is really the only major grudge I have against Microsoft. Entourage is a joke.

I'm probably a little bitter about it, and for that I apologize. We used to have IMAP enabled on our Exchange server, which at least allowed to me to send and recieve basic email with Entourage v.X, though the calendar and other features were useless. At some point, the company upgraded and disabled IMAP, leaving me out in the cold. Supposedly the latest version of Entourage has better Exchange support, but it's still not a real Exchange client.

Thankfully, we have Outlook Web Access and we do allow VPN connections from Macs, so at least I have that.

antifood

Eggplant Wizard wrote:

Sadly, I don't think there exists a full Outlook-like Exchange/MAPI client for OS X. I'd love to be proven wrong. This is really the only major grudge I have against Microsoft. Entourage is a joke.

I'm probably a little bitter about it, and for that I apologize. We used to have IMAP enabled on our Exchange server, which at least allowed to me to send and recieve basic email with Entourage v.X, though the calendar and other features were useless. At some point, the company upgraded and disabled IMAP, leaving me out in the cold. Supposedly the latest version of Entourage has better Exchange support, but it's still not a real Exchange client.

Thankfully, we have Outlook Web Access and we do allow VPN connections from Macs, so at least I have that.

Full Calendering and contact support now, public folders too. It is really night and day between the old and current version of Entourage.

supabeast

Parallels/VMWare does seem like the best solution, however the only way to find out if either product will actually work under your circumstances will be to buy a license and test it. As for the VPN on a Mac issue, if you configure the client correctly, the IT staff probably won't be able to tell what OS the client is running. If you're on old hardware there's got to be some open-source app that will handle all the VPN stuff and give a false client ID to let you connect with no hassles.

DolbyDigital

antifood wrote:

Eggplant Wizard wrote:

Sadly, I don't think there exists a full Outlook-like Exchange/MAPI client for OS X. I'd love to be proven wrong. This is really the only major grudge I have against Microsoft. Entourage is a joke.

I'm probably a little bitter about it, and for that I apologize. We used to have IMAP enabled on our Exchange server, which at least allowed to me to send and recieve basic email with Entourage v.X, though the calendar and other features were useless. At some point, the company upgraded and disabled IMAP, leaving me out in the cold. Supposedly the latest version of Entourage has better Exchange support, but it's still not a real Exchange client.

Thankfully, we have Outlook Web Access and we do allow VPN connections from Macs, so at least I have that.

Full Calendering and contact support now, public folders too. It is really night and day between the old and current version of Entourage.

So 11.2.3 is the most recent version? That's what we have just sitting on our Macs. It was bundled with Office 2004: Mac, just sitting there, waiting to be used...I'll be testing this on my Mac on the corp. network within the next few weeks...

So meeting notices, polls, and other calendar features, as well as public folders are seamless with the PC world?

As for why they won't allow vpn in osx, i cannot answer that...they might cry because "its never been tested" and they'd have to have their own machine to test things on, and that will never happen, since they are totally hands-off with everything that has to do with mac. The only support we get is through a third party vendor.

antifood

supabeast wrote:

Parallels/VMWare does seem like the best solution, however the only way to find out if either product will actually work under your circumstances will be to buy a license and test it. As for the VPN on a Mac issue, if you configure the client correctly, the IT staff probably won't be able to tell what OS the client is running. If you're on old hardware there's got to be some open-source app that will handle all the VPN stuff and give a false client ID to let you connect with no hassles.

Parallels will do the trick. I have a copy of Office 2003 installed on my installation. It rarely gets used, but you can have that and Entourage synced via your Exchange Server (when on the network).

I don't know if you have a workstation in the office, but another solution would be to use a terminal program such as remote desktop or CoRD to terminal into your workstation while using parallels as a vpn client of sorts.

Eggplant Wizard

antifood wrote:

Full Calendering and contact support now, public folders too. It is really night and day between the old and current version of Entourage.

Do you happen to know what specific features or versions need to be on the Exchange server for it to work? I'm willing to give Entourage another try if it's really improved.

antifood

DolbyDigital wrote:

antifood wrote:

Eggplant Wizard wrote:

Sadly, I don't think there exists a full Outlook-like Exchange/MAPI client for OS X. I'd love to be proven wrong. This is really the only major grudge I have against Microsoft. Entourage is a joke.

I'm probably a little bitter about it, and for that I apologize. We used to have IMAP enabled on our Exchange server, which at least allowed to me to send and recieve basic email with Entourage v.X, though the calendar and other features were useless. At some point, the company upgraded and disabled IMAP, leaving me out in the cold. Supposedly the latest version of Entourage has better Exchange support, but it's still not a real Exchange client.

Thankfully, we have Outlook Web Access and we do allow VPN connections from Macs, so at least I have that.

Full Calendering and contact support now, public folders too. It is really night and day between the old and current version of Entourage.

So 11.2.3 is the most recent version? That's what we have just sitting on our Macs. It was bundled with Office 2004: Mac, just sitting there, waiting to be used...I'll be testing this on my Mac on the corp. network within the next few weeks...

So meeting notices, polls, and other calendar features, as well as public folders are seamless with the PC world?

As for why they won't allow vpn in osx, i cannot answer that...they might cry because "its never been tested" and they'd have to have their own machine to test things on, and that will never happen, since they are totally hands-off with everything that has to do with mac. The only support we get is through a third party vendor.

10.3.3 is the latest. Features that are not supported: voting, shared tasks, shared notes, and server-side rules.

Scheduling works like a champ though. Pro tip: you may need to make a rule to move all incoming emails from "Folders on my computer" to your exchange folder.

antifood

Eggplant Wizard wrote:

antifood wrote:

Full Calendering and contact support now, public folders too. It is really night and day between the old and current version of Entourage.

Do you happen to know what specific features or versions need to be on the Exchange server for it to work? I'm willing to give Entourage another try if it's really improved.

Sp2 should do the trick for you. If you require voting or shared tasks, you still won't be happy (I have not had a chance to test Entourage sp3, but I did not see any additional exchange functions in the supplied doc).

Feral

The I.T. department is not willing to allow a VPN connection from a Mac

Sadly, web access is not available. They are looking at potentially doing that NEXT YEAR.

So, let me get this straight. They're basically talking about opening up their firewall to allow MAPI connections from outside the corporate network straight into their Exchange servers, without using a VPN or OWA?

Man, that is a terrible idea.

EggyToast

Cisco makes an OS X VPN client. I use it to connect to the campus library for my MBA program. it's pretty trippy. I'm not sure if that would work for you guys, but it may be worth mentioning to the IT folks?

DolbyDigital

OK I will look in to that.

My next question is:

There are a bunch of PC based network drives that I will need to be connected to...is there a way to prevent OSX from truncating the long PC filenames?

steeef

How are the drives shared/how are you connecting to them? I know I've had issues using smb shares via OS X, which is one of the reasons my company had to purchase Thursby's ADmitMac to connect to our Active Directory domain. Of course, that product has its own set of issues.

DolbyDigital

steeef wrote:

How are the drives shared/how are you connecting to them? I know I've had issues using smb shares via OS X, which is one of the reasons my company had to purchase Thursby's ADmitMac to connect to our Active Directory domain. Of course, that product has its own set of issues.

Eek, I don't know how to answer that question...sorry...Networking is not my forté...I draw stuff...

They are just network shares on a server that we can map to as drive letters and are attached to our login profile, so that if we log in on antother machine, technically they should follow us...

That's all I got.