I’m an Exchange 2007 user. It’s terrific, works great and is truly the standard by which others are judged when it comes to business email, calendaring, contacts and other key business productivity features.

Being both a Mac and a PC guy, I’ve been the tester, owner and user of a variety of different applications to interface to Exchange. Outlook 2007 on the PC is a pretty obvious choice, and again it’s a standard by which others are often judged. But on the Mac I have been using Entourage for some time, with mixed opinion and results. It’s a good attempt at filling the gap left by the fact that there is no Outlook for the Mac, but it lacks in both features and stability.

However, on this fin gray Saturday morning I find myself once again examining the world of Exchange and the Mac. As I type this my Mac is going through the upgrade process and transforming itself into a Snow Leopard (OSX v10.6) machine. I’ve also downloaded the Entourage Web Services Edition upgrade from Microsoft, which is waiting on the Mac hard drive to install after the OS upgrade is completed.

My plan here is to set up and run under the new native-Exchange 2007 support in OSX Snow Leopard while at the same time checking out the new Entourage Web Services Edition features.

I should also note that earlier this month, Microsoft announced it will be releasing (finally!) a new Outlook client for the Mac in 2010. The expected “too late” crowd has been chiming in with their opinions, but in The Real World, where people older than 13 years actually make decisions about buying software for business use, this may be a big deal. It’s at least somewhat inevitable that Macs will become more common in the workplace, and the need for a consistent collaboration and productivity platform will full-fidelity, complete feature sets across OS platforms is critical to making business work.

I’ll post more details and thoughts once I get some of the setup and comparisons done over the next couple days. Meanwhile, I need to get packing some more cardboard boxes here at home so I can load them up… For anyone who might have noticed I have been absent from writing here, I am in the process of selling my house and will be getting married in October, so my world is a bit busy these days. But I am not gone. :)