Topic

Messages

Cross Platform Mail Systems

Many of us are shops with both Macs and PCs and we're evaluating cross-platform e-mail and groupware systems here. What kinds of e-mail systems (clients and servers) do you use that have similar Mac and PC capabilities and cross-platform compatibility? Shared calendaring? etc? Anything nice? Something to avoid? We currently have an Ipswitch's Imail server with QuickMail and Outlook clients and it's a little dated. Thanks for your reply!!!!

Ed Arnold
HSR Business to Business

Outlook for both PC and MAC users. They are both connected to a Win2000 Advanced Server. The PC users are Win98. All email is hosted on remote ISP so that all users can get their email while out of the office.

Art Goff
CKE, Inc.

We use Microsoft Outlook

Laura Pacino
Drone & Mueller

I'm not IT savvy at all. Our IT guy is too busy to ask, so I offer this: We are cross platform shop (up to 25 people). We use Outlook Express 5 version 5.05. Been good so far. Is there a higher version?

Roxanne Cowan
Rutherford Bolen Group Integrated Marketing

We use Microsoft Exchange Server and outlook 2000 on PCs. Outlook integrates perfectly with the Exchange Server. The Mac users are a bit different though. They access their email using TCP/IP protocol and the integration is not as good as it is with PCs. But it does the job.

Johnson Paul
Campbell Michener & Lee Inc.

I can give you the "consultant" answer: There are a lot of ways to go, depending on the final goal, the budget and the ROI along with what works with your existing environment. Our company specializes in supporting agencies and helping them to make the right decisions based on what works best for that agency, rather than trying to fit them into a cookie-cutter. One of the critical issues is long-term support. Are your support people or IT staff (whoever supports your servers) cross-platform or are they only comfortable in one environment?

If your server support people only know Windows, then you may only be able to look at Windows options on the server side. Similarly, if you have people strong in the Mac environment, be careful implementing OS X-based solutions, since higher-end apps will require more than a working knowledge of the UNIX engine which drives OS X. One of the reasons that we recommend C&P to our clients is because of the My Clients & Profits! web server which allows data entry from almost any environment which runs a browser. Along the same lines we generally recommend that our clients evaluate groupware and Digital Asset Management systems which have web-browser plug-in capability. Most email server packages currently ship with browser capabilities.

Mike Melvin
Frontier Vision Technologies, Inc.