Chapter 5. Messaging and Groupware

Groupware is one of the most important communication vehicles in the modern enterprise. Tracking what people are doing in shared calendars, whom your organization does business with in shared contacts, and communicating with them all with email are requirements today for any large organization. In fact, it goes a step further in that you need to extend the same functionality you have at the desktop onto mobile devices, including, of course, the iPhone and iPod Touch.

For the purpose of this chapter, we will include messaging solutions as part of the overall groupware ecosystem. We do so because every conversation about shared contacts and calendars includes e-mail. Some even include instant messaging frameworks. Over the course of this chapter, we will cover the various solutions that have become common on the Mac OS X platform, starting with Microsoft Exchange.

There are a number of groupware platforms, each with varying degrees of compatibility with the Mac. Microsoft Exchange is clearly the most prevalent, so we'll spend more time in this chapter covering Exchange than any other solution. However, Exchange isn't the only solution out there. Lotus Notes, GroupWise, and a few others have become fairly common in enterprise organizations and so these are included as well.

But what if you want to be in a purely Mac OS X environment? Well, you can. We're not going to say that this will come with the same level of scalability, application functionality, cross-pollination among applications, and maturity that some of the other solutions (especially Microsoft Exchange) can provide, because it can't. The pure Mac solution is just not there yet. However, Snow Leopard does introduce some new features on the groupware front that certainly bring a first-party solution much closer to reality. Moreover, the Mac solution is worth exploring on a service-by-service basis, considering that licensing and complexity can cause many of the other solutions to come in at a much higher total cost of ownership for Mac clients than for their Windows counterparts.