How do I sync between calendars and address books on a Mac?

July 18, 2010 2:30 PM

How do I sync between calendars and address books on a Mac?

I've got a Mac, but the rest of my organization uses Windows, and our email/calendar/address book server is Exchange. I'm able to subscribe to my calendars and address books that reside on the server form my mac, but here's my problem: When I get a calendar invite, my Mac happily inserts it into the calendars in On My Mac, but doesn't give me the option to add it to my Exchange calendar. So when I'm not on my Mac and using Exchange via the web, none of my calendar entries show up because they're not in the right calendar. Same thing holds true for my address book.
Is there a program out there that will go through my calendar and address book and sync between the two calendars or address books? Somehow this seems to work seamlessly with Google, but between the Mac and Exchange they seem to live in two different worlds.

posted by Runes to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Are you using Entourage? If not, use it. Really.
posted by The Michael The at 2:51 PM on July 18, 2010

We need to know more about what version of Mac OS you're using, and what version of Exchange your company is using to offer advice: Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) had minimal support for Exchange, but Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) added native support for Exchange 2007 or 2010 calendars and address books. Using a 10.5 machine to connect to an Exchange 2003 server is a completely different task than using a 10.6 machine to connect to Exchange 2007, etc.
posted by eschatfische at 3:02 PM on July 18, 2010

Seconding Entourage.
posted by aberrant at 5:28 PM on July 18, 2010

Snow Leopard, and Exchange 2007. As I said, I can subscribe to the data on the server, but it shows up as a separate entity in the two applications. For example, iCal has a calendar in the "On My Mac" section and a calendar in the "user@domain" section and entries going into one don't replicate to the other.

If I switch to Entourage, won't that mean that I have to convert all my mail to the Entourage format? Back in the day that I used Outlook my biggest gripe was that it kept all of it's data in one giant file, does Entourage do that too or use separate files for each folder like Mail.app?
posted by Runes at 6:17 PM on July 18, 2010

Yes, Entourage uses one big file too. Makes life crazy for Time Machine backups (or any differential-based backups, really). I like the UI of Entourage, but I don't like that it will eat all of your mail if one message becomes corrupted.
posted by Wild_Eep at 8:59 PM on July 18, 2010