Why does Entourage give permissions errors with Exchange?

March 21, 2006 8:58 AM

Exchange + Entourage + Permissions Filter. I request your assistance with one more hurdle on the road to Mac OS X groupware nirvana.

Our predominantly Mac OS X 10.4 based office is testing out hosted Exchange with Entourage. I've created accounts for three of us—Corey, Karin, and Courtney. We all have the latest versions of OS X and Entourage and each of us set the permissions for our shared calendars and contacts to "Reviewer" for the other two individuals, which should allow the other two to access the calendars and contacts, but not make changes.

Karin's works fine: Courtney and Corey can both select "Open another user's folder" and enter Karin's name and bang! her calendar shows up on the other two computers. However, when Corey tries to access Courtney or vice-versa, we receive an error message that we do not have permission to access the folder. I've reset the permissions on both computers and checked the account settings on all three and they seem to match. Any suggestions?

One semi-related item: I notice that the calendaring, addressing and folder sharing are all based on either WebDAV or LDAP. Is there a way to use an open source calendar and contact server with Entourage, and bypass Exchange altogether? With regard to suggestions to switch clients, our office really likes the integration Entourage provides and the Palm syncing, so switching would be a tough sell. Thanks.

posted by MarvinTheCat to computers & internet (2 comments total)

One thing we've run into with a mixed environment is that you cannot use a password greater than 8 characters when accessing a windows domain from OS X. That may be particular to our setup, but it's worth checking out.
posted by sardonista at 9:30 AM on March 21, 2006

Exchange and Entourage suck. That's all there is to say.

At my old office we had a similar situation. An admin assistant needed access to her boss's calendar. It all worked fine with Outlook and PCs... just like for all the other admin assistants.

Then he got a mac and all hell broke loose. If she made appointments for him on her PC, they'd show up double on the mac.

And she couldn't alter appointments that he had made on the Mac on her PC. (big problem)

Basically, what we eventually figured out was that any appointment that he made in Entourage on the mac didn't see it as user "greg" (the boss guy) having had made the appointment -- it appeared that no one was assigned as owner to that appointment so therefore admin assistant user "kelly" wasn't authorized to make changes to this appointment with no owner.

Oh, and Microsoft couldn't solve the problem.

There has been an Entourage SP update since this all happened, so it may have changed. Somehow I doubt it.
posted by k8t at 1:58 AM on March 22, 2006