ical, address book & mail...

total noob here, so don't hammer me too hard.

i'm a proud new owner of a 2.4 20 inch imac. i'm totally new to the mac os and i have always been a windows user. i was a big fan of outlook and was wondering if i can get the same features without getting entourage. i have a .mac account i would like to take full advantage of the sync feature. with outlook i was able to add a contact with addresses, birthdays, and anniversaries. the dates would get updated in the calender and i was all set with reminders. can i do that without entourage? is there certain extras i need to download? also, if i do get entourage will i be able to sync it with my .mac account?

thanks in advance for any help.

Short answer: yes.
That is what Mail, iCal and Address Book are designed to do!
If you decide to get Entourage it will sync with your .mac account.

I use Entourage and it's a pretty solid piece of software... certainly one of Microsoft's better efforts.

Entourage does work with iSync, but it kinda cheats. It will actually create itself a calendar on iCal - so when you open iCal, you'll see your Entourage Calendar (there is a setting in Entourage under preferences, where you can choose to sync Address Book, Calendar and Notes with Address Book, iCal and .mac respectively). Having said that, you don't need to do anything in iCal for this to work, it is all done automatically.

So, it works seamlessly - the only slight downside is that the MS Database deamon launches on startup to keep everything in sync and is a Rosetta application. If you're going to be a heavy Office user, 2 gigs of RAM is slightly preferable in my experience on an Intel machine.

BTW, Entourage offers far more options on your Address Book than Apple's version - plus in Entourage you get Project Center, which is very cool.

thanks

useful info. i will probably end up getting entourage. i'm just bitter with ms now. i had so many problems with my last pc it made me go buy an imac yesterday. i was 5 secs away from tossing my treo 700w out the window (lost all my contacts for the 3rd time). i'm sure i will figure out the os apps. thanks again...

The treo 700 is notorious for crashing with Windows Mobile - you'd be better off with Palm OS.

Entourage is steady; I have never had it crash. It's a little laggy because of Rosetta, but no more than say Outlook 2007 is.