This tool is incredible, especially when combined with freely available scripts to create rotating snapshots of your system using hard links so that disk space usage is minimal. Is does local and remote syncs, can use compression, run as a server, resolve moved files without retransfering, use ssh for encrypted connections, and many many more features. It is a serious power tool if you are willing to learn it.

We have a Sun mail server, which obviously makes the email piece easier. However, I did some contract work for another company that used Exchange, and Thunderbird works great - you can choose which folders you want to synchronize, and it’s flawless in operation. I like Mail on the Mac, but I also find Thunderbird and the other Mozilla products excellent. I believe that they are working on a calendar solution, so you may find that once finished, this solves your calendar issues also.

As for Access, my girlfriend has an old 867 Mhz G4 PowerBook, and since she’s an Accounting major in college, MS Access is a must. While VirtualPC has been frustratingly slow for most applications I’ve used it with, for some reason the performance for Access is almost identical to a native Windows client (and this is on the old, slow version of the G4). You might want to give it a try.

For the calendaring, did you try iCal? I have never used iCal with Exchange, but OS X’s built in support for MS products is pretty good in my experience. For example, the Windows-native VPN access works flawlessly, and everything else I have needed (file sharing, Office document exchange, etc.) has always been trouble free.

The trouble with MS is that they don’t have to follow other people’s standards to make people use their software. All we like sheep have gone the MS-way. When we get .doc files, AppleWorks is not very good at them. I usually open them in OpenOffice.org, with the inconvenience and clash of X11). I expect Pages will fix some of that, if we get it. MSN Messenger is way behind on OS X; there is no free native OS X powerpoint browser (again the resort is OO.org). At least VLC on OS X is up to date! We use that to avoid losing region-changes, and it gets better with each release. We’ve watched a number of full length movies with it now.

Here’s just a few suggestions on what I’d (these aren’t criticism) do:-

1) You say that your in a total MS environment. Do you have any Terminal Servers ? We use them heavily at our work, so Remote Desktop Client on the Mac into your Windows Terminal Server to access Office 2003. Outlook, Powerpoint, you name it. All available to you. Even Access if you desire.

2) Virtual PC on the Mac. You mentioned it, why not use all those MS apps under Virtual PC. I use Virtual PC on our XP workstations to run everything from BeOS to FreeBSD.

3) The Mac Mail client. Does it not support IMAP or LDAP ? That’s what you’ll need to get it working with Exchange. Unfortunately, MS are the only ones with a MAPI client email package. OWA as you say, isn’t that great and you can’t get at your Public Folders very well with it.

4) Composing Emails as Word. I found this feature (and so did all our 50+ users) awful. We turned it off immediately. There are other issues associated with it - in that settings are taking from Word rather than from Outlook (such a printing - this was a nightmare to track down)

5) I never use PowerPoint so I won’t comment on that.

6) Windows File Sharing - Well this is going to be an issue thanks to NTFS (MS’s proprietory filesystem). All OSes except for Windows can only have read access to these filesystems. Personally, I was going to get around this by use http://FTP. I use FTP on two XP machines that aren’t in a domain that won’t talk to each other using Windows Authenication and that works well.

Finding Computers will only work if the master browser is responding and this on a Windows network is pretty poor as well. I never rely on it to be accurate. With Windows 2003 Server, it runs it’s own DNS Server so it can find machines, it should query that or do a broadcast ping.

7) Database - I’d never use Access in a million years. Last time I used it was 10 years ago. I use SQLite for small databases, MySQL for web or a little bit bigger and MS SQL at work. Using PHP with MySQL and PHPMyAdmin, you can import and export from all types. I’ve even imported an Access db by first exporting it to an open source format such as CSV or TSV.

That might give you a few things to try.