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Fused with my Xobni

Posted in Uncategorized on October 14, 2008 at 2:19 pm

I write about virtualisation a lot, often, more than I want to — not that VMworld wasn’t oodles of fun, but you do start wanting to stab the eyes out of the next person who creates a company or a product which involves the letter ‘V’ prominently.

Yeah, it’s cool technology — not really new, the naysayers like to point out, and they’re right. And yeah, it’s green and easier to manage and saves cash. All good things, if you run an IT department. But I don’t.

I did, however, recently get a shiny new MacBook at work. I love my MacBook, because unlike its ancient Dell predecessor, it works. But a year and a half of my email is stuck in Outlook, so over the past few weeks I’ve been stuck on Entourage for my email client.

Unsurprisingly for a Mac-only product from Microsoft, Entourage is a piece of crap. It makes Outlook look good. It made me miss Outlook. It made me really,r eally miss Outlook-add-on Xobni, which is a work of pure genius; it makes Outlook useful and functional. (Will wonders never cease, etc.)

This is a surprisingly easy-to-fix problem, especially when your brain is full of virtualisation crap. So I’ve spent a bit of time today installing VMware’s Fusion 2, not only doesn’t involve the letter ‘V’ but is stupidly easy — it would need to be for me to make it work, seriously — and setting up XP and Outlook and now Xobni, with the help of Rich in IT (thanks Rich).

So now I’ve got Outlook docked in my… uh, dock. I click it, and it runs. Xobnified Outlook, on my Mac — so I guess sitting through all those virtualisation sessions was worth it?

And yeah, it’d be better if Entourage didn’t suck, or if I could sync my Outlook emails onto a better Mac client, but if Microsoft (and Apple) are going to be so difficult about things, I’m pretty alright with using software like Fusion and Xobni to make their products, y’know, work.