I’ve been working from home for the last couple of days. This is I can get away from the daily grind of meetings and phone calls so I can concentrate on getting some work done. The plan was to use my work laptop and connects to my company’s network via VPN over my wireless network. However, thing was never that simple when technology is concerned. Even though the Wi-Fi card works perfectly well before the laptop is upgraded from Win2k to WinXP, now it refuses to work. Not that it does not see the router, it does, but XP somehow does not see the connection at all. So, I was forced to work from my PowerBook instead! What a hard life 😀
It turned out that I can be pretty productive on my Mac too. I get company emails via the Outlook Web Access on the web browser, chat to my colleagues via MSN Messenger, and I can get access to the client’s test site over the internet. The only thing I miss is the VPN connection so I can use Entourage for email rather than web mail.
Lost in Colonisation 
If your company uses Exchange Server 2000 you might be interested to know that a software company called Snerdware has released two applications to integrate exchange support into Address Book and iCal http://www.snerdware.com/ since mail in Panther supports exchange anyway, all these together means no more need for Entourage, which lets face it isn’t all that good as an application and I for one welcome an excuse not to use it.
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This is assume that I can VPN into my company network in Panther, which I can’t.
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Of course, I didn’t mean to suggest that this was a solution to your problem only that if you wanted to use apple products Mail/iCal/Address book instead of Entourage with Exchange server then it is now possible to do so.
Panther does have a built in L2TP/IPSec based VPN client, but I assume that your company’s VPN software isn’t supported?
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My company’s VPN is IPSec but does not use RSA password or shared secret. Instead it uses a certificate that requires Cisco software to work. So unless I get the OS X version of the Cisco software, which I can’t as you need to be an net admin to log into the Cisco site, then I have no way of making the VPN handshake. Of course I can also ask my company to set my PowerBook up but their answer will be, “Why can’t you just use the PC laptop we gave you?”
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Ah, bummer. I sympathise, being the only Mac user in my comapny I often hit the same sort of wall. They use the Microsoft L2TP/IPSec VPN Client, which I couldn’t talk to with Jaguar but I’m hoping now that now in Panther I’ll be able to make it fly. I’m really looking forward to being able to get my email and access the company address book from within Mail remotely and on site so you’ll have to excuse my enthusiasm for Snerdware’s products, I’m really happy that a software company has noticed this hole and given us Mac users who use Exchange a viable alternative to Entourage which really should have had proper exchange support from the start.
Nice blog by the way, I often find your comments really useful and entertaining, and the new style under Typepad is top notch.
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