ICal falls short for enterprise use in an Exchange server environment

Question

(Cross posting from the "Using Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard" discussion).
I work at a very large software company on a team of people who all use Macs. We were thrilled to install Snow Leopard and begin using the new Exchange server features in Mail, Address Book and iCal. Sadly, though, some very rough edges on the iCal experience are making many people go back to running Entourage, or even Outlook in Parallels (ugh).
Specifically, iCal does not allow you to control how and when notifications are sent when you edit an existing event. As a meeting organizer, if you make a change, such as adding a new attendee to a meeting that includes 40 other attendees already, all 40 of those existing attendees get a notification, forcing them to re-evaluate the meeting in their inboxes.
There is no way to save a draft of a meeting invitation without sending it to the attendees. Often the chore of assembling the correct mix of attendees for a meeting takes significant time. If you are unable to complete the agenda or other planning aspects of the event in a single sitting, you must send the meeting as is, which is not a real option if your respect your colleagues time, because they will be receiving multiple updates to your meeting as you complete it.
Declining a meeting automatically notifies the meeting organizer without giving the invitee a choice. This also creates a lot of unnecessary "noise" in peoples inboxes. Sometimes it is desirable, but not always- the ability to control notification is a very sensitive issue in the context of meeting etiquette.
You cannot Reply, Reply All, or Forward a meeting calendar event from within iCal.
There is no support for rich text in the meeting calendar event's "Notes" field - the field in iCal that is used to represent the meeting invitation email's body text. This strips out meaning and complicates the workflow for attending a meeting.
Getting people to participate in collaborative work in large distributed organizations is a challenge as it is. We cannot afford to use tools that work against the goal. Apple, please hurry up and provide the rest of the features required to really USE an Exchange calendar client in an enterprise environment.

Answer 1

"He also wants to get his calendar appointments and address book (contacts), but he doesn't want to use Entourage"
You need to use GroupCal by Snerdware but we have found it not to be a really good product in our office. The address book has the ability to sync to exchange server many have indicated it doesn't work (Address Book/Preferences/General Tab/Sync with Exchange)
You could try Thunderbird mail product not used that but I doubt any of the Tasks, To-Dos and Calendar come over...now Entourage used to be horrible with this sync but now with 11.3.6 (or whatever it is now) our users see calendar events, to-dos and the LDAP directory
Though I am a Mac fan, still in a windows world you cannot be too choosy they should just use entourage for an outlook like product.
NOTE do NOT go to Exchange 2007 tons of IMAP problems our Mac users are unable to get mail (and yet our Windows Admin could care less)
good luck