Doesn't Office X have an Exchange client? It's called Entourage, I think. In response to your bits about Linux software on OSX, the answer would be no. OSX is based upon Darwin which is more BSD than Linux, and BSD software won't even work on it... The biggest reason is because it's a PowerPC platform and not an Intel one... Try as they might, operating systems can't insulate applications from hardware architectures. It's why Intel-based Windows NT applications won't work on Alpha platforms running Windows NT.