Ok Conor, I understand the pressures of getting your email sorted, so I can see why you have gone back to the Dark Side
At least you have a dual boot partition! It is intriguing, if I understand you right, that "They" are considering a move away from MS to Linux, I wish you all the best and let's hope they go for it. Some points worth bearing in mind for the transition (if they ever go that route) -
1) I have been using Star Office 6 for several months now and it works like a dream (although it is initially slow at starting up) and it can read and write Office douments - Word, Excel and Powerpoint without any problems. In fact when I update documents sent to me I do so via Star Office and then save them in Word format and nobody has noticed! So you have instant compatibility there.
2) KMail can import Outlook folders directly into the users mail box in the Linux session, so nobody loses any email - a big plus as people can be a bit precious about their email!
3) You already know this - Linux can share windows resources and vice versa.
4) Web access and email from Linux is a doddle - unless of course you are trying to connect via Exchange!!!
5) If you need to develop in house applications, both types of developer are catered for. You have all the standard Unix development tools (Perl, C, C++, etc) for the command line guys and you also have a very cool IDE for those of us used to working in a window environment - Kylix from Borland which has now matured nicely and is on version 3, which is Pascal (well Delphi really) on Linux.
6) Another no brainer - lots of stuff is free or nearly free!
Anyway back to your email problem. Let's have a recap. As I understand it:
1) you can email internal addresses but not external addresses
2) port settings are set fine
3) you can see the IMAP port
After another hunt on the web I came across this link:
https://secure.rvglug.org/pipermail/...er/001002.html
which suggests
"Consider having "outlook web access" installed on the exchange server. It
will let a linux client connect to a web version of outlook. Very nice." You may have already had this installed so the techies don't have a heart attack when you ask them to install something else!
Also part of the same thread:
"Exchange's default protocol is MAPI, which is really nice for network-based
Windows clients but not well-supported on other platforms (Outlook and
Eudora are the programs I've had success with). However, Exchange can also
be configured to allow POP3 access to the same mailboxes, with which any
client that speaks POP3 can be used. So if your Linux program allows you to
configure for two different POP3 servers, or two different
profiles/accounts/users, then you're in business as long as your admin can
enable POP3 access on the Exchange Server. (It's installed by default, but
not fully-enabled for non-MS clients without a little bit of tweaking.)"
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue58/tag/3.html also might have some suggestions.
Phew - I'll have another look later, I would love to sort this out! This reply is getting a bit long.
By the way what was your questions about shared resources?
Ed Jones