Welcome to Macs Practice Law Week, the Hump Day Edition! Today, we’re featuring a guest post from writer extraordinaire, Luigi Benetton, who has some … unusual things to say about a certain Redmond, WA-based group of folks for a Mac user on a Mac-centered blog event …

Lots of us switched to Mac to get away from “The Evil Empire.“ Don’t believe me? Try taking a casual stroll through any Mac discussion board without tripping over potshots at Microsoft, the computer company everybody loves to hate.

But here’s a vote in favor of Redmond’s most famous resident – from a Mac user no less. Someplace inside The Evil Empire sits an Enclave of Good, commonly known as the Microsoft Business Unit, that publishes one of the most brilliantly simple project management tools I’ve ever seen.

To understand where I’m coming from, check out productivity guru David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, or this Wired Magazine article about Allen. One pillar of Allen’s method is the ability to create orderly “buckets“ into which one dumps “stuff“ so that a person can work without that stuff weighing down his mind.

That’s why I rely on the ability to easily create calendar events, tasks and contacts directly from emails. But what Microsoft built into Entourage 2008 (and 2004) that it didn’t in Outlook 2007 is a decent – and easy-to-use – project management piece called Project Center.

Frankly, Project Center surprised me. See, I once used Office 2007, complete with Outlook, and I initially had high hopes for Business Contact Manager. As a freelance writer, all my work is project-based, and the hype around BCM had me believing.

It took me one day to abandon BCM. Why? The BCM database made me create new contact and task entries that were separate from the main Outlook database. What really got under my skin was not just that both are Microsoft products, but that BCM is an Outlook database – it sits in the same place as my mail, tasks and so forth.

Duplication of efforts and existing records? No thanks. Not seeing tasks in my calendar window? A pain. Inability to sync BCM stuff with my Palm using the sync software I already had? Annoying. All this made the product a non-starter. (A third-party Outlook 2007 book confirmed what I saw – that Outlook and BCM project teams don’t seem to talk much.)

Fast-forward to Entourage 2008 and a Project Center that I can pull up from any one of the programs in Office. If I create a task in a project, it shows up in my task views and beside the calendar. Contacts in Entourage associate easily with a project. All the components play together nicely. They share the same sandbox – no separate silos here.

There are other project and case management tools out there. MILO seems dominated by Daylite users. (I’d try it, but I haven’t made the time – too busy writing.) You can cobble something together using Mac apps like iCal, Mail and Address Book.

(The native Mac apps are nowhere near as good as Project Center for somebody who actually does work, though. Stevie Jobs could theoretically snap his fingers and voila! a native Mac project manager. But, as we all know, Stevie won’t. I can picture him holding a business marketing outfit in front of a mirror and asking “Does this make my ass look fat?“)

Entourage ain’t perfect. It isn’t as full-featured (bloated?) as its Windows cousin. And of course, the MacBU might want to break up the massive, unwieldy Entourage data file into small, distinct files for each email, calendar entry and the rest to make the information Time-Machine and Backup friendly. (Of all the “features“ to copy from Outlook… sigh.)

But for now, I have a simple, effective tool that comes with one of the most popular software suites of all time. Too bad Windows users don’t have anything this functional.

My opinion: Don’t hate it because it’s Microsoft.

Freelance technology writer Luigi Benetton writes for Lawyers Weekly and National Magazine about business and technology.