Making Google GAL visible to 3rd party apps?

[Menko Johnson]

We just migrated from onsite Exchange to Google Apps for our organization.  One challenge we're running into is making the GAL visible to apps like Apple Mail, Contacts, and any non-native Gmail apps.  

I'm wondering how other people handle this--we have a large number of users who use a mail app instead of the web to save mail offline.  So I want to enable the autofill of our users and groups to those people not opting for the web based Gmail.  With Windows and Exchange we can use the GWSMO but on the Mac I can't connect to an LDAP GAL with Contacts.  

My thought was to use GAM to create a GAL as local contacts for our users, but wanted to see how others are handling this.  I've seen paid services like Patronum to do this, but figured theere must be a simpler way with GAM to do this as a daily sync/update.

Thanks in advance.