In a time frame of three of four months from now (fall 2009), I'll have to choose how to natively enable a handful of mac computers to access Exchange Server 2007 (email, contacts, calendar.)
As far as I know at the moment there is only one solution: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which includes the Exchange client Entourage (similar to Outlook for Windows.)
Apple announced that the next version of Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. "Snow Leopard", will have built-in support for Exchange 2007:
Microsoft Exchange Support
Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box
support for Microsoft Exchange 2007
built into Mail, Address Book, and
iCal. Mac OS X uses the Exchange Web
Services protocol to provide access to
Exchange Server 2007. Because Exchange
is supported on your Mac and iPhone,
you’ll be able to use them anywhere
with full access to your email,
contacts, and calendar.
Does somebody know if these new features could replace the Entourage client? Could there be there some limitations?
Thanks!
Answer
The Entourage team is about to release a version of Entourage 2008 that uses Exchange Web Services instead of WebDAV. (Check mactopia.com and you should be able to find the public preview version). EWS is much more performant than WebDAV or MAPI, and the fact that Apple said that Snow Leopard will support Exchange 2007 (see www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/) indicates very strongly that they won't be using MAPI.
Having said that: it's tough to build a fully-featured EWS client. Apple will ship "Exchange support", but what will they support? There are lots of Exchange features (folder access delegation, S/MIME, multiple account support) that Entourage has now that I don't expect Apple to bother with. For that reason, I'd lean towards Entourage, especially given that MS has a "try before you buy" version available for download now and Snow Leopard isn't shipping until some unspecified future date.
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