“Recent reports list Microsoft Exchange market share as high as 65 percent. That’s a lot of organizations tapping Exchange for critical messaging, calendaring, and contacts functionality, and it’s why Apple’s superior client-side applications should be such big news,” Eckel reports. “The simplicity, usability, and reliability of Mac Mail 4, iCal 4, and Address Book 5, combined with newfound Exchange compatibility, make a compelling partnership.”
“Using Snow Leopard, accessing and synchronizing a user’s email, tasks, calendar items, and contacts have never been easier,” Eckel reports. “Mac OS X 10.6 makes the formerly challenging process, which sometimes stressed even the most veteran of Windows administrators, simple. Some of the credit goes to Microsoft. The Exchange Web Services (EWS) protocol serves as the critical link in enabling secure synchronization between Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 systems and Snow Leopard-powered Macs.”
Maximize Snow Leopard/Exchange deployments by keeping these three tips in mind:
1. EWS is the key
2. iCal and Address Book synchronization is automatic
3. Tasks live within Mac Mail and iCal
Full article here.
Those are tips?
Wow.
It’s smart at this stage for Apple to stay out of the messaging cloud battle between Google and Microsoft by remaining compatible both with Exchange and CalDAV.
The main issue for organizations is the lack of “Public Folder” support among iCal, Mail, etc. These programs and added Tasks work just great but shared “public folders” which we use to manage room reservations and planning among several staff members is missing. We still use Entourage since it does offer Public Folders. Sadly, MS even removed those from web access when one moved from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.
I tried and our IT people tried but could never get my quad-core tower using snow leopard to access the exchange server at work. I can do it via Entourage in Office 2008 but not using Mail.
I gave up….and stayed with MS. Too bad!
Buster,
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You sure they were really trying?