iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Apple’s implementation of MS Exchange 2007 clients in their current Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is far superior to Microsoft’s own attempt in the form of MS Entourage 2008. If you are an MicroSoft Exchange user and you’ve been considering upgrading to Apple OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard I encourage you to upgrade if the Apple interface and integration of these tools out-weigh the limitations outlined below.

Apple explains MS Exchange support on their web site. What follows is my experience.

I’ve installed OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on my work Mac Pro for a week now. It was the first victim as it has the ability to hold multiple drives, so I installed OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on a new RAID 0 array and left OS X 10.5 Leopard on the original drive — which only received Leopard six months ago. I’m writing this post as one my first tasks on my Snow Leopard-afied MacBook.

Exchange support is found in the Snow Leopard versions of:

• Apple Mail (Mail.app)
• iCal
• Address Book

When you create an MS Exchange account in one of these applications it will offer to create an account in the other applications.

Here’s a look at each application with an eye to helping pre-Snow Leopard Entourage users gain insight into if they want to make the jump or not.

Mail.app

Mail’s got the same great features, like sql-lite based search, that kept me from being able to switch to anything else for so long (until Thunderbird got the same quality of search…. but not Exchange.)

Exchange accounts are added via the same “Preferences” > “Accounts” and the + method that was previously associated with IMAP and (shudder…) POP accounts.
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