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A Different Perspective On Snow Leopard's Exchange Support
imamac writes "Apple Insider has an interesting perspective on the MS Exchange support built into Mac OS X 10.6 and how it essentially frees Apple from all things Microsoft: 'Windows Enthusiasts like to spin Apple's support for Exchange on the iPhone and in Snow Leopard as endorsement of Microsoft in the server space. From another angle, Apple is reducing its dependence upon Microsoft's client software, weakening Microsoft's ability to hold back and dumb down its Mac offerings at Apple's expense. More importantly, Apple is providing its users with additional options that benefit both Mac users and the open source community.'"
The "dumbed down" stuff they are talking, at least in my direct experience, is the lack of full functionality. Almost nothing was ever implemented completely or wholly in the Mac version of MS Office. And Entourage's exchange support is abysmal. Once again, not all of Exchange's features and functions are well supported and certain parts are simply omitted from support entirely. And the connection/communication is sometimes mysteriously broken as well.
Now comparing a Windows Mobile Phone and an iPhone connecting to an Exchange server, which one do you think "wins"? If you guessed "Windows Mobile of course!" you would be horribly mistaken. As far as mobile devices are concerned, iPhone beats the all hands down. And if Apple's native/local support of Exchange server is at least as good as that found on iPhone, then I would say it is probably quite powerful and feature complete.
(There! Go back and look at all my "Apple Bashing" posts and try to call me a "hater" now! In all cases, I call'm like I see'm and nothing more or less.)
They are implementing this via a custom conduit that uses WEBDAV. It's not clear if this requires anything installed on the server side, if so then its a non-starter for most folks. For Apple PC's you're probably better off simply using the webmail interface anyway. This does provide a means for mobile sysems such as phones or laptops to actually download the messages.
Snow Leopard's Exchange support works very well for connecting to my department's servers, and they're about as anti-Apple as you can get. They absolutely refuse to even make the smallest config changes to allow non-Outlook clients to connect (ie. Entourage) and I can connect flawlessly (AFAIK...). I have mail support, calendar support (with functioning invited events), tasks/todo support, contacts and access to the global address books, all through Apple's standard applications. They may be implementing this through a WebDAV backed conduit, but as far as functionality goes, this is the real deal.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
What SMB problems? My MBP connects just fine to all te shared drives around, and when I connect to a new network, it shows all the available shares very quickly.
Compare that to a XP install that repeatedly tells me that "I don't have the necessary permissions" to view the public, no password share.
It's been mentioned elsewhere (but not here as far as I can tell) that this development is particularly notable, given that Windows doesn't support Exchange out of the box. You need Office for that.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose