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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 article says:
"Apple built its support for Exchange using WebDAV..."
Untrue. The Exchange support for Snow Leopard was built using Exchange Web Services, just like the next version of Microsoft's client, Entourage.
Assuming you have a computer that's less than about 6 years old, I think what you're looking for is Windows XP Pro. It has the look and feel of Windows XP Pro, hasn't bluescreened on me anytime in recent history (and when it has, it's been due to crappy 3rd party drivers), and has the UI you're looking for. As an added bonus, you don't even need to use WINE to run windows apps - they run natively!
There is no single "Exchange Protocol." What you might be talking about is MAPI, the protocol Outlook uses to talk to Exchange (and the oldest protocol Exchange supports, I believe). MAPI is full documented on MSDN, and there are a number of open source implementations of MAPI (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAPI).
However, the Exchange support in Snow Leopard doesn't use MAPI, it uses Exchange Web Services, which is also open and documented on MSDN.
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.
If you consider IMAP to be a "security nightmare", I'm wondering why you allow anyone to access your exchange server at all.
If MS can't get IMAP to work securely, what makes you think they can do any better with any other protocol?
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