Of the many bits of information that came out of Apples World Wide Developers Conference this week, one that really caught my attention was Snow Leopards native support for Exchange.
Within one of the sessions Apple spoke about how the out-the-box Mail app will support connectivity to Exchange for email (including folders) and tasks, with iCal supporting Exchange calendars and AddressBook integrating with Exchange Contacts.
Providing it works as advertised that’s really good news, if a little surprising. It’ll be good to see it in action, assuming it supports the exchange auto-discovery tools it should be a very easy setup.
With the Snow Leopard supporting Exchange, Microsoft Messenger for Mac providing great access to OCS’s capabilities and SharePoint 2010 about to offer better support for non-IE browsers, Mac’s should offer a pretty good business platform for companies that use Microsoft infrastructure. It will also be interesting to see how well Snow Leopard works with Microsoft’s hosted BPOS services that offer MS’s business platforms from the Cloud.
Although I’m not really a Mac user I’m quite looking forward to trying this stuff out. Anything that builds interoperability and people more options has to be a good thing. It should certainly help the Apple case for making Mac’s acceptable as a business computer.
You reckon it’ll support Exchange 2003 too? They mention 2007, but is that only because it has Auto-discovery and is the current version?
Hi Mike, how’s it going?
Not sure to be honest… In the info I’ve seen if mostly refers to 2007. I believe Apple are using Exchange Web Services to connect, so possibly not :(