Microsoft likes Apple again

Microsoft have announced that they will once again release a product for the Mac that will support Exchange Server.

According to http://tech.yahoo.com/news/macworld/20090106/tc_macworld/expomicrosofttoenhanceentourageexchangesharepointonthemac (and probably other places too), they'll be releasing a version of Entourage that uses Exchange Web Services.

Who cares? Well, Macintosh users account for about 5% of the user base although probably less when it comes to those with access to an Exchange server. Nonetheless, the media industry loves Macs and Mac users don’t like Outlook 2001 for Mac which was clunky and only ran under OS9 / classic mode.

With this announcement, Microsoft are showing that they support the Mac platform and Administrators will no longer need to use Entourage as an IMAP4 client and have to pick up the GAL over LDAP which was a pain unless you had someone incredibly knowledgeable and talented to configure it called Matt.

To support it, you’ll need Exchange 2007 SP1 or later. Eric Wilfred, the General Manager of the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) announced this in conjunction with the Document Collaboration Companion which integrates the Mac into Sharepoint, Document Library and Office Live Workspace.

At the moment, a Mac user has a choice of Entourage as an IMAP4 client to Exchange or Outlook Web Access Light (due to the lack of ActiveX controls on the Mac browsers). Not only will this go away with the EWS enhanced version, but there’s a public Beta this month and a full release later this year and its FREE.