Exchange Interoperability - Solved?
With a trip to the US coming up, I needed to set up a way to access my work email from my OS X laptop. Last time I went I just used Mail.app to access the Exchange server via IMAP and it worked ok, but obviously had no calendaring ability. This time round I really need the calendar to work as well so I fired up Entourage.
Going through the set up was a bit tedious and I thought it pretty dodgy that it wanted the Outlook Web Access (OWA) URL - obviously it goes via that instead of the normal exchange protocols. As it turns out though, that's the way that the Exchange server hosting company recommends you access your email. In fact, the instructions for setting up Outlook on Windows include a series of complex maneuvers to get it to use OWA too. Indeed, Entourage seems just as capable a client as Outlook at least form early impressions. The only thing I miss is the SpamBayes integration and that's not really a feature of Outlook.
Playing with Linux today, I fired up Evolution and it too supports going through OWA. Within moments it was pulling down my work email too. In fact, Evolution had by far the simplest process to set it up.
In all, I think the Exchange-Windows lock-in days are well and truly over.
April 28th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Beware of connecting to owa via entourage. We tried branding our login screen with university logo and tidying up the html so it was css based and wasn’t nested tables etc. We left the login fields alone. However this still broke owa screen scrapers like entourage and evolution. I’m not sure if they will work if microsoft upgrades the owa login page in the next release/upgrade/patch.
April 28th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
I can’t comment on how reliable they are but as I mentioned, Outlook itself is connecting via Outlook Web Access with the exact same settings (just hidden under a million sub dialogs).