Snow Leopard and its Exchange support

One of Snow Leopard’s biggest corporate appealing feature was its straight out of the box Exchange support. iCal, Address Book & Mail App all worked directly with Exchange 2007 server (sorry, Exchange 2003 only supported via IMAP). While it is not as fast as Outlook 2003/2007 on Windows, the ability to work directly from Mac apps has been a positive and powerful experience.

Until Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) came along, all versions of Mac OS X had limited or no Exchange support. The only option was to use Microsoft Office (2004 or 2008), each with limited usage due to weak sync-ability between Office and Mac OS X. As a Mac user in a Corporate Windows world, this was seriously limiting.

Address Book & iCal with Exchange configured (image courtesy of TUAW)

Prior to Snow Leopard, I had been maintaining multiple calendars in iCal – Work, Home, Personal, etc. With Snow Leopard, events management and organisation become much simpler.

Using Exchange-powered iCal, I can send meeting invites, accept meeting invites and check on availability of others to all my colleagues on their Windows platforms. So far, no-one has been able to tell the difference between a meeting invite from a Mac or Outlook – all good. Now in our office we use the shared Exchange calendar, meeting invites far far more frequently then ever - allowing everyone to be on the same wavelength quickly and easily. iCal has become even more powerful then before, allowing management of personal and work calendars from one system while keeping their content segregated in the back-end. Perfect.

With Exchange enabled Address Book, searching and finding people in our global company has become drastically easier. Few keywords and within seconds, complete personnel information is displayed. Prior to this, my best bet would be to launch a browser and log in to Outlook Web Access – a limited web interface. That or launch Parallels. Both of these options were time consuming and took many steps to process. Snow Leopard’s Address Book solves all this issues in one easy to use application.

On the corporate front, Snow Leopard is slowly and surely winning friends as it is the only OS in the market that comes with Exchange support right out of the box. As someone who has been directly (and positively) impacted by this upgrade, I highly recommend upgrading to Snow Leopard.

For more information on Exchange in Snow Leopard, please visit Apple – Exchange web site.