Exchange 2007 for Mac OS X at NUS

When Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was launched last year, one of the things that caught my attention was its support for Exchange 2007. It would have meant better integration for Mac users with a corporate Microsoft Exchange-based calendar and directory service. But alas, when I finally got Snow Leopard installed and tried to get my Mail.app setup, I realized the nitty gritty details. It’s Exchange 2007, not any Exchange, and it turns out that the Microsoft Exchange I have at work isn’t 2007.

Oh well. So it was back to the old way of configuring Mail.app, using IMAP to access the Exchange server. It works well enough to read emails, of course, and that’s the most important thing. Just no calendar and no directory. It would really have been nice to be in “sync” with the corporate dictated collaboration platform.

But wait… it seems we now do have Exchange 2007! A comment posted on my Mac@NUS page pointed out that the configuration has changed. I checked it out, and yippee, we now really do have directory and calendar integration. So now I can be aligned to the corporate direction to adopt Microsoft technology for email, calendaring and directory. It’s not that I like Exchange very much, but at least I’m now not incompatible with the rest of the organization.