Mac Office Set for Exchange 2010

A new edition of Entourage 2008 for Mac will work with Exchange Server 2010 and deliver other new features, and a subsequent Mac e-mail client from Microsoft will improve integration with OS X and Windows Server. Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition will help organizations support Mac users on the latest Exchange versions and foreshadows more focus on the corporate market by Microsoft’s Mac unit. However, compatibility issues will complicate migration of Mac users to Exchange 2010.

New Protocol, Better Task Management

Entourage is an e-mail client and organizer that ships in Office 2008 for Mac and plays a role similar to Outlook in the Windows Office suite. The existing Entourage edition performs most Exchange operations using Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning, or WebDAV, a data access protocol that was introduced in Exchange 2000 but removed from Exchange 2010, which is expected to ship in late 2009. The new Entourage Web Services Edition, in contrast, communicates with Exchange via the server’s Web Services APIs, introduced with Exchange 2007 and enhanced in Exchange 2010. As a result, the new Entourage will be able to work with Exchange 2010, and probably with the next version of the Microsoft-hosted Exchange Online, which does not support Entourage today.