Snow Leopard with Exchange support not working

Hi jhrichmond
I have the Student and Teacher edition and it indicates Exchange support is not included when I try to set up an account.

I am having similar problems with iCal and exchange. I can connect to exchange fine though Mail and also view/modify my calendar. The problem I am having is looking at 'Other Calendars' which are those selected from a public folder. I assume this is a bug?

"... why can't i get push working?"

It doesn't work at all in Mail.app. No push services from Exchange. Stop trying to make it work. Resistance it futile 😉

I, too, love this conversation, especially when us poor knuckle-dragging Exchange admins (who are also all apparently experienced Mac users) show up and try to explain stuff and get flamed for the hard work. ONe Exchange admin must have spent hours typing his lengthy explanations, only to be told not to post any more.

Hi Chandy08

What does exchange support give you in addition to calendar, contacts and mail synchronisation? I have all of those with the student & teacher edition. Does it give you the ability to synchronise notes and tasks?

Hi Nextdoor
Thanks for your earlier post - that was very helpful

Given other users reporting their versions of student & teacher will not sync calendar and contacts with Exchange server 2003, could this be odwn to different editions or builds? What are you all running? Perhaps the later builds stopped a loophole that allowed exchange support when it should not have been there? I woudl obviously be buying the newest version/build

dtas wrote:
jhrichmond- One other suggestion before you run out and get Entourage. If you set up a google calendar/gmail account, you can sync up your imac (ical/address book) with Google very easily, and also from your work computer install Google's outlook/gcal sync tool which you can set the frequency interval to sync.
It's not the perfect solution. I too long for a reliable sync between my mac and Exchange, but hey Google's free in the meantime.

dtas - thanks for this. I can see how to sync my outlook calendar from outlook to my gmail account, and then to my iMac - looks great and I have done the first step already and then will sync with the iMac tonight at home

BUT I cannot see how to sync my outllok contacts with gmail. I downloaded something called google apps sync setup - but it wont load indicatig that I need to purchase a paid for google business account to get "dashboard" and the "enable apps" . I am missing a way of syncing Outlook contacts to my gmail account for free?

Thanks

I wanted to test SN's exchange functionality without disturbing my existing exchange configuration and entourage. I opened a new hosted exchange account with Godaddy and tried to connect using Snow Leopard's native apps. Mail would connect but not Ical or address book. I called both Apple and GoDaddy and neither one really helped me. The Godaddy rep gave me a link to this thread so I read it over and one post gave me an idea. I checked the internal server address in the mail app that autodiscovery had populated, and compared that to ICAL and Address book. there was one digit difference in Ical. once i made that change it connected. I'm still leary of this though due to all of the posts in the thread.

Hi nextdoor,

I am using entourage 2008 standard edition with webservices update currently to connect to NHS net exchange server(2007 sp2). which supports mail, contacts, calendar, notes and tasks.

I was previously using mail2web free version(exchange server 2003) with entourage 2008(without webservices update) which was supporting mails, contacts, calendar and tasks(i think).

I never used Entourage(office) 2008 student and teachers edition and I use office mac 2008 standard edition, but the features missing are exchange support were automator actions(as advertised by microsoft).

The information given by were based upon the microsoft mactopia website, not with my experience.
I do not know whether things have changed after service packs or web services update

Regards,

Hi jhrichmond

I've gone back to my disc - it's one of those sold by universities to their staff for use at home - it's a special licence which says on the disc "Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, End item part no. 731-01785" - it cost me $A25 (roughly £15). Prior to that I bought a student teacher edition for Office 2004 (when I didn't know about the discs available from the university bookshop) and I didn't use exchange then, I had set things up as pop because back then in order to use exchange I had to use VPN which didn't like turning on as it meant couldn't use dot mac and skype. So maybe the university student teacher editions are different, but it definitely says "Licensed for use only by students and faculty". Perhaps worth posting on the entourage forum (see below) to see if anyone else out there has with student teacher editions can synchronise?

Chandy08 is definitely right - according to microsoft student teacher has no exchange support - problem is I can't find an exact definition of what that means.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/shop-now.mspx?link_name=shop-no w

And there are conflicting reports in the Microsoft Entourage threads as well. Most people say it can't be done but there is someone called "Jon" who posted "Entourage looks great - I love the ability to sync contacts/calendars with the native apple stuff (which I vaguely remember Mac ** people saying was out of scope for this release last year or so.) Very pleasant surprise (and seems to be working right off the bat.)" - but it is not absolutely clear in his post that he's using the student teacher edition. Maybe the way my university has set up their exchange is the reason that it works for me?
http://www.officeformac.com/ms/ProductForums/Entourage/511

On another note the Google calendar & contacts does work and sync with ical well. I did try that and can't remember why I decided against continuing that - I think it had something to do with some confusion with trying to sync the exchange calendar with entourage, mobile me and google mail - there must have been some conflict at some point - but I think if you are doing just google and your ical should be fine.

Good luck!

Thanks Nextdoor
Given the uncertainty about Office08 student & teacher and exchange support, I think I might try to get the Google thing working then - as that will suffice for me if it works...

The trouble is I cannot seem to find how to do the contacts syncing. I have got the calendar syncing and it works - but it is the contact I most want to sync, and I cant see how to set that up in Google Mail. When you had it working did you take up a paid business google account to get google apps working?

Hi jhrichmond

First go to Address Book. Highlight all the names in your address book. Then go to File, Export and select Export VCard. Important that you have all names selected otherwise it will only export the 1 card or however many you have highlighted. You should then have a VCard file (ending with .vcf)

Then go to the Gmail page http://mail.google.com/mail/, on the menu on the left there should be "Contacts". At the Contacts page, on the top right, select "Import" and select your VCard file. I just did this now to check it and it definitely works.

As for synchronising the following page explains (1st article on page)
http://googlemac.blogspot.com/

Hope it works!

This discussion is probably going to set a record or something soon...

Being a non-techie and non-Exchange Admin types, I thought I would share my experience with Snow Leopard & Exchange:

Mail does connect to Exchange 2007... however, it is important to get the configuration settings right, and sorry to those who expected it be smooth & simple: it isn't so. In my case, my IT folks had recently migrated Exchange to 2007 (from 2003), so that was not an issue but I needed to connect to my VPN (using an RSA token) before I could access the EWS. Also, it was not immediately evident what the "Server" name should be... but a few tries got me there.

(Note: my N/W admin seems to have blocked Port 993, so I cannot use Gmail/MobileMe on the Mail app when I want to use Exchange 😟 I have to disconnect from the VPN to connect to personal mail)... Such is corporate life!

In fact, for those who were cribbing that accessing Exchange on the iPhone (or other similar smartphones) was easy and why doesn't Mail also use ActiveSync: thank God, it doesn't! Apparently our network admin thinks that ActiveSync is unnecessary (we have Blackberry Enterprise service) and a potential security loophole: so AS has been blocked in the migration from 2003 to 2007: so now my iPhone cannot access Exchange mail (I rarely used it anyways, so not an issue for me).

Earlier I used to access our Exchange Server (2003) through Entourage without needing to be on the VPN; now that is not possible. Because of the changed settings in the Exchange 2007 implementation at my company, I need to be on the VPN even to use Entourage. Btw, I like the Cisco VPN built-in access in 10.6 (it took me months to get hold of the Cisco VPN CLient for a Mac! Network admins don't really want to encourage this sort of by-passing corporate standards...)

So... like AAPL and other experts have been saying, don't crib about Apple or Microsoft or anyone else. Most of us who want to use a Mac to access corporate mail/networks are trying to get around IT Policies / Standards that our employers would have us use. Sometimes it will work; sometimes it won't. While I would ideally want my IT department to move to a Platform/OS agnostic setup, I know that it is just not possible. So anything that I can make work is great and fun while it lasts...

Cheers!

jhrichmond wrote:
The things I want synced across all three platforms, Address Book and iCal, are clearly not going to sync with Exchange 2003.

Well, in Leopard, Address Book WILL sync with Exchange 2003. Set it up in AB Prefs and then it will use iSync to actually do it. This worked for me until Exchange was updated to 2007 and it then stopped. This was the same for everyone, not just me, so we waited for Snow. However, due to the well publicised (here at any rate) problems, it can be tricky (impossible with MSEx. 2003) to set up and it may be the old method can still be used, but I doubt this can be done in Snow Leopard as the Exchange support is all different.

But do you really want to go back to Leopard?

In any case, there was never any support for syncing iCal.

Nextdoor - now I see. I thought you meant I could do a proper sync, like with calendar - not just a one way one off import. Now I understand that a sync of contacts is not possible

Hi jhrichmond

You can do a proper sync. Go to Address book - select Preferences, select Accounts and tick Google. You might even have been able to do the initial sync that way (I had simply given you instructions the way I had done it before with Leopard, but Snow Leopard lets you do that directly from Address book).