Snow Leopard with Exchange support not working

I am your father...

http://www.exchangeninjas.com/AvailabilityServiceFAQ

LOL. I ran across that about the same time you posted. Clear as mud to me! I might as well run to Toshi Station to pick up some power convertors...

Are you the EXCH admin, or do you have someone else?

Ha! I am the admin, because there is nobody else. Pretty scary, huh? I am able to read directions for the most part, and feel my way through stuff. 🙂 This one gets beyond me!

OK, let me offer this up.
I will talk to my admin early early next week.
I will ask if she has a Cliff's Notes version for me to offer up.
I know Active Sync is a snap, but this might take more effort.

A A P L, very much appreciated. I will keep dinking around to see what I can dig up. I will post here if I find anything.

Yeah, ActiveSync was actually pretty easy. I am in the same boat as others with the easy iPhone setup (mine worked with no problem). Let's not open up that discussion again!

Thanks, buddy. This is exactly why I post here!

Best Wishes!

I DO know this much, we still have EWS enabled, but they made changes that stopped us from using it without a LAN or VPN connection.
So, it's not just an on/off deal.

That's interesting... I guess it's not just a black and white issue. But then again, I am just a Padawan learner.

Count me as among the disappointed. My company does not have IMAP enabled for the Exchange server, so I understand (now) that Mail.app won't work.

What is beyond frustrating is that Entourage works fine just be entering my OWA address, company user name, and password. No VPN needed.

Heck, my lowly Sprint LG Rumor 2 mobile phone can sync with my work emails, contacts, and calendar via it's email client and yet Mail.app cannot because it can't connect through OWA without using IMAP? Is there a reason this functionality is not present in Mail.app and that I am still going to have to use Entourage for my work email? If a stupid dumphone (is that redundant?) can do it, I see no reason why mail.app cannot.

And in my mind, this is an issue with Apple...not an issue with my company's nearly non-existent IT dept or with MS.

Bottom line, Entourage can do it and my stupid phone can do it. Mail.app cannot.

I am an Exchange administrator and have been for about 10 years for company with over 1000 users. I'm in the same boat as most of you. I run a Mac Pro for my main technical workstation and upgraded to SL. Thinking I could connect mail to the server like I could with the iphone. We still use 2003 because we honestly do not have a need at this point to go to 2007. Let me tell you though, I was just about to roll one out for myself and move my mailbox so I could use mail with 2007. lol I can tell you I worked on trying many configs in the settings in mail to get it to connect and had no luck with 2003. There's also not a lot of configuration options to set. I believe the reason is because it's looking for the exchange server to have the EWS service. There's several ways to connect to an exchange server and I think a lot of people are frustrated because the don't understand the behind the scenes method of how you can connect and why the mail app doesn't work if EWS is not enabled on a 2007 server. The iphone works because it uses Active Sync service. It basically uses your Outlook Web Access credentials, logs into the webmail and retrieves the messages. EWS is not the same as active sync. Apple probably should have used activesync instead of EWS. It would have given more users the ability to connect the mail application. However, starting with 2007 Microsoft starting using EWS so developers could interact with the server in a more native way. Just because exchange 2007 is on your network doesn't mean that EWS is turned on. If it hasn't been needed in the organization it's mostly likely disabled to save overhead or security reasons. So if you have Exchange 2007 and mail isn't connecting, you either have settings not completely right (it's really tricky trying to figure out what exact settings it wants) or EWS is not enabled. A common problem might be the username...try username, username@domain.ext, domain\username. Hopefully your IT departments will work with you. I hate hearing how people like to avoid IT because they are afraid of them. It's also unfortunate that some IT departments are *****. you can always go with a hosted exchange company like intermedia who does this professionally and offers pretty good support. you could forward you email to that.

Hi htech sean,

This is really a solid post. Thanks for your insight. I think most people here would love their Macs to just seamlessly integrate in their Windows work environments. Unfortunately, it's not usually just as easy as saying "Exchange Support Right Out Of The Box", although Apple did say that! 🙂

From your experience and expertise, can you offer any suggestions to those of us whom are in the dark as to how to enable EWS on Exchange 2007?

Jonathan,

If it's configured on the back-end properly, it IS that easy.
That's the point.
It IS and it works.
I don't know how many other ways to say this.

Indeed. I wouldn't dispute that at all. And I don't find fault with Apple on this at all. Nor do I find fault with Microsoft. It is what it is. My only comment would be that having something "correctly configured" is a bit of a moving target, obviously based on what you are trying to do. For what I knew, I had our Exchange "correctly configured", because it did what we needed it to do. Based on new feature requests (Snow Leopard/Exchange integration), we do not. That's my only point...

My company uses one hostname for Outlook and Exchange access within the firewall (and via VPN) and another hostname for ActiveSync for use by BlackBerries and iPhones outside the firewall. Has anyone been successful in using their iPhone configuration with the new Mail.app? I'd be surprised if they have.

Mike

Can someone please explain what is it that Entourage 2008 "WEB SERVICES EDITION" has that Snow Leopard Mail.app doesn't?

Our EXCHANGE 2007 server DOES have EWS enabled and meets the minimum requirements (SP1 Rollup 4). There have been numerous posts trying to explain what needs to be configured on the Exchange Server, I get that already. What I don't understand is why is it Entourage can connect to our server, even under plain old Leopard, and Snow Leopard Mail.app 'out of the box' exchange support cannot.

Because of this I'm not convinced it is simply a matter of server settings.