[besson3c]

Good news,

Recent betas of Entourage 2004 work with multi-server Exchange environments now.

With the current (release) version of Entourage, LDAP to the GAL works, and of course IMAP connections work, but free/busy (calendering) only work with single-server Exchange environments.

This has been fixed. We now have the complete gamut of Exchange functionality.

Yes, we can an "official" beta which came directly from Microsoft.

[gorickey]

What build do you have?

[Oneota]

Originally posted by gorickey:
What build do you have?

7B85. And, yes, it IS the GM.

[gorickey]

Originally posted by Oneota:
7B85. And, yes, it IS the GM.

Only internally at Apple...

[OptimusG4]

I hope you have a more recent copy than what we were given at work. The preview of Entourage did not work at all with Exchange servers.

[sanity assassin]

Originally posted by Oneota:
7B85. And, yes, it IS the GM.

lmao, you sure it's reeeaally the GM?

[besson3c]

Scratch what I said about "later betas". The Preview version works fine here. It did take a long time to figure out *how*, but it does work. The only thing which doesn't seem to be working yet is Delegates.

The big difference is that Entourage 2004 is an OWA (Outlook Web Access) screen scraper. The IMAP server needs to be set as the OWA server. WebDAV needs to be enabled for calendaring, and of course LDAP needs to be enabled for GAL queries on Exchange 2000 or greater servers.

It *does* seem to work as advertised though, finally...

[Kristoff]

Why did they make it an OWA screen scraper?
Why not just use IMAP as in Entourage X?

[besson3c]

Originally posted by Kristoff:
Why did they make it an OWA screen scraper?
Why not just use IMAP as in Entourage X?

Because calendaring in Entourage X only works with a single server Exchange environment. I would imagine that most multi-server environments would have a single Exchange server which redirects IMAP requests to a specific DNS name to a specific Exchange node. I don't think such a server exists that would work with non-MAPI clients when it comes to calendaring, which was the shortcoming of Entourage X.

Functionally, there is no difference or way of telling that OWA is being used instead of IMAP, as far as I can tell.

[Kristoff]

Unless your organization doesn't use OWA

[OptimusG4]

Originally posted by Kristoff:
Unless your organization doesn't use OWA

And that is my problem.

[[APi]TheMan]

I have found that Entourage 2004 is much more pleasant to use under Panther than Entourage X. I haven't tested the whole suite, but I do think that Entourage has come a long way from the version X. In our campus' Exchange environment it's a pain in the rear to configure Entourage (most of our faculty still use Outlook 2001 in Classic), but this latest version configures itself very well; free/busy and directory servers finally get auto-discovered when configuring new Exchange accounts.

This latest release feels less like a dirty port and more like a nice OS X application. One of my gripes about Entourage X was that it was, interface-wise, slow. The interface seemed unnatural, yet the new version is surprisingly slick and easy to use. I think that, for the most part, Entourage 2004 is a step forward.

[Diggory Laycock]

Maury from RAILhead seems not to be having the joy that you've got with Exchange:

http://www.railheaddesign.com/

[MadBrowser]

Are all of these comments based on the 'Preview Release' build floating around that looks to be from sometime in February?

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by MadBrowser:
Are all of these comments based on the 'Preview Release' build floating around that looks to be from sometime in February?

Yep, I'm using the "Office 2004 Preview." I'm not sure when it's from.