I’ve been trying for a while to get Mail.app to talk to my work Exchange server. After talking with the IT guys, it seems it’s not possible. I reckon the server has IMAP switched off. Apple have got to implement MAPI support. And we need syncing between Exchange and iCal and Address Book.

In the meantime, I tried using Entourage. It worked first time, out of the box. Great, so now I don’t have to use Outlook Web Access anymore. But Entourage is clunky and unpleasant. And I still want my Palm, my phone, my iPod and dot mac to share the same information.

Fortunately, there are solutions out there. Snerdware offer this functionality – to integrate Exchange info with Apple’s iCal and Address Book – with Groupcal and AddressX. But this is expensive and didn’t work for me. An alternative tack has been attempted by e2sycn and PocketMac GoBetween which work as plugins to iSync, treating Entourage as an additional device – allowing full syncing between Entourage and iSync (iCal, address book, dot mac and all your other devices). Having read around, the former appears more reliable, but after trying it for a week, I’ve had several problems with recurring events propogating themselves into different calendars, calendars multiplying and all sorts (which may be due to the bugginess of SyncServices rather than e2sync). But it’s settled down now, and it’s such a useful utitlity that I will probably buy it (despite the problems) when the 10 day trial runs out.

It will have to do until Apple build in full Exchange support into Mail, and iCal and Address Book.