As everyone in the Mac universe learned after Thursday’s Microsoft MacBU conference call, Entourage is going away, Outlook is coming to the Mac, and everything will now be perfect for all users of Exchange on the Mac. Well, that last part is completely silly, but I’ve seen some reactions that make me think that people honestly think that Outlook on the Mac means Mac users are going to get a 100-percent feature-compatible version of Outlook.
No. You most certainly are not–nor, in fact, were you ever–going to get that. For one, Outlook on Windows still supports versions of Exchange Server going back to at least Exchange 2003 if not earlier. This is because in addition to using Web Services to connect to Exchange 2007 and the upcoming Exchange 2010, Outlook on Windows supports MAPI, or the Messaging API. MAPI support is certainly not the magic spell that all too many people in the Mac world think it is, but it does allow Outlook to connect to a wide range of Exchange versions. This is important as, contrary to what the Exchange team would like, you don’t just upgrade your Exchange version because a new one exists.
While there’s nothing in Thursday’s Microsoft announcement about specific protocol support in Outlook Mac, I would be highly surprised if it will support connecting to Exchange via MAPI. Given how even the Exchange team is deprecating MAPI starting with Exchange 2010, the idea that it would show up in what is essentially a new product to be released in late 2010 makes almost no sense. So it’s safe to assume that Outlook on the Mac will be a Web Services-only client. Not running Exchange 2007 or later? Outlook Mac will be just a big e-mail client that opens .ics files too. Maybe there will be some LDAP access, maybe not. (I’d like to think the Mac BU won’t dump LDAP as a separate protocol, but it’s not out of the question.)
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