Entourage for Exchange Web Services Released

Today, Microsoft released an update to the Office 2008 suite that allows Entourage (the Exchange e-mail client) to connect to Exchange 2007 servers using Exchange Web Services instead of WebDAV. This update provides improvements in the calendar interface and allows Entourage to sync tasks, notes, and categories with Exchange server. While Entourage still lags terribly behind Outlook 2001 for Mac in terms of feature compatability with Exchange server, this update provides a much-awaited set of improvements for the Mac e-mail client.

Entourage 2008 Web Services edition requires Office 2008 with the 12.2.1 update installed. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not make the updates for Office for Mac cumulative, so if you install Office 2008 from the original media, you must first install Office 2008 SP1, then Office 2008 SP2, then the 12.2.1 Update before you will be able to install Entourage Web Services Edition. All of these downloads are available at the Mactopia download site, http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.

Detailed information about how Entourage Web Services works and tips for how to upgrade to Entourage Web Services can be found at the Microsoft Mac IT Pros site, http://www.microsoft.com/mac/itpros/default.mspx.