If you happen to work in or have a company with several Mac clients and an Microsoft Exchange Server, you’ll invariably run into the problem that your Mac clients can’t really connect to your exchange server without using Office Entourage (terrible product) or the new Outlook 2011. On top of it, if you restrict Exchange exposure to the outside world to outlook web access, the latter approach will not work.
If you want to still have access to your calendars without resorting to the many solutions involving Google Calendar Sync, here’s what we found out:
- Mail.app: in order to access your emails, choose Exchange IMAP instead and uncheck the configure iCal option
- iCal.app: install DavMail from http://davmail.sourceforge.net/index.html. This component simulates a CalDav Server and connects to Outlook Web Access, thus acting as a gateway. You can run it on your client, provided you have a Java VM installed or on a JEE compatible Server.
IPhones and Androids work fine without these settings, as they use Microsoft ActiveSync.
