Say hello to Exchange Web Services; The future of Entourage!

I’m excited to tell you about the future for Entourage connectivity to Exchange Server! We’ve transitioned away from WebDAV, and today we are announcing the public beta of the Entourage for Exchange Web Services client. With this new client, not only are we taking advantage of the Exchange Web Services connectivity, but we are also delivering some new user features such as:

• Tasks, Notes, and Categories now sync with the Exchange Server
• Resolving names against the Global Address List now works via EWS/HTTP. This means you no longer need to be connected to your corporate network via VPN to resolve names when addressing an e-mail or meeting invitation
• Improved Autodiscover. In Entourage for Exchange Web Services Beta, the Autodiscover service keeps user account settings up-to-date after the account setup.
  • It runs in the background every time that you start Entourage.
  • It also runs at a server-defined interval, typically every hour, to make sure that the Exchange Server settings are always kept up-to-date

Since Entourage began connecting to Exchange Server over 5 years ago, we have used the WebDAV protocol to connect to mailbox data. What you may or may not know is that with this implementation, the bulk of the work being done resides with the Entourage client. Obviously, we’d rather let Exchange Server do what it does best and shoulder more of the load. Well, when the Exchange Server team began working on Exchange Server 2007, they developed a new piece of technology called the “Business Logic Layer” that does just this; A server-side component that allows different clients to connect to the Exchange Server in a consistent way, letting the server to do the bulk of the workload.

From the beginning, the Exchange Server team  partnered with the MacBU to develop a way for Entourage to utilize the Business Logic Layer.  Over the last couple of years, our Entourage team has been working closely with the Exchange Server team to develop “Exchange Web Services” which is an Application Programming Interface (API) that developers can use to communicate with Exchange Server 2007.  This allows end-user clients, such as Entourage, to interact with Exchange mailboxes in a compatible way with other clients such as Outlook Web Access.  In fact, Exchange Web Services clients, Outlook Web Access, and Active Sync (how your iPhone or Windows Mobile device syncs with Exchange Server over the air) all use the same Business Logic Layer for accessing mailbox data.

While the Exchange Web Services component was being developed, our Entourage team was busy rebuilding the core of the Entourage client to utilize the Exchange Web Services. In fact, they were able to get a couple of features into the current Entourage 2008 for Mac release. If you are currently connecting your Entourage 2008 for Mac client to an Exchange Server 2007, the “Out of Office Assistant” and “Delegation” features are utilizing Exchange Web Services.

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