Entourage for Exchange Web Services to take on Snow Leopard

During yesterday's WWDC, Apple spent some time showcasing the new Exchange capabilities of Snow Leopard.  It got a lot of ooohhhs and ahhs because it has, out of the box, free of charge, most everything Mac users will need to connect to their company's Exchange 2007 Server.

Ironically, it seems to have more functionality than Microsoft's own Entourage 2008 product. (Entourage is the Mac "equivalent" of Outlook)

Unfortunately, Entourage has never had all the functionality of Outlook on the PC.  Things like notes and tasks server synching have never worked on Entourage.   In fact, its second-class nature has been one of the factors keeping the Macintosh a second-class corporate citizen throughout the years.  

Strangely,  the day after Apple demoed Snow Leopard's revolutionary Exchange support,  Microsoft is advertising a new Entourage project called Exchange Web Services.

Microsoft lists the following improvements over traditional Entourage Exchange support:

• Enhanced Autodiscover service to keep user account settings up to date after the account setup.
• Synchronization between Exchange Server and Entourage 2008 Notes, Tasks, and Categories.
• Addition of an Enable Logging (troubleshooting) preference, to log all events that can be used as diagnostic information.
• Use of attachments in Entourage for Exchange calendar events.

If these features sound familiar, that's because Apple showcased three of these four bullet points during yesterday's show. The only feature that Apple didn't mention was the logging support.

Exchange administrators with Mac clients have been asking Microsoft for years for the same features that Outlook for PC has enjoyed. Until Apple built these features into Snow Leopard, they fell on deaf ears at Microsoft.

However,  now that there is some competition for Exchange clients,  perhaps the Mac can become a first-class citizen on the corporate network.