Having used both OS X and Windows over the years the one huge drawback on the Mac for me has been lack of a decent way to access my Exchange calendar and contacts. Recently, with Snow Leopard and Exchange IMAP this has gotten somewhat better, but not much to be honest. At the organization I work for Exchange is set up in such a way that try as I might I can’t get iCal to connect, and even if I could, I prefer the Lightning plug-in for Thunderbird which I find to be a superior mail client to the OS X Mail.app (primarily for formatting reasons which I won’t go into here.)
I downloaded Lightning and the Provider for Exchange extensions but to be honest couldn’t get it to work at all – much the same issues as iCal. If I had access to our IT department I’m sure we could’ve made it work but that’s a non-starter. Even more frustrating is that my iPod Touch has no issues (due to the Exchange synch functionality Apple licensed for that platform) and I was almost resigned to having to do all my calendaring through our Outlook Web Access.
Then along came DavMail. Oh how I love thee. From the DavMail site:
“The main goal of DavMail is to provide standard compliant protocols in front of proprietary Exchange. This means LDAP for globale address book, SMTP to send messages, IMAP to browse messages on the server in any folder, POP to retrieve inbox messages only, Caldav for calendar support and Carddav for personal contacts sync. Thus any standard compliant client can be used with Microsoft Exchange.”
And it works. Although it’s a bit roundabout to set up, using DavMail you can access Mail, Address Books, Calendar and other Exchange data without having to configure each client. Simply configure DavMail to access OWA and then point your clients to a localhost or DavMail location and Bingo! I have Thunderbird (IMAP), Lighting (DavMail) and OS X Address Book (DavMail) all easily accessing and synching with my Exchange account. Mail.app and iCal would work just as well.
This is the simple kind of solution that I have been waiting for and I was happy to donate to the project. If you’re primarily an OS X user and you’re IT department ignores you, check it out.
