Entourage for Exchange Web Services Beta is Live

I am excited to announce that we went live with our Entourage for Exchange Web Services beta today. For those of you who may be new to the Exchange Web Services feature, this is new technology that we partnered with the Exchange Server team on to allow clients like Entourage to connect to the Business Logic Layer (released with Exchange Server 2007) in a consistent way with other clients such as Outlook Web Access and ActiveSync (e.g. Windows Mobile or iPhone). This technology has allowed us to move Entourage completely off WebDAV, going forward, as our means for connecting to Exchange Server. This means that Entourage no longer shoulders the bulk of the workload when interacting with mailbox data.

 

We’ve decided to open this up to customers who meet the following minimum requirements:

 

· You must be connecting to Exchange Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 with Update Rollup 4 or later. (Caution: If you are using earlier versions of Exchange Server with Entourage, we recommend that you do not install this beta edition of Entourage for Exchange Web Services.)

· Office 2008 for Mac Standard or Special Media Edition must be installed, with all of the latest updates, prior to installing Entourage for Exchange Web Services Beta. Note: Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition users should not install the Entourage for Exchange Web Services beta.

· Processor: Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (500 MHz or faster) processor.

· Memory: 512 MB of RAM or more.

· Operating system: Mac OS X v10.4.9 or a later version.

· Hard disk: 1.5 GB of available hard disk space; Hierarchical File System (HFS)+ hard disk format (also known as Mac OS Extended or HFS Plus)

 

A couple of important notes:

· This beta is English only

· We are using Connect for this beta, so customers will need a LiveID

· We also have a mandatory survey that asks qualifying questions to ensure that they meet the minimum requirements of Exchange Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 with Update Rollup 4 or later along with Office 2008 for Mac Standard or Special Media Edition must be installed, with all of the latest updates

· Once the customer completes and submits the survey, they will get a response within 24-48 hours. If the customer is not accepted into the beta, it is because their Entourage 2008 for Mac client and/or Exchange Server environment did not meet the minimum technical requirements to support Entourage for Exchange Web Services to connect appropriately to their Exchange Server as per their answers to the survey.

 

For more information, please review the following links:

 

Mactopia Blog - https://www.officeformac.com/blog/Entourage-for-Exchange-Web-Services-Beta-is-Live

 

Entourage for Exchange Web Services Page - https://www.microsoft.com/mac/itpros/entourage-ews.mspx