Entourage for Web Services released today

Today's a big day for MacBU! Today, we released Entourage for Web Services. EWS was in public beta earlier this year. Thanks to your help, we made plenty of improvements, and now you can get the final bits. Go forth and download!

For those of you who participated in the EWS beta, the best way for you to proceed is to uninstall EWS and Office 2008, and then reinstall. You were using early code, so reinstalling is the cleanest method to ensure that there are no problems. Then reinstall Office 2008, update to SP2, and finally install EWS.

EWS wasn't included in SP2 to avoid confusion for our users. EWS will not work with Exchange 2003 or earlier. Additionally, for users who aren't Exchange users, there aren't pressing reasons to use EWS. EWS was focused on changing our backend from using WebDAV to using Exchange Web Services, so there aren't changes if you're on a POP or IMAP account. If you're an Exchange user and weren't using the EWS beta, you should check with your IT guys to ensure which version of Exchange you're using. If you're using Exchange 2007 or later, EWS is for you. If you're using Exchange 2003 or earlier, Entourage 2008 is your tried and true friend.

There are some UX improvements that are in EWS (even though there weren't any UI changes), which I'll talk about in a future blog post. Today was a very big day (I still have to post about Outlook! :D ), so I'm not going to try to stuff everything into a single post. Stay tuned!