Mac and Exchange Server 2007: Entourage or wait for Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)?

The Entourage team is about to release a version of Entourage 2008 that uses Exchange Web Services instead of WebDAV. (Check mactopia.com and you should be able to find the public preview version). EWS is much more performant than WebDAV or MAPI, and the fact that Apple said that Snow Leopard will support Exchange 2007 (see www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/) indicates very strongly that they won't be using MAPI.

Having said that: it's tough to build a fully-featured EWS client. Apple will ship "Exchange support", but what will they support? There are lots of Exchange features (folder access delegation, S/MIME, multiple account support) that Entourage has now that I don't expect Apple to bother with. For that reason, I'd lean towards Entourage, especially given that MS has a "try before you buy" version available for download now and Snow Leopard isn't shipping until some unspecified future date.

If you want full contact and calendar support at the moment, your only choice is entourage, or to use Outlook Web Access. You can use the native Mac mail client to collect mail from the Exchange server (POP or IMAP), but that's about it.

As far as Snow Leopard support goes, from what I have seen this should bring in the functionality of calendaring, contacts but bear in mind that these will be delivered through separate applications, mail, iCal and contacts, so if you want them all in a single application space you will most likely still need Entourage.

The other option of course is to run Outlook via Fusion or Parallels.