How to setup Mail, Contacts and Calendar on OS X Lion to use an Exchange 2007 account
With each iteration of the OS since Leopard, Apple has made it easier to integrate Exchange Messaging Services with OS X native productivity applications — Mail, iCal and Address Book. Apple’s latest Mac operating system, OS X 10.7 Lion, has been out for some time and Apple has made significant changes to some of the native apps including Mail and iCal that make setup and use of Google services even easier. Last year I wrote about how to do this under Snow Leopard. Let me show you how to do this under Lion.
System Preferences
The simplest method to setting up Exchange Messaging services on OS X 10.7 is via the System Preferences. OS X Lion System Preferences has a new option called Mail, Contacts & Calendars under the Internet & Wireless section. Select it.
Mail, Contacts & Calendar
This section reminds me a bit of the Mail preferences pane in iOS. From here we can set up various email and calendaring services from Yahoo, AOL and others. To setup a particular service, click the Add Account… button and select the icon for the service. In this case, we are setting up Exchange so select Microsoft Exchange.
You will be prompted to enter some information about your Exchange account. Click Continue.
After entering your account information it will take a few seconds for OS X to connect to the Exchange server and discover any exposed services. Click Continue.
You may get a confirmation screen where you can add more information or correct inaccuracies. Click Continue.
If all goes well, you will be prompted with the following screen. If everything looks good, click Continue or click Go Back to make changes.
You will then get one more confirmation screen where you can disable any Exchange service you do not want to sync to your Mac. Once you have enabled the services you want click Add Account.
Your Mac is now setup to use Exchange email via Mail, Exchange calendar via iCal, and Exchange contacts via Address Book.
