Tag: Snow Leopard

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.

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## 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_.
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You will be prompted to enter some information about your Exchange account. Click _Continue_.
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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_.
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You may get a confirmation screen where you can add more information or correct inaccuracies. Click _Continue_.
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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.
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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_.
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Your Mac is now setup to use Exchange email via Mail, Exchange calendar via iCal, and Exchange contacts via Address Book.
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Using Mail, Address Book and iCal with Exchange 2007 and Active Directory

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Once I had setup the OS X 10.6 VPN and had a working connection to my employers' network I wanted to use the native OS X 10.6 applications to access my email and calendar. I have a copy of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 which includes Entourage. Entourage is Microsoft attempt at providing an Outlook type experience on the Mac. While it works it does not work well (the software is as slow as molasses) and the user experience is not up to par with what a Mac user might expect. I only had one copy of Office 2008 for Mac and I wanted to be able to check my corporate email from any Mac on which I had an account.

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Apple promised that Snow Leopard had native support to Exchange mail and calendar and I wanted to test their claims. Setup was much easier than I thought but you'll need to know the address of your Exchange server. You can get that from your Exchange server administrator. After connecting to the VPN, launch Mail and selected Mail->Preferences->Accounts. Click the + to create a new account and enter the email address and password for the account. Mail will attempt to scan for the mail server. If it does not find it, no problem - just select Exchange 2007 from the menu and enter the relevant information. At this point, I also selected the check boxes to set up iCal and Address Book. These can be done later but doing it now made things easy. Once this is done you should have an entry that looks like this.

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You do not have to use Mail to initiate the setup. You can also use any of the other apps, iCal or Address Book. I did encounter one issue that I have no been able to resolve. iCal is not able to connect to the Exchange server at all. I've Googled around and hung around Apple forums since Snow Leopard debuted looking for a solution to no avail.

Snow Leopard

original.pngOn August 26 Apple released the latest version of it's MacIntosh operating system, OS X 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard. Some have called it a service pack while other say it is a foundation for something bigger. Whether a service pack or future proof update, the sales figures have Wall Street buzzing causing Apple's share price to soar. Good for my IRA and good for my Mac. But what does Snow Leopard offer and what is in it for you? Read on.

No PowerPC allowed

The bad news is that Apple, in the interest of moving the platform into the future, has dropped support for the PowerPC. Snow Leopard will not install on a G4 or G5 Mac. Time for an upgrade?

Under the hood

The refinements in Snow Leopard can be broken down into two general areas with a small number of user interface (UI) improvements.

  • Technology
  • Exchange

Exchange 2007

Like most of corporate America, my employer uses Microsoft Exchange to provide enterprise email and calendar services. On Windows, I use the Outlook client to read email and manage my time. Outlook is part of Microsoft Office for Windows. The MacIntosh Business Unit of Microsoft does not provide Outlook for the Mac but instead provides Entourage; something that most agree is a poor substitute. In any case, to connect my Mac to the corporate email and calendar service, I had to purchase Microsoft Office for Mac.

Snow Leopard changes that requirement.  The Snow Leopard versions of Mail.app, iCal and AddressBook provide built-in support for Exchange Server 2007. Even though I was using the corporate VPN, setup was relatively easy using the Autodiscovery wizard that each application provides. Autodiscovery will use the information provided with your email address to find all the information needed to setup Exchange support. I completed the setup in Mail.app and iCal and AddressBook were setups automatically. Not everything worked for me though. For some reason, iCal won't sync with my Exchange calendar. Other than Exchange 2007 support nothing else appears to be (visually) difference about these apps except I can now manage my personal and business calendar from one app and view them all at once in a single window.

32bit/64bit

64bit_icon_20090824.jpgSome of the changes in Snow Leopard will only be exciting to computer scientist and software developers but will still yield tangible benefits to most users. Nearly all system applications — including the Finder, Mail, Safari, iCal, and iChat — are now built with 64-bit code to take full advantage of the multicore CPUs in the Intel processor. This configuration will boost overall performance because the Mac can now take advantage of more memory (16 terabytes) and process data twice as fast. However, not all Intel Macs are created equal. To run Snow Leopard in 64 bit mode, you'll need an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a 64 bit EFI. If you bought your Mac in late 2008 or sometime in 2009, you could take advantage of 64-bit computing with Snow Leopard. Right now most applications are still written for a 32-bit computing world, so this isn't such a big deal.

32 or 64 bit, there is still some processing improvement to be had in Snow Leopard even for those older Intel Macs. The Intel Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors are two processors on a single chip. Apple has developed a new Application Programming Interface (API) called Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). "Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors." To take full advantage of these processors software applications will need to be reprogrammed. Once software developers start programming their applications to use GCD, they will be able to boost that applications' performance on a dual-core Mac mini, an 8-core Mac Pro, or anything in between.

Apple has also developed OpenCL, a new API I to take advantage of the fast graphics CPU (GPU) in Intel Macs thus potentially making the MacIntosh user interface (UI) faster. "OpenCL in Snow Leopard is a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application." We may finally see the Mac become a computing platform that gamers will like.

090614_quicktimex.pngYou can see evidence of the new APIs, (GCD and OpenCL), at work in the new version of QuickTime; QuickTime X. QuickTime X is quite visually different it's predecessor. If less is more, then QuickTime X embodies that. I open a .mov file from my library, and I am presented with a spartan black box in the middle of my screen. Playback is smooth even on my 3-year-old MacBook (2GHz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM). One of the features I love, that was absent in the previous version, is that I can now record video straight from QuickTime. "QuickTime Player can now capture audio or video using the built-in camera and microphone in your Mac." I can now create high definition video-cast and how-to videos with QuickTime and post them directly to MobileMe or YouTube. Thanks to QuickTime I can now launch my movie career.

Is that all?

While there are a large number of other "refinements" in Snow Leopard the ones I talked about here are the most noticeable. Services, Exposé and Stacks has small but useful improvements, Time Machine is faster, and Preview has been enhanced. Is it worth it to upgrade? I think the three items I outline here justify the $29 cost of Snow Leopard. I no longer have to switch to Entourage to read my corporate mail and manage my work calendar. My three-year-old computer seems faster than it did before and I am starting a side career in video. If you don't have an Intel Mac, the question is moot. For all Intel Mac owners running Leopard or Tiger, get yourself a copy and install. If you have more than one Intel Mac (like I do) get the family pack for $49. It's a good deal.