Howto: Entourage 2008 for Exchange 2007 Configuration

With all of the Macs being deployed in companies all over the world there are a lot of admins scratching their head on how to integrate Macs into a Windows world. The most common request these admins will get is, “Can you configure my Mac to get my Exchange 2007 email?”. The simple answer is, Yes. Regardless of whether or not you have configured, your Macs to authenticate against your Active Directory (which you should), you can configure Entourage to sync with your Exchange 2007 Server, to allow all of your Mac users to take advantage of your existing Exchange infrastructure. Use the howto below to configure your Entourage clients.

1. Give the account setup a useful name.

2. Enter the name and email address of the User for which you are configuring Entourage.

3. Enter of username of the user, enter the FQDN of the Active Directory domain name, and the password for the user.

4. Enter the public URL of your Outlook Web Access server. If you are using SSL to secure your OWA server as you should be make sure you specify that.

5. Enter the public URL of your Outlook Web Access server, with “/public” on the end. If you are using SSL to secure your OWA server as you should be make sure you specify that. This will allow your users to access your Public Folders.

6. Enter the internal FQDN of a domain controller in your Active Directory domain. This will be used to look up users from the Global Address Book.

7. Enter the Search Base for your Active Directory domain. This usually is just the internal DNS name for your NetBIOS domain name broken out into LDAP-centric format as displayed in the example.

These instructions will allow your Mac users to make full use of your Exchange Server. The one important note, is that your LDAP settings will be inaccessible outside of your LAN, as I do not recommend opening up port 389 on your firewal to allow LDAP traffic outside your LAN. This may prevent your Macs from making Global Address Book lookups when not connected to your LAN. What you may consider instead is setting up a VPN connection on the Mac to allow this to function fully.

The top 10 most Innovative companies in tech

This month’s Fast Company magazine has a listing of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies”. While it is a great article, it has some traditional “low-tech” companies such as Wal-mart mixed in with the tech companies. I recognize that some of these companies are doing some very innovative things, many don’t have technology that is useful in our daily lives today. So I have created my own list of the 10 most innovative companies in my opinion, with products and services that you should be using today.

1- Amazon.com – Through the deployment and monetization of their Services they have singlehandedly popularized the cloud-computing industry.

2- Google — Big Surprise here. Google is designing products/services that are giving Microsoft a run for their money, too bad they are not as polished and as capable as Microsoft’s products. However, Microsoft has a 20 year jump on Google.

3- Sun Microsystems — Sun is taking on power consumption in data centers with some of the most unique designs in the server hardware segment that I have seen years.

4- Microsoft — Vista in all of its glory, or lack there of have in a way lit a fire under Microsoft. The new versions of some of it’s products are looking promising. Pair this with the fear of God that Google has struck into them, Microsoft is finally making a whole-hearted effort into moving some of their applications online.

5- Revision 3 — Kevin Rose and Company have taken on the network studios by producing full-length high-quality shows that are free. The networks should be very afraid of these guys.

6- Apple — They made my list simply for the iPhone SDK and Enterprise support. These will transform the mobile phone industry.

7- Zimbra (A Yahoo! Company) — These guys have been working hard to produce a viable, complete alternative to Exchange. They have succeeded, after using their collaboration suite over the last 6 months I do not miss Exchange at all.

8- VMWare — Using their Virtualization patents to throw their weight around these guys rule the Virtualization market. One such product that has made them a household name is VMWare Fusion for the Mac. Also, by giving away their VMWare Server product they have firmly cemented their place at the top of this market for the foreseeable future.

9- Intel — They make my list for simply making CPU’s smaller and more power efficient, such as the one used in the MacBook Air

10- OpenOffice.org — Another example of a feature complete Microsoft alternative that is making a active effort to make their as ubiquitous as possible on as many platforms as possible.

Where are the rest of Apple’s enterprise products?

Now that Apple has embraced the enterprise market with the iPhone where are the rest of the enterprise products? Apple has spent the time to invest in a relationship with businesses by building the new iPhone software, now they should apply this philosophy across their entire product line. For example, they should bolster their Xserve offerings and their xSAN product. Such a move would entice the business market to use Apple’s robust server operating system and hardware platform.

To do this they must do a few things:

-Release more hardware configurations – Currently there is really only one xServe, which starts at $2999 for a basic configuration with no hard drives, no RAID, etc. Essentially they need to release a “Mac Mini” Version of the Xserve; something that is server class, but at a lower price point. I would further argue that they need something along the lines of a server class headless iMac as well. This would put them in the sub-$1000, $1500, and $3000-and-up categories.

-Put Boot Camp on the Xserve – For some unknown reason Apple does not want you to run Linux or Windows on your Xserve. This could be that they do not wish to develop drivers, but it is foolish of them to assume that a company would only need Mac OS to run their company.

-Commit to Xsan – Commit to Xsan for the next 5 years. From my experience companies that are looking for a simple cross-platform SAN have looked at Apple’s Xsan, but have been hesitant for fear that Apple will abruptly stop future development because they refuse to market it.

-Open up Xsan – Create an Open Source version of Xsan to spur development and interoperability with other operating systems.

-Buy Likewise Software – Likewise software makes a product that allows Windows admins to apply Group Policies to the Macs on their network. This is huge! As someone that runs a mixed network, the inability to easily manage and update the Macs in the same fashion as the Windows boxes is a huge time drag. Likewise software has done a good job of attempting to solve this, but it would be better if it was integrated into the OS.

-Buy Zimbra from Yahoo! - Apple needs a group messaging platform. Sure they have pieces of one now with their iCal server and their built in implementation of Sendmail, but they lack a cohesive Messaging Platform. Zimbra already natively runs on Mac OS (as well as Linux) and has a huge following.

-Create a Windows iChat Client – iChat is by far the best IM client that I have ever used, but it is not available on Windows. Yes, I know that you can use any Jabber client on Windows, but you lose some features that the iChat Server provides. The fact that Mac OS X Server has a built in IM server is huge for Apple.

iPhone to gain Exchange support, does it matter?

Note: I have posted a followup to this post here.

Over at Apple Insider there is an article stating that Apple is going to announce better Microsoft Exchange support on the iPhone next week. It has been 8 months since the launch of the iPhone and sales have slowed since then and most IT departments that have chosen to or been forced into supporting the iPhone have figured out how to get it working with their Exchange server and syncing with Outlook or Entourage. So does it matter that they are releasing this now?

Are all of those IT departments that just spent all of this time changing network settings and desktop security settings to allow this device to work properly with their systems going to now go back and reconfigure all of these now stable devices? Chances are in the short-term, no they will not. They will probably catch this one on the next wave when Apple releases the second (hopefully 3G) version of the iPhone and there is a rush of new iPhones to be supported. Unless Apple does what they should have done all along, pay Microsoft to license ActiveSync, which would make setting up and supporting these devices a no brainer.

There is always the possibility that this is simply a rumor and is not going to happen next week, and this argument is just and exercise in futility. We will just have to wait and see.