With a trip to the US coming up, I needed to set up a way to access my work email from my OS X laptop. Last time I went I just used Mail.app to access the Exchange server via IMAP and it worked ok, but obviously had no calendaring ability. This time round I really need the calendar to work as well so I fired up Entourage.

Going through the set up was a bit tedious and I thought it pretty dodgy that it wanted the Outlook Web Access (OWA) URL – obviously it goes via that instead of the normal exchange protocols. As it turns out though, that’s the way that the Exchange server hosting company recommends you access your email. In fact, the instructions for setting up Outlook on Windows include a series of complex maneuvers to get it to use OWA too. Indeed, Entourage seems just as capable a client as Outlook at least form early impressions. The only thing I miss is the SpamBayes integration and that’s not really a feature of Outlook.

Playing with Linux today, I fired up Evolution and it too supports going through OWA. Within moments it was pulling down my work email too. In fact, Evolution had by far the simplest process to set it up.

In all, I think the Exchange-Windows lock-in days are well and truly over.