We're moving from a POP3 server hosted by Electric Mail right now to an interal Exchange Server 2007.  Given the relative growth of our company, we needed a better solution for mail management, but especially for calendar sharing, and the benefits of OWA and Outlook Anywhere.

I knew that trying to integrate Exchange 2007 and Entourage 2004 on OS X would be fraught with much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.  I found a number of articles on the web concerning people getting the two to work together fine, but no matter what I tried, Entourage did not want to hook up to Exchange 2007.

Now, I need to note here that this is for fresh, clean installs of Exchange 2007, not upgrades.  You'll see why in a minute.

If you have a clean initial install of Exchange 2007, in order to get Entourage to work properly, you have to install the legacy folders for OWA.  Mind you, none of the books I read, nor did any of the blogs/forums I read mention this rather essential fact.  What I found was the following:

• If you create the legacy folders of Exchange and Exadmin specifically, you should be ok.
• You will probably have to use the address of http://mobile.yourdomainname.com/exchange/username@domain.com in order for Entourage to correctly hook up.  Note, you have to use exchange, not owa which is the new Exchange 2007 folder that should be useable.

Hopefully, this tip will help someone out there before they go through 8 hours of frustration and wanting to rid myself of every Mac in my office.  We only have 5, but what a headache they can be.

That being said, I'd still take a MacBook Pro if I had the opportunity.  Boot Camp is a wonderful thing, and if it can run Vista or OS X, to me that would be the best of both world.  May a large lightning bolt not hit me in the head for having said that... :)

Yeah, yeah, so my previous post was lame. 

Here's the downlow: My name is Jason Clark, I'm currently the IT Directory (and lead ASP.NET developer) forcj Advertisingg in Nashville, TN.  This blog will be more of a professional blog, I have a more personal blog at http://www.riceboyler.com, my main site.  (And yes, it's on PHP for now.)

I've been developing using ASP.NET since 2003, where I started at Dell Computer as a reporting analyst and web developer.  Previously, I had been working in PHP exclusively on a site for MECA (which I just recently finished migrating to ASP.NET, and subsequently due to my promotion at work, had to relenquish), and other car related sites.  I still dabble in PHP, but love ASP.NET more.  Most of my ASP.NET development work is not web facing, in the strongest sense of the word.  Our web department at cj is very talented at design, and their collective strengths lie with a little more PHP.  In the future, I may push for that to change somewhat, but for now, it works well.

Hopefully, moving to Spaces can get me more motivated to blog more often about both development issues and stuff I run into in the IT world.  I'll post one such thing in a minute.

That's my professional life in a nutshell.  As of May 2007, we're looking for a good young ASP.NET developer to come on board at cj.  If that person is you, email me at jclark at cjadvertising.com.