The reason for that is simple: for MOST things, and MOST people, Apple’s products just work.  And, when it doesn’t just work, it’s usually fairly easy to GET it to work.  It’s NOT perfect, and I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it can be downright annoying when it doesn’t work. Overall, though, I find myself a whole lot less frustrated with Apple computers than I do PCs.

Apple just released late last week their latest upgrade to their venerable OS X lineup – OS X 10.6: Snow Leopard.  Many of the most important changes to the OS are under the hood and not easily seen by the average user, but will most definitely add significant performance improvements moving forward. There were a couple of things that were changed that had me excited – the most important of them being native support for Microsoft Exchange.

Like it or hate it, Exchange is a mainstay in the business world. In an effort to make Mac’s more business friendly, Apple has cleverly added in support for it into Mail, iCal, and Address Book.  Using Exchange Web Services (what we all assume will eventually replace MAPI, which Microsoft has indicated is now deprecated), these apps are able to provide a fairly good replacement for Microsoft’s own Entourage (which, up until VERY recently has not supported EWS).

I was excited to see it in action, and on Monday when I finally got a copy at work I excitedly installed it and – with the giddiness of a kid on christmas morning – I fired up Mail and created my Exchange account. And it just… worked. Mostly.

The accounts created just fine for Mail, iCal and Address Book. I could send and receive mail, I could look up Exchange users in Address Book, and I could see my calendar items show up properly in iCal.

A buddy of mine set out to test whether or not the meeting invite functionality worked as expected, and he sent me some meeting invites which I saw in Mail and accepted, and they showed up on my calendar.  The same functionality is available within iCal as well, and works well.  Then I ran into the one problem: I could not create iCal invites.

The following Screen popped up telling me that “iCal can’t save the event “New Event” to the exchange server.”

After searching online and finding practically nothing regarding this, I decided to look through Console and see if I could see any errors when I would try creating a meeting.  Sure enough, there were:

9/2/09 11:38:15 AM iCal[1299] -[EWSTimeZoneType:0x114d241d0 initWithStandardTimeZoneName:] TimeZone for US/East-Indiana is nil

9/2/09 11:39:28 AM iCal[1299] error = Error Domain=CalExchangeErrorDomain Code=-4 UserInfo=0x116217bd0 “iCal can’t save the event ‘New Event’ to the Exchange server.”

I remembered seeing in the Advanced tab of the iCal preferences an option to enable time zone support – so I went and made sure that was enabled. I thought perhaps, given the messages iCal was putting in Console, this was a timezone issue.  I checked the timezone settings in iCal to find it set to just Eastern Time, and didn’t seem to be set to use Eastern Time with Indianapolis as my closest city, so I configured it correctly in iCal.  I checked my system’s timezone settings and they too were not set (something in the upgrade must have changed this, as they were set before the upgrade), so I set those too.

After making these two changes I’ve been able to send meeting invites without any problems.  Now all is right in the world.

The Exchange support is pretty darn cool. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t offer feature parity with the likes of Outlook, but it’s not meant to. It certainly performs snappier and has a cleaner interface than Entourage. Plus – it’s just darn cool to get an Operating System (for $50 for a 5 machine license) that has native, out of the box, support for Exchange.

Now – to be fair and open and honest – to use these features you MUST be running Exchange 2007, WITH service pack 1 and security rollup 4 (or greater). It WILL NOT work with earlier versions – so don’t get it and get mad when it doesn’t work because you don’t have the right version of Exchange.