So, I’ve been running Entourage 2004 over the week-end, kicking the tires so-to-speak against my personal IMAP and my work Exchange. Thus far, I’ve been very happy w/ the changes, improvements, and features they’ve made. The WebDAV-based Exchange access is a much better Mac option than EntX’s IMAP/SMTP setup was —although perhaps still not where Outlook 2003’s RPC-over-HTTP hooks could be.
Here is the only real issue I’ve seen thus far:
It would appear that the security options for the Exchange account also extend automatically to the security options for access to the Free/Busy info on the public folders server. In other words, if you choose SSL for Exchange access, Free/Busy automatically inherits that same SSL setting.
In my work environment, I connect via SSL WebDAV to a front-end Exchange 2003 OWA server. However, our free/busy pub folders are only on a back-end Exchange 2003 server that do not serve up DAV via SSL — only DAV access via tcp/80. As such, only basic Calendar functions work, gaining access to other peoples’ Meeting request availability do not work.
Assuming this was a correct view, I would appear to only be able to get Free/Busy to work a couple of different ways:
- do unencrypted DAV to a back-end Exchange server that is serving up OWA, thus having a global security option for SSL (or lack there-of) that will work w/ our Free/Busy. Not a great idea due to the unencrypted transport and transmission of credentials.
- talk the Exchange admin into serving up optional SSL access to our back-end Free/Busy.
- talk the Exchange admin into replicating public folders to our front-end OWA server. This doesn’t seem to be a great idea from an OWA stability perspective.
Or ... And something that this group may be able to help with:
Locate an Applescript for Entourage 2004 that will turn off the SSL=Yes flag on the Free/Busy server configuration setting only at Entourage start-up. This would work similar to an old Applescript from the MVPS.org site that dynamically changed the IMAP server value at start-up: thus providing 1 server value for IMAP in the applescript and a different server value for DAV access to calendar.
Any ideas if a public folder “SSL=No” Applescript is possible w/ entourage 2004?
Any alternative suggestions or ideas?
Thanks,
jeff
