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.