WWDC: Apple moves on the Enterprise!

Apple made news on on lots of fronts at its Worldwide Developers' Conference Monday, with the new iPhone 3GS, a $100 iPhone 3G, and major notebook announcements. Almost lost in the iPhone and Mac Book announcements were several moves that add up to an assault on the enterprise, long Apple's weakest market.

The most intriguing announcement, partly because it was completely unexpected, is that Snow Leopard, the next version of the OS X operating system for Macs, will include built in support for Exchange, Microsoft's enterprise mail and collaboration system. Snow Leopard is scheduled to ship in September and will cost $29 for a single copy or $49 for a family pack for up to five machines. And new iPhone features seem to take aim at both Microsoft and Research In Motion, maker of the enterprise-oriented BlackBerry.

If the Exchange support works as promised, it will be a very big deal. The difficulty of using Exchange, which is the dominant mail system in corporations and many other large organizations, has been a serious barrier to the adoption of Macs. You can use either the built-in OS X Mail program or Entourage, the mail component of Microsoft's Office suite for Macs, to handle Exchange mail, but neither does it very well. The best solution has been to run a Windows virtual machine on your Mac, using Parallels or VMware software, and then use Microsoft Outlook. It works fine, but it's a bit of a pain.

By building support for the Exchange infrastructure directly into the operating system, Apple has done something that Microsoft itself has never attempted. Apple says that in addition to reading mail, Mac users will see Exchange contacts in the Mac Address Book and Exchange calendar items in iCal. Integration extends to the ability to create meeting invitations simply by dragging contacts into an iCal appointment. You sure can't do that in Outlook.

The big question, of course, is how well this will really work. Exchange and it's Mail Application Program Interface a notoriously complicated beast and developers have long complained that MAPI's technical documentation is incomplete. Even developers within Microsoft grumble about the difficulty of working with it.

Apple Senior Vice-President Phil Schiller did confirm that the Exchange integration in Snow Leopard will only work with the latest Exchange software, Exchange 2007 which will be mostly likely due to the depedency on Exchange Web Services