I mentioned in my Enterprise Desktops: Linux, OS.X, and Win7 post that I never expected to see OS.X pass Linux in the race to MS Exchange compatibility.

OS.X 10.6, codenamed "Snow Leopard" got there first.

As a Linux maven, this has been a hard loss to accept, but as I also have a Mac, it has been an easy loss to accept... Yes: I am feeling very split-brain about it all.

Just to be sure, I loaded up Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, and updated to the very bleeding edge, to see if Gnome 2.28 / Evo 2.28 and its built in MAPI support was going to catch up, or even be close. But it has not. It is not even close yet. When I try to enter the server name or IP address in the setup dialog, it just crashes, and it does not even ask if I want to report the problem. It's Alpha, so I can not really criticize it. I was just hoping. I was just looking for a glimmer of MS Exchange 2007 interoperability light.

To be even more sure I loaded up SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED 11) and applied all the maintenance. I can enter the MS Exchange server by name rather than address, but the GAL (Global Address List) does not work, and calendaring hangs. I am told some have working calendars, so this does appear to be variable, but it does not work on my calendar, as built up over the years, so I assume that it will not work for others as well.

I also built a SLED 11 appliance with SUSE Studio (very cool) and had the same results.

Last try: I downloaded OpenSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and installed it, but that does not have MAPI in it at all yet.

OpenSUSE 11.2 and the GA of Ubuntu 9.10 are still months away, and I have no idea if full MAPI is going to make it even then. The forums I watch about the subject have been very quiet about MAPI status. The Wiki has:

• http://www.go-evolution.org/Evo2.28
• http://www.go-evolution.org/MAPIProvider

But the last updates there are severely out of date. I scoured the forums, and Googled with fervent hope, but at the end of the day, OS.X was there with fully functional MS Exchange support, and Linux is not yet.

Nope. This round goes to OS.X. That is not to say that the support for Exchange in OS.X is perfect yet. I found a bug with scheduling meetings this morning. I have not seen any public discussion of this problem yet either, but then 10.6 is brand new, so there may not have been time. It appears to be an issue with the Global Address List (GAL) looking up the name.

I am also having another problem, but this appears to be a MS bug. The 'affinity server' is, after 3 days of steady use, suddenly rejecting my password. It is my password though, and I can not seem to convince the affinity server that it is OK. Whatever this little issue is, it locks out my Mac from email, but Linux (using IMAP) and Win7 (using whatever RPC's and MAPI bits Outlook 2007 uses) are both still able to access the Inbox.

There is an easy "work around" though: Look them up in the address book, and then drag and drop them on the appointment. In retrospect this is probably what Apple thought people would do anyway, rather than trying to do direct adds in the meeting itself. Its kind of funny: the meeting invite is sent the second that the person is dropped onto the meeting, rather than when the edit of the meeting is finished. But it works, and very well.

All of this does not even count the fact that MS will release Outlook for the Mac too, so that there will be two ways to access the Exchange server on a Mac. Outlook does not arrive till the end of 2010 though, so the built in MS Exchange 2007 support in OS.X will have plenty of time to mature and have a great deal of uptake.

The reason that this all works is probably that Apple did not take the MAPI/RPC route with 10.6. They are using Web based API's. I traced out a conversation with MS Exchange just to verify this was true. In this regard it seems like that the MS Exchange support in 10.6 is a bit like the Exchange Connector support used to be in Evolution... except that was WebDAV based, and with MS Exchange 2007 WebDAV is dropped in favor of these new API's.

This is also why 10.6 only supports MS Exchange 2007 and not 2003 and earlier. When MAPI / RPC support is finally fully working in Linux / Evolution it will have that over 10.6: MAPI / RPC means that Evolution will be able to talk to any version of MS Exchange all the way back to 5.5 more than likely. But then Outlook will arrive in the Macstack at the end of 2010, and probably negate that advantage, unless MS releases a Web API only version of Outlook. They might... never know.

The Mac I am using for all this is a 3.5 year old unit, and 10.6 has also had the side effect of making the unit feel like it has had a new processor installed. The system has a 2.1 Ghz Core processor (not Core 2) and 2Gb of RAM, and while it has never felt slow, it now "feels" every bit as fast as my Macbook with 4GB or RAM and 2.4 Ghz Core 2 processors. I used the word "Feels" there very intentionally, since I have not done actual objective measurements. Still, Safari seems to snap open, and Filezilla seems to transfer things with great speed, etc. The mail.app is quick, and the interface clean. The emails are sent quickly.

Does all of this mean the Mac is now "Enterprise ready"?

I have read this question over and over in the trades, along with endless (and endlessly vapid, IMHO) 10.6 / Win7 "Shootouts" and "Death Matches" and other similar cruft.

The answer is of course "Yes". Unless it is "No" in your shop.

MS Exchange is at something like 50% market share in the email server space, so having this support was critical *if* you are in a place that uses MS Exchange. If you were in a place that uses some other email server, or maybe have it SaaS'ed out to Google Apps or something, then you already were ready to use a Mac in the Enterprise. Whether or not you do is probably more about the size of your organization, the enlightenment of your IT department, and so forth. I was talking to one person recently whose IT department had a very cool hardware standard for their laptops: They gave folks a budget and they bought whatever they wanted to schelp around. If they bought a Windows based unit, it had to be locked down with a corporate software stack, but OS.X or Linux were not nearly as restricted.

Right after I was told about this, I got curious what I could buy for their stated budget. I have done this a couple times in the past, but I wanted to be sure the numbers had not changed much. According to a couple of vendors online configurators, that I could get a Mac for about the same price when configured the same way. And I got the Macbook unibody to boot. To be sure, I could not buy a 500 dollar Mac laptop or anything: I was comparing 13.3 inch screened, 1033 Mhz buss'ed, fast, large disked, corporate units only. Combine this with what, at least for me, has been a high level of reliability / durability / schelp-ability, and I can see why some would want to bring their Macbooks into their office settings, rather than their normal habitats like graphics studios and print shops and Hollywood offices and other parts of the creative world.

In the very strict confines of an MS-infrastructure-only shop, Mac's were historically harder to use: Same as Linux. Also like Linux, Macs have the same coping mechanisms now. Examples:

• Office Apps:
  • OpenOffice  (Have had NeoOffice for years): I just loaded up 3.1.1, and it has had no problems with an MS formatted documents
  • iWork:
    
    • Pages opens MS formatted stuff as well, and usually with high fidelity.
      
    • Ditto Keynote for PowerPoint.
    • Numbers: I have had slightly less luck with Numbers. The problem is, as always, macros, although it also does not like outlined and sorted spreadsheets. Numbers is the new kid on the iWork block, and it is a great spreadsheet on its own: it is just not fully MS compatible. Yet.
      
• Browsers:
  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Chrome
  • Seamonkey
    
    • I like the Composer HTML editor. NVU stopped at 1.0 and its child Kompozer often goes stale (although I see some movement over in Komposer, and I am using both Composer and Komposer on this post on 10.6, to see what is what. Komposer is buggy and feature-full, and Composer is solid and feature-few. Sigh.)
      
  • And of course, Safari 4.

... and so forth: OS.X has benefited greatly from the Open Source world, to be sure.

And Of Course, with Web 2.0+ All This Matters Less Anyway

As the screams around the Internet reverberate every time Gmail has a multi-minute outage, it is clear that a huge part of the world now uses online infrastructure rather than dedicated, installed in the computer or personal datacenter based infrastructure. Out there in Cloudland, you need a computer to access the cloud, and it matters not if it is a Mac, Linux (or some varient / imbedded version of it), BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, or something else. All that matters is if you have a good standards compliant browser available for your platform. That was the idea behind the Netbook, and my Dell Mini-9 came with a 2GB SSD hard drive: Enough to run Ubuntu and a browser, and it works extremely well.

The more standard (as in Open Standard) the less the client platform matters. The trends are that the people using one platform will be able to communicate with those of all the other platforms, and never know if they are talking to someone like them or not like them, computer-choice-wise.

That is good for Linux.

Or, looked at another way: I can tweet from anywhere. And anything. Change "tweet" to be whatever you need it to be.

<I’m back! Had to go move an R&D data center from one place to another. Took a while...>

Read through any of my recent posts about Linux and MAPI and a picture should develop of hope that in the very near future, even in a shop that runs Microsoft infrastructure like MS Exchange that there will soon be new choices.

This does not even address the idea that one can feasibly use Google Mail and Calendar for everything that MS Exchange does now: I have a friend who in setting up a new shop went that way rather than choosing to build their own email infrastructure or go with a more traditional outsourced email solution like hosted Lotus Notes or MS Exchange.

It is also not really my way to criticize companies or products here. I do not think using a forum like this is appropriate for that. That and I think constructive comments are more useful. I have stated over the years my reasons for preferring Linux, and if you go far enough back in my posts I wrote a series that is the true core of it: Heterogeneity. In summary, a computer ecosystem, like desktop computers, is more vulnerable to attack when it is homogenous, and I saw that demonstrated during the Code Red and Nimda virus outbreaks when only MS Windows computers were affected, but everything else was working fine... and in fact I was using Linux to build software disks full of stuff for cleaning off the virus’s on the MS Windows computers.

This is not to say that Linux or OS.X can not get a computer worm or virus. Anything created by people can be hacked by people. Cross-platform attacks are an order of magnitude harder to create though. Shoot: These days most malware targets particular releases of MS Windows, such that Windows XP might be affected, but that same thing attacking Windows 2000 or NT fails.

Barriers Dropping

The big barrier to entry for using either OS.X or Linux as an Enterprise desktop has always been MS Exchange and its closed / undocumented protocols. As I have written here, the EU has changed that by forcing Microsoft (among other things) to document how MS Exchange “talks” to Outlook via MAPI and something like 85 other Remote Procedure Calls (RPC’s). When I say MAPI hereafter, I am including all the requisite interactions between server and client, even though it is not technically accurate to just call it MAPI.

This is of course different than using POP or IMAP protocols. MS Exchange supports them, but these protocols are for email only. Contacts, Tasks, and Calendars are “safely” locked away on the MS Exchange server where only those that speak MAPI and the related RPC’s can have full access.

Rather than having to slowly read wire traces and figure out how it all works (The way Samba was created: It can be done) there is documentation about how to interact with MS Exchange for the first time. I have written here about work under way in Linux to be able to take advantage of those protocols. Now it has been revealed at the World Wide Apple Developer Conference that OS.X 10.6, shipping in September of 2009 will also have MS Exchange compatibility. Around that same time, Windows 7 will go GA.

Windows Vista Service Pack 3

I have tested Windows 7 quite a bit: In my role as a senior technologist, I can not really have a favorite platform: One of the secret sauces of BMC is that we support a wide range of platforms. Opps... I probably should not have let that slip.

As a technologist, I also have and use Vista and XP and so forth. I have to say that I do not understand the positive buzz for Windows 7 relative to Vista. I also do not understand why Vista was treated so poorly. All of it seems to lose sight of history. Windows XP was a suboptimal place to be until Service Pack 2 came out. Ditto Windows 2000 and Windows NT and Windows 98. Vista was no better and no worse out of the gate than those. It had problems, but my Vista Service Pack 2 install is now pretty stable, and does not have the speed problems that Vista and Vista SP1 had. Throw another three years of development on top of Vista, and you arrive at Vista Service Pack Three, A.K.A. Windows 7. We have been here before. Windows 98 Second Edition anyone?

Here is another thing I do not understand: I read recently one pundit say that Windows 7 and OS.X were now just two flavors of the same user interface. Huh? I use OS.X all the time. I’m writing this post with my Macbook. I do not see the resemblance. By that logic all dogs and cats and horses and cows are just various looks on the exact same animal.

Just because OS.X and Win7 both have compositing video interfaces, they are hardly the same, any more than Compiz on Linux makes it the same thing as Windows or OS.X. Sure, you can theme up Linux or Windows to make them look a lot like OS.X, but they are not the same. OS.X and Linux are more the same, given OS.X’s BSD roots, but there are still enough differences that no theme will cover up.

Nor is it hard to jump back and forth between Linux, OS.X, and MS Windows. When you are looking at a composited GUI, and using a keyboard and mouse to interact, there are bound to be similarities in the usage paradigm. There is always some adapting: I have to get used to my older Macbook Pro not having all the trackpad gestures that my Macbook has for example.

Therein lies the point of confusion I believe. The way we humans interact with computers follows a fairly simple usage paradigm. Till we have voice control or mind / computer interfaces, all computer desktops follow from the current technology. Keyboards, pointing devices, and displays. Regardless of platform, people want to write code in languages they know and love: Perl, Java, C+, Python, and so forth. All of this leads by necessity to there be some similarity in how one interacts with a computer platform, no matter which one it is.

Windows 7 is not a bad place to spend time. It runs OpenOffice, Firefox and Chrome well. The new super-command-prompt A.K.A Windows Power Shell is more in line with what xterm/konsole/gnome terminal have been for years. Would have been nice to just have bash....

Win7 with Aero is nice to look at. Some of the compositing eye candy now does useful things in addition to just being chrome. Its hardware requirements are in reach of most current gear, although like Vista before it forget running it on something more than about three or four years old. Not gonna work well. It is possible Win7 is getting good press in part because the hardware of three additional years finally caught up to Aero and Vista. That and the UAC prompt has been tamed a bit.

Win7 without Aero (in the case of something like a low end video card or a virtual machine) is pretty much like XP but with all the menus jumbled about in some way that might make sense to someone someplace but I just use the search bar to find things anymore. The hardware activation stuff is a major pain: Change the video RAM: reactivate the Win7 guest.

Key for me after Nimda and Code Red is that after years of work (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/01/17/BU102125.DTL), Win 7 is less vulnerable to black hat attack than any of the predecessor versions of MS Windows.

OS.X 10.6

The choice of what makes a new release versus what makes a new point release is often very arbitrary. OS.X 10.6 and Windows 7 have a great deal in common on that point. The new OS.X, according to everything we have read, is going to be mostly focused on internal differences. Full 64 bit exploitation. New dispatcher called “Grand Central” that will allow OS.X to work better on multi-core systems (and one would think, something that the server version will need more than the desktop edition). Big focus on security loopholes. Not much new in the user interface.

Like Win7 could be thought of as Vista SP3, OS.X 10.6 could be considered more of a point release of 10.5. One OS.X pundit thought that was in fact the entire point of the new releases code name: Snow Leopard follows Leopard. The way that the 10.6 release is priced also seems to echo that: 29 USD rather than 129 USD.

Except for the part about MS Exchange. The new 10.6 version will run as a native client of MS Exchange. Email, calendaring, etc from OS.X with no third party software. If that works, then that is huge. That means my main office desktop is going to be OS.X or Linux. No more Windows virtual machines to get to my Calendar. No more webmail calendar interface that is intentionally low function to try an get people to use IE. OS.X as a native MS Exchange client is enough for me to call it a new release. It is enough that I will buy it day one. The fact that it will make my existing hardware feel like it is running faster will be a bonus.

Linux

As I write about here in “Adventures” quite a bit, MS Exchange client function is also coming to Linux. Very very slowly. What I never expected to see was OS.X pass Linux standing still in something like this: Linux has always been the OS platform that has worked the hardest to get along with everyone else. On Linux I can load up HFS drivers so I can read and write to non-journalized Mac disks. I can load up Macutils so I can format and repair Mac disks. I can load up Samba and NTFS and get along with MS Windows disks and Active Directory. Linux is always the kid trying hard to please everyone. Yet, as I write this, the MAPI functionality I have in Linux right now is more or less the same as what I had 6 months ago.  It is there, but it is not usable. I am trying to load up Fedora 11 to see if that will change anything: Ubuntu 9.04, Mint 7, and OpenSUSE 11.1 all work at more or less the same level as far as MS Exchange access is concerned. I can read email. I can send email as long as I type in the email address. I can not reply to email because all the email addresses in the RFC822 headers are munged. No server-side group calendaring. No server side contacts. Yet.

I use the word “try” about Fedora there because unlike OpenSUSE or Ubuntu on the exact same system, Fedora is not wanting to install at all. It does not like the disk format. ‘/boot’ has to be ext3 but ‘/’ has to be ext4. It really really wants to install everything in logical volumes, not hard partitions. I will get it installed, sooner or later, but it sure feels like a step back in time. Fedora prides itself as being the most bleeding edge Distro going, and that is why I hope the MAPI functionality is better than what I have seen before in Ubuntu or OpenSUSE, but it’s installer is not up to the other distros standards. A freind of mine described it as “fragile”, and now I see what he means. OpenSUSE 11.1, looking at the same system, picks a disk layout exactly like I would have done manually.

Like Fedora going in eventually, MS Exchange MAPI support will be in Linux eventually. When it works, you’ll know it here! My guess is that OS.X will beat it by at least 6 months. I could be wrong. Knowing OS.X is getting ready to pass them might set a few coding fires.

One last thing on this point: I have said it before in other posts, but it bears repeating here. This is all about MAPI. If you have Exchange 2000 or 2003, you are good to go on Linux. You still have the WebDAV access mode that MS eliminated in Exchange 2007, so the “Evolution Connector” plug-in still works, and you still have everything. Email, calendars, contacts, task lists, out of office settings... the works.

MS Exchange 2010

As if to acknowledge that choice of desktop client has entered the workplace (or perhaps that eliminating WebDAV came off as a bit surly in the marketplace), one of the new features of MS Exchange 2010 is going to be fully enabling the web client so that, like Google Mail, full feature functionality is available to everyone, regardless of platform. One will not have to run IE to see advanced/more fully featured webmail functions.

MS’s Outlook Webmail will finally be Web 2.0-ish. Reportedly. I have not had a chance to try it yet...

If it does work as advertised: If I can use Firefox or Safari or Opera to access a fully featured Webmail, then that will probably go further to cementing MS Exchange’s market share in the data center than any of the exclusionary things that have proceeded it.

At the same time, the ability to have diversity on the desktop will go a long way to containing future computer worms and viruses