As has already been much-publicised, MacOS 10.6, or "Snow Leopard", can access Exchange 2007 mailboxes to provide integration with the Mac's native email, contact and calendar applications: Mail, Address Book and iCal.

Only Exchange 2007 is supported, not Exchange 2003, and only Exchange 2007 servers running SP1 update 4 or later. At the time of writing, the public release candidate of Exchange 2010 appears to work fine.

The Mail, Address Book and iCal applications need to be configured separately. If the Exchange server in question is using a self-issued, or non root-trusted certificate, to avoid being prompted to accept the certificate each time a connection is established to the server, the root certificate of the CA which issued the certificate to the Exchange server should be added to the System folder within the Keychain application:

When running the Mail application for the first time, or when adding a new account within the Preferences pane, you will be prompted to enter your email address:

The setup wizard will attempt to determine the appropriate server and authentication settings to use based on your email address. Should any of the settings not be determined automatically, you will be prompted to complete them:

Complete the fields as required - the server address is typically the same as that used by Outlook Web Access (webmail) and the username is that used when logging into your desktop PC at the start of the day:

If prompted for a domain, again this is the same as that used when logging into your PC at the beginning of the day and should be entered in the username field in the format 'domain\username'

Once configured, your email messages will be downloaded automatically:

To edit your account settings once they have been defined, select the Accounts tab within the Preferences view:

Options pertaining to Junk Mail, Sent Items and Drafts can be defined:

The amount of data that is synchronised (entire messages with attachments, messages, or message headers) can be defined:

In order to configure Address Book and iCal access, similar settings must be entered when adding accounts: