Have You Met Steven?

While many PC users are looking forward to Windows 7, many Mac users are also dying for the newest OS X: Snow Leopard. Most new features sound nice, but not so impressive (After all, this is just a small upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard). However, there is one particular thing that caught my attention: Out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange.

Some background about Microsoft Exchange (ME): This Microsoft technology is very popular in the business world. It allows users to manage emails, tasks and daily events such as conference, meeting, etc. This doesn’t sound much exciting, but a good size business would go nut without using ME or an equivalent system. For example, if I am assigned a project and need to setup a meeting with other employees^[a] to gather specs, figure out solutions to the project, etc, (or just planning a party ), this is all I need to do:

1. Go to my ME Schedule, start a new meeting.
2. Add all the people I want, add the conference room I want to use, and ME will show me when everyone is free (marked by the little green box in the picture), and when the room I want is empty
3. Click send, and there I have a meeting setup in to everyone’s ME Schedule^[b].

Setting up a meeting in Microsoft Exchange

Without Microsoft Exchange, this is what I would have to do:

1. Call Rodney up, ask when he’s free.
2. Call Keith up, ask when he’s free.
3. Call Cannon up, ask when he’s free.
4. …
5. …
6. Find out when everyone is free (In a working environment, yeah, good luck with that).
7. Call up Stacy the receptionist, ask her which room is free at that time, if not, go back to step 6, or worse, step 1.
8. Send an email to everyone about the meeting.
9. If someone wanted to change the time, that person would have to start over from step one.
10. Since it’s not in the calendar, people will forget, so I will have to send one more email to everyone an hour before the meeting as a reminder^[c].

Of course this is not the only thing that Microsoft Exchange offers, but it sure is the most useful thing I found at work place. However, over the years, as b****y as Apple is (Ahh, yes offense! Even using a Mac, I still don’t like the way Apple does business.), it didn’t want something like that, nor has it an equivalent technology^[d].

With the out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange, what statement did Apple make? Did Apple finally have to admit that the business world belongs to Microsoft and it’s way out of Apple’s league? I don’t know and don’t want to make any guess, but I can say this is a smart move from Apple. With Snow Leopard, a Mac OS user can actually do what Apple calls “bring-your-Mac-to-work day” (Again, Apple does know that people don’t use Macs at work).

Side note

Besides Microsoft Exchange supports, there is another cool feature I noticed about Snow Leopard. Apple named it “Innovative Chinese character input“.

Until Snow Leopard, if you wanted to enter Chinese characters on a computer, you had to type in the phonetic spelling of Chinese words and the computer would convert them into proper Chinese characters. Snow Leopard offers a breakthrough new way to enter characters: You draw them right on the Multi-Touch trackpad in your Mac notebook. They’ll appear on the screen in a new input window, which recommends characters based on what you drew and lets you choose the right one. The input window even offers suggestions for subsequent characters based on what you chose.

The last thing I notice about Snow Leopard is the new QuickTime icon. Personally, I think it looks uglier than the previous version. However, there’s a small change in the “QuickTime clock”. The old icons has a hand pointing to number 1, or 2. In the newer version, the hand has reached probably number 4 or 5 on the clock.

1. This happens very often, if not every single day. [↩]
2. And if someone is not happy about the time, ME allows suggesting new meeting time (when everyone is free), if the event creator agrees, ME automatically updates it to everyone’s calendar. [↩]
3. Did I forget to mention the schedule has a reminder feature, too? [↩]
4. The only equivalent technology I know of is the combination of GMail, Google Docs and Google Calendar, but still can’t be compared to Microsoft Exchange [↩]

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.