Snow Leopard, the latest Apple operating system release which becomes available this week, will have out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, a feature intended to enhance the suitability of the Macintosh as an acceptable alternative to Windows PCs in the enterprise desktop estate.
The latest version means a Mac can run Microsoft Office and Windows applications, can connect to virtually any server and authenticate to Active Directory servers and, with built in support for Microsoft Exchange Server, can access and manage Exchange email using the Mail application in Mac OS X.
Mac OS X Leopard users will be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard for $29 as of Friday August 28, the company confirmed earlier today.
The Finder has been completely rewritten in Cocoa, Exposé and Stacks have a new look so that windows are displayed in an organised grid, and systems will boot up and shut down faster than before under Snow Leopard.
The new OS takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB on a machine.
The arrival of Grand Central Dispatch in Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the way Apple has addressed power-performance issues, by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimising it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors.
