I'm not sure if you're trying to be ironic or you really don't know that Exchange is just a (mostly) RFC compliant SMTP server and a (mostly) RFC compliant IMAP server rolled into one.
My point was that Exchange is not compliant enough to be usable from a non-Outlook email client. At my current job I run a windows VM just to run Outlook in it; at my previous^2 job I had a second physical machine for the same thing (though I eventually put mysql on it).
> My point was that Exchange is not compliant enough to be usable from a non-Outlook email client.
Well, you kind of have a point there. I use Apple mail and iCal against our corporate Exchange, but when I have to schedule a meeting, I either have to log into the Windows terminal server or use the outlook web interface to do it reliably.
It would be nice if there were an RFC for calendaring protocols, even if that RFC was just codifying Exchange.
That is only a mechanism for encapsulating an event and giving it to someone else: it doesn't really help any of the actual use cases people have for the kinds of group calendar management that everyone is used to having from Exchange.
The more related standard that could have done this is ICAP, but that spec never happened and died as a draft back in 1998, long enough ago that the acronym got reused in 2003 by RFC 3507 for something unrelated to calendar access.
Right now, it seems like all of the effort is behind CalDAV (which is based on WebDAV), which actually has some published RFCs behind it (dating back through 2007) and multiple clients (including Apple's iCal and Google Calendar).
Right, but CalDAV doesn't seem to support everything. Or to put it another way, using a CalDAV client and using actual Exchange don't get the same results.
My employer uses exchange, and I use Apple Mail and iCal to connect. It works perfectly. (Exchange provides an proprietary connection between the server and the client. It also supports IMAP, but many admins don't enable that. It's server to server connections are fully interoperable.)
