Over the years Apple has slowly been adding Exchange functionality to a number of their products, quietly. While Snow Leopard is reported to add even more functionality there are still a number of things you can do with Exchange from the Mac OS X client. For example, Address Book can pull information from your Exchange contacts. This isn’t to say that every single field will work, but the basics do work – and pretty well.
To connect to your Exchange server from Address Book, open the program and then open the Preferences menu. From the General tab check the box for Synchronize with Exchange as seen here:
Now click on the Exchange… button and enter your user name, password and Outlook Web Access Server (OWA Server, or if you only have one Exchange server, the name/IP of the host). For the Outlook Web Access Server you’ll also want to make sure you have the Fully Qualified URL of the host you use to access your mail, rather than just the IP address for example. If you would like for synchronizations to occur automatically go ahead and click on the Synchronize Every Hour checkbox.
Saying that Apple has been quietly developing it and saying that it works like a charm though, are two separate topics. Don’t expect to be able to also synchronize with other services. This is a recipe for mass duplications of contact data. Also, don’t expect it to work flawlessly. It can be problematic, although not always. In short – if you’re going to try this, make good backups early and often.