Microsoft to dump Mac Office's Entourage in 2010

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. today promised that it will replace the often-hated Entourage e-mail client in its Office for the Mac suite with a version of Outlook by late 2010.

"Outlook for Mac will deliver the functionality that businesses have come to expect from Outlook on Windows," said Eric Wilfred, the general manager of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit in a conference call this morning.

"Outlook for Mac and Outlook for Windows will be different, for sure, and they will also be compatible, for sure," Wilfred added when asked what kind of parity users should expect between the two applications.

Microsoft will ship the next version of Office for Mac -- which doesn't yet have an official title -- in "time for the holiday season in 2010," Wilfred said.

Mac users have long complained that Entourage, the e-mail app bundled with Mac versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Office for Mac 2008, is a poor cousin of Outlook, the application used by Windows customers. Their complaints have centered on Entourage's inability to connect to corporate Exchange mail servers as seamlessly as Outlook does.

Before Microsoft launched Office for Mac 2008, in fact, Mac Business Unit developers explicitly said Entourage's reliability and stability were more important than making the program a clone of the Windows-based Outlook.

Wilfred reversed business unit's course today. "Outlook for Mac will refresh not just the front end, but the guts of the application," he said during the call. "Outlook for Mac will bring features our customers have long requested -- such as information rights management -- that make working across platforms even easier. I think people will see that this move to Outlook for Mac is more than just a name change."

The new program will be built using Cocoa, Apple Inc.'s development environment, which consists of a collection of frameworks, APIs and runtimes that let engineers create Mac OS X native software. Outlook for Mac will also sport a new, more robust database to store e-mails, events, notes and to-do lists, said Wilfred, and the database will support backups done with Apple's Time Machine software and indexing via Mac OS X's integrated Spotlight search engine.

Outlook for Mac will build on Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition, which was unveiled by Microsoft in January has been in beta testing ever since. The Entourage Web Services Edition uses Exchange's native connectivity protocol through an API to put the client on a more equal footing with the Windows-based Outlook when it comes to synchronizing with Exchange.

The Entourage Web Services Edition "is a steppingstone to something bigger... Outlook for Mac," Wilfred said.