Microsoft to dump Mac Office's Entourage in 2010

Microsoft Corp. 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.

Microsoft posted the Entourage Web Services Edition on the its Macintosh download site today, where users of Office for Mac 2008 can grab the 65MB update.

Wilfred also announced that starting Sept. 15, Microsoft will pare the number of Office for Mac editions from three to two, dropping Special Media Edition and renaming the standard version as “Business Edition.”

The Business Edition will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage Web Services Edition; Document Connection for Mac, a tool also introduced in January that's designed to improve access to and browsing of documents on SharePoint and Technologies and on Office Live Workspace; new business-oriented clip art and templates; and a seven-hour online training series.

Microsoft added Document Connection for Mac to Office for Mac 2008 with the update to Service Pack 2 (SP2) last month.

Business Edition will be priced at $399.95 for the full version and at $239.95 for the upgrade; pre-orders of Business Edition will start Aug. 18. The Home and Student edition's price will remain $149.95.

Wilfred dodged questions during the call about Microsoft bringing Office for Mac to Apple's iPhone, a move many had speculated would be the focus of today's announcement. “That's a popular question,” Wilfred acknowledged today. “But no, there's no news today about any iPhone work.”

Microsoft had previously committed to bringing back Visual Basic support in the next version of Office for Mac — another sop to business users — and Wilfred repeated that promise today. “Visual Basic will be back,” he said. Visual Basic was used in Office for Mac 2004 to provide macro-making capabilities, but Microsoft scrubbed it from the 2008 version.

He said Microsoft had nothing to say about any integration with Snow Leopard — Apple's Mac OS X upgrade some now expect to see later this month. “Apple has not shared any features of Snow Leopard's Exchange support with us,” he said.

Snow Leopard is to include built-in support for Exchange 2007, and thereby will make it possible for corporate customers to connect and sync to their Exchange mail servers using the operating system's bundled Mail, iCal and Address Book applications.