Microsoft Outlook 2011 for Mac OS X

For name recognition, it's hard to beat Microsoft Outlook. As soon as you say those two words, a large percentage of computer users immediately knowwhat you're talking about. With the release of Microsoft Office for Mac2011, Microsoft rewrote the Apple Macintosh-based Microsoft Entourage email andcalendar client and renamed it Outlook for Mac 2011. This change represents both a radical departure from previous versions of Entourage and Outlook'sreturn to the Mac.

Years ago, Microsoft had an Outlook client for the Mac. That client used Messaging API (MAPI), but it was slow, buggy, not especially Mac-like, andfeature-poor when compared with its Windows sibling. Microsoft replaced it with Entourage, and that was that. However, Entourage has long lacked manyfeatures that cross-platform users want, including compatibility with PST files, support for server-side rules, and numerous minor Outlook features.Outlook for Mac 2011 is Microsoft's attempt to bring its two Outlook clients closer to feature parity, as well as a competitive response againstApple's built-in email and calendar applications.

A Brief History of Outlook

The current version of Outlook for Mac is the direct descendant of Entourage, a personal information manager and email client that made its debut yearsago in Office for Mac 2001. The original versions of Entourage used WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) for Microsoft Exchange Serversupport. When Microsoft announced that Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 would no longer support WebDAV, the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit (knowninformally as MacBU) built a version of Entourage that used Exchange Web Services (EWS) instead of WebDAV. However, this change put companies withmixed Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2010 environments in a tough spot: Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition couldn't talk to Exchange 2003, and"regular" Entourage 2008 couldn't talk to Exchange 2010.

This situation continues with Outlook for Mac 2011, in that it supports only EWS as a means to talk to Exchange, limiting its use to Exchange 2007 andExchange 2010. (The client also supports POP and IMAP for use with consumer services such as Windows Live Mail and Google Gmail.) However, Microsoftneeded to rewrite much of the core Entourage code to make it more compatible with modern versions of Apple's OS and development tools. Outlook for Mac2011 is the result.

It is reasonable to think of this Outlook client as a combination of the network core of Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition and a brand-new UI thatattempts to blend elements of the Office 2010 Fluent User Interface (Microsoft's official name for the Ribbon) with Mac OS X. But the Ribbon-style UIisn't the only thing that's new in Outlook for Mac 2011:

One of the much-touted new features of Office for Mac 2011 is its support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The Office for Mac 2011 versions ofMicrosoft PowerPoint, Word, and Excel support VBA, but Outlook for Mac doesn't; you'll need to use AppleScript to automate and control Outlook. TheAppleScript dictionary that is defined in Outlook for Mac 2011 differs in many respects from that of Entourage, so you should plan on spending sometime testing and revising your Entourage scripts. In general, Outlook for Mac has more automation support than Entourage did, but some object types(notably public folders) aren't exposed in the dictionary and thus can't be automated.

Many other new features are less evident. For example, Outlook for Mac 2011 can update its account information after a cross-forest mailbox move, butyou won't see that listed as a new feature and it isn't visible anywhere. Other semi-hidden features include support for federated calendar andfree/busy sharing, as well as the ability to display the relevant portion of your calendar inline within a meeting-request message.

Perhaps the biggest feature in this category is the way in which Outlook for Mac 2011 stores messages. Entourage used one monolithic database to storemessages, attachments, rules, and other metadata. If this database became corrupted, it needed to be rebuilt or restored -- often a time-consumingendeavor. For Exchange accounts, just throwing away a corrupted database and re-downloading messages from the server was generally no big deal, but indoing so you'd lose the local search index.

Having one large database also made it more difficult for Microsoft to integrate Entourage with the built-in Spotlight search system. To solve thisproblem, Outlook for Mac 2011 uses a much smaller database, and individual messages (and their message metadata) are stored in individual files. Thisarrangement eliminates the problem of data loss caused by database corruption and makes searching for Outlook content by using the built-in tools orsystem Spotlight mechanism gratifyingly quick.

A Quick Tour of the Outlook 2011 UI

Figure 1 shows the Outlook for Mac main window. If you've ever seen Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010, this will be a familiar view. However, if you're usedto Entourage, the appearance of the Ribbon might be a little confusing. At the top of the main window is an icon-only toolbar that gives yousingle-click access to commonly used commands. You can customize the commands that appear here. Immediately below this toolbar is a row of tabs: Home,Organize, and Tools. The contents of the Ribbon below these tabs change as you switch between them. Most of the commands here are directly equivalentto items that used to appear in the Entourage toolbar; as in Windows Office, some Ribbon icons are pull-down menus, as indicated by a downward-pointingtriangle to the right of the icon.

Figure 1: Outlook for Mac 2011 main window 

The same layout is used for message windows, although those windows have only one tab. The main Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks windows get the Ribbontreatment, as do the windows for individual items of each type.

Apart from the Ribbon, most of the UI changes in Outlook for Mac are fairly subtle. The UI retains the familiar three-column view, although there aresome changes in the folder list that occupies the leftmost column. There's no way to reorder the accounts or folders that appear here, and Microsofthas decided to group them so that each account's related folders are together. For example, there's a single Drafts folder that shows you drafts fromall defined accounts when selected. If you expand this folder, you see the individual Drafts folder for each account. After the grouped folders (Inbox,Drafts, Sent Items, and Deleted Items), separate per-account headings contain other folders, including the Conversation History and Sync Issuesfolders. Although this arrangement might seem a bit confusing at first, individual folders are accessible through the Inbox folder, just as they are inOutlook for Windows. This design parallels the approach that Apple took in its Mail application, so it's familiar to most Mac users.

Offline and Synchronization Behavior

One long-running irritation in Entourage was its synchronization behavior when used with Exchange. There was no way to control when or how itsynchronized, and the Work Offline menu command often needed to be used to force disconnection and reconnection at unexpected times. Outlook for Mac'ssync behavior is both considerably faster and much more robust than its predecessor. For example, when in offline mode, you're no longer prompted to goonline and send the message each time you queue a message for sending. This prompt used to drive me absolutely crazy when working through email on longairplane flights.

However, there's no way to take an individual account offline or to provide separate sync settings for individual accounts. Outlook for Mac 2011 alsolacks the extensive controls for dial-up and the low-bandwidth connection control that are included (though rarely used) in Outlook for Windows. Ingeneral, Outlook for Mac 2011 deals gracefully with changes or interruption in network connectivity, and it does so without any of the balloons orerror messages that are familiar to Windows Outlook users. An activity window tells you which synchronization operations are in progress, but itdoesn't contain much detail on which folders or messages are being synchronized at any given time.

Conversation Threading

Conversation threading is a semi-new feature in Outlook for Mac 2011 -- meaning that Entourage could sort messages by conversation, but only based onthe text of the message subject. If you're accustomed to the way that conversation threading works in Outlook Web App (OWA) 2010 or Outlook 2010, thenyou might be somewhat disappointed by the Outlook for Mac 2011 implementation. The feature still depends on the message subject line and doesn't usethe conversation headers that Exchange Server 2010 adds. So if your correspondents change the subject line of a message, the thread appears to break.This behavior is particularly annoying for threads that originate from systems such as Yahoo! Groups and Gmail, in which the mail transport systemitself can (and often does) meddle with subject lines during normal operations.

Apart from that, there have been several bizarre bugs in conversation threading mode. One nice Outlook for Mac feature is the ability to switch to aview that shows only unread messages with a single keystroke (Cmd+Shift+O). However, in that mode, Outlook frequently loses track of how many messagesare actually in a folder, and the selection behavior that is used to move between messages in a thread is often inconsistent. Almost all these bugsappear to have been fixed in Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 2 (SP2).

What's Missing

There are two ways to categorize missing features in Outlook for Mac 2011: those which are present in Outlook 2010 for Windows and those that aren't.Microsoft never claimed that Outlook for Mac 2011 is, or is intended to be, a feature-for-feature clone of Outlook 2010. Instead, it tried to pick themost-demanded features from Outlook for Windows while still preserving a Mac-like experience that is well-integrated with the rest of the Office forMac suite. Still, some Outlook 2010 capabilities would be welcome in a future release:

In the category of non-Windows Outlook features from which Outlook for Mac could benefit, the biggest is probably performance. Outlook for Macsometimes feels ponderous when launching or switching modes; Apple's Mail.app feels much faster for many operations. In general, Outlook performance issignificantly better than that of Entourage on similar hardware, but there are improvements yet to be made.

In a few areas, Outlook could be better integrated with Mac OS X and Apple's other apps, such as iPhoto (though there is a nifty new media browser forincluding iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie content in messages), and there are certainly additional opportunities to integrate Exchange features. Overall,though, the missing features are minor when compared with the stability and functionality improvements that Outlook for Mac delivers.

A Bright Future

OWA 2010 is a fine client and is useful for a broad range of users. However, most users want a rich desktop client, and for Mac users in an Exchangeenvironment, Outlook for Mac 2011 is it. None of the other available Mac OS X clients deliver the same combination of functionality and utility.Although the program has a few rough spots, Microsoft has fixed many of them in the first two service packs, and it's clear that Microsoft understandswhat Mac users with Exchange mailboxes want to see in a client. The future for Outlook on the Mac looks pretty bright.