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Microsoft Details Shift From Entourage to Outlook for Next Major Release, Announces Office 2008 Business Edition

Thursday August 13, 2009 9:28 am PDT by Eric Slivka
Microsoft today announced that the next major version of Office for Mac will see the replacement of its Entourage for Mac e-mail client with Outlook for Mac. The company has also deployed a Web Services Edition of Entourage 2008 for Mac beginning today, offering users the ability sync Tasks, Notes and Categories.

Outlook for Mac will bring to the next major version of Office for Mac a number of new features, particularly targeted at enterprise users, designed to enhance productivity.

- Cocoa. Built from the ground up using Cocoa providing users with improved integration with the Mac OS
- New database. A high-speed file-based database with support for backing up files with Time Machine and Spotlight searching
- Information Rights Management. Helps prevent sensitive information from being distributed to or read by people who do not have permission to access the content

The Loop reports that the next version of Office for Mac is scheduled for launch in the "Holiday season 2010."

Microsoft also announced the introduction of Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition, scheduled for release on September 15th. The new edition will replace the existing Standard Edition and Special Media Edition packages with a single suite offering support for Microsoft Exchange. New features in the Business Edition include:

- Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition. Improves performance, brings new features and support for the latest version of Exchange Server
- Microsoft Document Connection for Mac. Helps improve access and browsing to documents on SharePoint Products and Technologies and Microsoft Office Live Workspace
- New art. More than 200 business-related templates and professional clip art
- lynda.com training. Training for beginning to advanced users by lynda.com Inc.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition will be available for pre-order beginning August 18th at a price of $399.95 for the full version or $239.95 as an upgrade. The existing Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition will continue to be offered at $149.95.
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derryquinn
33 months ago
It's nice to see Microsoft is still building upon their previous exploits on the mac in new ways and not leaving it behind. I like that entourage is FINALLY gone, and that outlook will be Cocoa
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SwiftLives
33 months ago
Die, Entourage! Die! Die! Die!
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EDIT: So - what will be lacking in the 2010 edition? Or have we achieved feature parity? With the addition of Outlook and the return of Visual Basic, I'm guessing we're going to be close.

Also, I wonder how new of an exchange server Mac Outlook will need.
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sonofmof
33 months ago
too little too late,

If we weren't getting exchange in apple mail, this would never have happened.

I wont be using it.
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Grimace
33 months ago
[SIZE="4"]NEW CLIPART!!![/SIZE] :rolleyes:
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BryanLyle
33 months ago
$240 for the upgrade? Geez. No thanks Microsoft.

Do they mention that you probably need the latest version of Exchange server to run this stuff?
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11800506
33 months ago
Hopefully the shift from Carbon to Cocoa will make it much stabler and less bloated in the process. Also, the shift away from Entourage to Outlook hopefully means Office's mail suite will no longer be so crappy.
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HLdan
33 months ago
Ah, Microsoft is really "Microshaft". It's amazing, they have tried for years to keep Macs out of the business/enterprise sector. Now that Apple has designed Snow Leopard to have full Exchange support without ANY version of MS Office installed, Microsoft is now seeing a lost $$$ opportunity and NOW that are giving in and making a business version of the Mac Office suite. They are not gonna get my money, I will stick with Snow Leopard without any additional software. MS=FAIL.
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0racle
33 months ago
With Mail.app supporting native Exchange 2007 MS was going to have to do something about the half assed support for Exchange that Entourage has. Obviously the easiest thing to do is also the thing they should have been doing the whole time, is port Outlook proper to the Mac along with Word and Excel, like they used to do.

We dropped Office for Mac in favor of NeoOffice and Mail.app because Entourage sucked so much balls and did not play nice with home directory syncing or spotlight.
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DrCheese
33 months ago

t ANY version of MS Office installed, Microsoft is now seeing a lost $$$ opportunity and NOW that are giving in and making a business version of the Mac Office suite. They are not gonna get my money, I will stick with Snow Leopard without any additional software. MS=FAIL.


er you realise that Apple would have had to pay to license exchange server support for SL? So MS aren't exactly losing out from this, if they REALLY wanted to they could have denied Apple the license in the first place.
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TheNorthWaves
33 months ago
No way that I'd even consider this upgrade unless 10.6, the new office, AND SPACES play nicely together. Freeware does a better job, heh.
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