Mac gets fresh Outlook

Evan Gower October 7, 2009

Microsoft has confirmed that it’s bringing Outlook to the next version of Office for Mac, slated for release in 2010.

Outlook has long been a notable absentee from the Office suite on Macs, with the lightweight Entourage left to fill the void. However, the software giant is looking to make amends with a version of the email client written from the ground up in OS X’s Cocoa development frameworks.

“We’re building on the most modern OS X frameworks to make Outlook beautiful, to make it high performance, and to make it well integrated with the OS,” says Eric Wilfrid, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit general manager.

Alongside, a revamped interface Wilfrid also claims that the database underpinning the application will be overhauled: “We are refreshing not just the front end, but the guts of the application,” adds Wilfred.

We’re building on the most modern OS X frameworks to make Outlook beautiful, to make it high performance, and to make it well integrated with the OS

“A new database gives us increased reliability, better performance, and better integration with technologies like Time Machine for backup and Spotlight for search,” he adds.

At the heart of these efforts is a desire to make Outlook for Mac and Windows work flawlessly, and while Wilfred admits they won’t match each other feature-for-feature he claims “Outlook for Mac and Outlook for Windows work great together, and work great in an Exchange environment.”

To further this interoperability, Microsoft will also implement its Information Rights Management (IRM) technology, currently doing the rounds in Office 2007 for Windows. IRM allows users to share confidential documents across various operating systems.

Microsoft also confirmed that Visual Basic will return to Office for Mac 2010, after being removed from Office 2008.