Re: Microsoft Outlook for Mac: Not Quite There

On Oct 8, 2:46 pm, Alan Baker <alangba...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<b8636429-27c5-4167-8540-ca19ba404...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,





 MuahMan <muah...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 7, 8:29 pm, Alan Baker <alangba...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <i8l2rf$sh...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

 "Redjak" <redjack...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Chance Furlong" <T-B...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:WrudnTCNatOiZDDRnZ2dnUVZ_jWdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From Tech Night Owl:

http://tinyurl.com/25d3ffs

Curse and discuss.

Microsoft Outlook for Mac: Not Quite There
October 7th, 2010

I have long held a love/hate relationship with Microsoft¹s Mac email
software. Whereas the previous entrant, an email/contact manager known
as
Entourage, offered a powerful range of features, it proved endlessly
flaky
to me in the real world.

For one thing, those inevitable lockups and, second, the feeling I was
trudging through quicksand whenever I asked the app to do some serious
work. Far too often, Entourage would just bog down while retrieving
email
from one or more of my regular accounts, which are all IMAP by the way.
I
use that protocol to store the messages on the server, and thus I¹m
able
to keep them in sync regardless of which device I use.

In any case, I looked forward to the second coming of Outlook for the
Mac.
Although only long term Mac users will realize this, Microsoft had a
version of Outlook available in the late 1990s, before the transition
to
Mac OS X.

I suppose Microsoft¹s logic is that they needed a consumer focused
email
client on the Mac, which is why they gave us Entourage and not Outlook.

However, Microsoft, in architecting Office 2011 for the Mac, decided we
needed full, or nearly full, compatibility with the Windows version. So
we
have the ribbon, which is basically a context-sensitive toolbar that
has
drawn mixed reviews on the other platform, and Outlook, which is not
offered in the basic Home and Student edition of Office 2011. I presume
Microsoft expects consumers to stick with Mail or one of the other free
email clients, such as Thunderbird.

While the basic email/contact manager setup in Outlook mirrors that of
Entourage in large part, it¹s designed as a more industrial-strength
app
with superior support for Exchange email servers. One key improvement,
both from a performance and reliability standpoint, is keeping your
messages in separate files, rather than throwing everything in one
huge,
monolithic database.

Outlook for the Mac has also been coded, supposedly from scratch, in
Apple¹s
Cocoa environment, which supposedly means better compatibility with Mac
OS
X features, not to mention superior performance.

Now I don¹t pretend to understand the underlying coding issues, but I
found the overall behavior of Outlook to be extremely similar to
Entourage, other than the noticeably snappier response. Sure, the
dialogs
are prettier, and preference settings are more Mac-like, but
functionality
didn¹t strike me as all that different, other than the enhanced, or at
least changed, feature set.

My real concern, however, is that there are some seriously annoying
bugs,
no doubt symptoms of the 1.0 release, which make it extremely difficult
for me to use Outlook, at least for now.

There are two ways to set the app up after installation. I used both,
first importing my account information, rules and signatures from Apple
Mail. But after I encountered some difficulties with the setup, I went
ahead and quit the program, deleted the settings files, and added the
new
accounts from scratch, one by one.

The import process is especially faulty. Even such granular settings as
using a server¹s IMAP Idle command, which lets it dispatch messages to
you
ahead of whatever schedule you set, wasn¹t retained from Mail to
Outlook.
Rules were especially troublesome, and they were all non-functional
without serious editing, and even then, I couldn¹t achieve reliable
performance.

Understand that my email rules are largely ones that dispatch a message
to
a specific folder if it meets certain criteria. One criterion, however,
doesn¹t exist in Outlook, and that¹s the ability to consult message
content, a feature that is supported in Mail. I had always assumed
Microsoft had more powerful Rules and, except for this missing feature,
maybe that¹s true.

When it came to actually handling email, again I ran into some flaky
behavior.

For one thing, in some accounts, I prefer to use the disclosure
triangle
to reveal subfolders, but I¹d rather hide them in others. These simple
distinctions were lost by Outlook between launches. That never happens
to
me in Mail.

I also ran into a problem quoting material from HTML mail in a new
message
window. The act of selecting and replying was sufficient for the quoted
content to lose its formatting.

None of this erratic behavior was cured by cleaning out Outlook and
entering my accounts from scratch. I¹m also concerned that Microsoft
won¹t
allow you to reorder accounts by drag and drop, the way you can do it
in
Mail. The default account, whatever it might be, is always at the top,
and
everything else is placed alphabetically depending on the label you
attach
to an account.

To add insult to injury, after I returned from a short errand, I was
confronted with a prompt informing me that Microsoft had to quit the
program, giving me the option to send them a report about the problem.

At this point, I¹d had enough. I simply quit Outlook for good, but will
be
happy to revisit Microsoft¹s newest Mac email/contact manager app when
the
inevitable maintenance update arrives. With Office 2011 for the Mac
going
on sale later this month, I¹m sure Microsoft¹s Mac Business Unit is
already working on that update.

But I had hoped for something better.

Why doesn't he just use the Mac product?

I lot of people will, zara.

Apple Mail, Address Book and iCal have support for Exchange. I'll
evaluate Outlook when I get my hands on a copy, but there's a good
chance that a lot of my clients won't be using it.

Bwahahaahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahaha

What's so funny, Brian?

Right now, I'm transitioning a workgroup to Snow Leopard (yes: real
businesses don't always roll this stuff out immediately) and the first
users to try it like Apple Mail, Address Book and iCal much better than
Entourage.

Obvious lie is obvious.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Microsoft burning party
    ... You say yourself that the market share is small, ... I wouldn't call ANY of those products unique to the Mac ... > Outlook and, God forbid, Windows. ... > Entourage over Apple Mail anyway? ...
    (microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage)
  • Re: Import PST file from Win Office 2003 to Mac Entourage 2008
    ... While Entourage 2008 is far from perfect, ... everything that Outlook can do and that would be my perfect solution. ... their VPN tunnel software which does not have a version for Mac OS/X ... completely moving all my business data off of Microsoft technologies. ...
    (microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage)
  • Re: Microsoft Outlook for Mac: Not Quite There
    ... Entourage, offered a powerful range of features, it proved endlessly flaky ... Mac OS X. ... which is why they gave us Entourage and not Outlook. ... a feature that is supported in Mail. ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
  • Re: Microsoft Outlook for Mac: Not Quite There
    ... Entourage, offered a powerful range of features, it proved endlessly ... Mac OS X. ... which is why they gave us Entourage and not Outlook. ... a feature that is supported in Mail. ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
  • Re: Swittching from Outlook 2007: Try Entourage? Or Parallels?
    ... I cannot live without my blackberry and Outlook. ... I'd love to use Mac Office, and could easily do so vis a vis Word, Excel, Powerpoint. ... However, most any Windows product from Microsoft such as Windows, Office, etc., are still proprietary in a lot of ways. ... Methods have been posted to bring over PST information into Entourage. ...
    (microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage)