Microsoft is planning on bringing out Microsoft Outlook to the Mac in 2010. Outlook will be apart of the Outlook bundle for the Mac and it is about time!
Entourage isn’t gone yet however. Microsoft also announced today’s launch of Entourage Web Services Edition, which better integrates Entourage with Exchange Server and with Outlook for Windows. It’s now available for download.
Microsoft have made this announcement as Apple has added Microsoft Exchange support in the next version of its OS X operating system which ships this month. As many more players are entering the market, but more importantly entering the market online supplying Office like packages online and in the cloud, Microsoft still needs to provide its users a reason to keep paying for their products.
A new tool is available for Google Apps Premier users, the sync plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. But you read it right, it’s only available for Google Apps Premier or Education accounts, the Standard and free account will have to wait (or not) to receive this tool, or you can try the Premier version for free.
Still this is a great advance for Google, the Google Apps platform had a great impact in users and enterprises; but the Outlook compatibility was one of the most requested features considering the awful performance given by IMAP and the not so convenient POP3 configurations. This plug-in will keep in sync your mail, contacts and calendar with your Microsoft Outlook in a very transparent way.
Here’s a short demo:
Some of the features:
For e-mail the plug-in uses the Offline Gmail Protocol. Avoiding the unconfortability and low performance from IMAP.
Free/Busy lookup and Global Address List functionality, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with your colleagues, regardless of whether they use Outlook’s calendar or Google Calendar.
A simple data migration tool which allows users to easily copy existing data from Exchange or Outlook into Google Apps.