Microsoft Outlook Sets Its Sights on the Mac

If there were any lingering doubts about the Mac's penetration of the enterprise, they were dispelled on Thursday when Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced it would ship its Outlook e-mail client in Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition next year.

Outlook will replace Microsoft's Entourage e-mail client in the Business edition, but not in the Home and Student editions. [*Correction - Aug. 14, 2009]

Outlook for the Mac will be built from the ground up with Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) Cocoa framework to provide improved integration with the Mac operating system.

It will also give enterprise users rights management capabilities.

Microsoft's Announcements

While enterprises are waiting for Outlook for Mac, which will be released late next year, they can use Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition, which Microsoft also announced on Thursday.

This has enhanced performance and reliability, and lets users sync Tasks, Notes and Categories, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft also announced Home and Student editions of Office 2008 for Mac on Thursday.

Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition will launch on Sept. 15, at which time the suite will still carry Entourage. It will be available for pre-order from Aug. 18. Estimated retail price is US$399.95, while an upgrade will cost $239.95.

Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition carries a retail price tag of $149.95.

About Outlook for Mac

In addition to building Outlook from the ground up with Cocoa, Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) has given the e-mail client a new database and information rights management.

The database is a high-speed, file-based application which supports backing up files with Apple's Time Machine and searches with Apple's Spotlight.

Information rights management will help enterprises control the distribution of, and access to, sensitive information -- one of the more difficult tasks they face today.

"Rights management is a huge challenge for the enterprise," Mike Tedesco, senior product manager at Microsoft's MacBU, told MacNewsWorld. "Today, on the Mac platform, there is no solution for rights management in Entourage or Outlook Web Access or any place. Rights management is critical to our customers who have Macs in the enterprise."

The Grapes of Wrath

Reactions to the announcement from readers of the TUAW blog were mixed.

Microsoft's prices are just too steep, said commenter David Emery. "I'll have a hard time justifying the upgrade price, even with the return of VB," he wrote. (VB is Visual Basic, which will be offered with Office for Mac next year after having been removed previously.) "I don't use Outlook/Exchange. I'm not seeing the value proposition here."

Getting Outlook on the Mac excited John Luetke. "Outlook for Mac! Hurrah!" he wrote. "Finally Entourage will be done with."

However, Report2Michael was wary. "If that is a true Cocoa version of Outlook -- something that conforms to the Apple UIG and does not try to trump the OS -- then kudos Microsoft," he wrote.

Cocoa and Other Tech Stuff

Cocoa is one of five major application programming interfaces (APIs) available for Mac OS X. The others are Carbon, POSIX, X11 and Java.

Cocoa applications are developed using Apple's Xcode and Interface Builder development tools and the Objective-C language. However, Cocoa can be accessed using other tools such as LispWorks, Python, Perl and Ruby, through bridging mechanisms such as PasCocoa, PyObjC, and Camelbones.

The Cocoa API automates many aspects of an application to comply with Apple's human interface guidelines, so Mac users may get a kinder, gentler, more user-friendly Outlook than their PC counterparts.

Tweets between people who are apparently Microsoft engineers discussed Outlook for Mac in some detail. "It's not a port of Win Outlook," @bynkii tweeted. "It is an all-native Mac client. MacBU is writing the whole thing."

"Shares some infrastructure with Entourage but all new Cocoa app," @Clegko tweeted.

Outlook for Mac uses Web Services APIs, MacBU's Tedesco said. "With Entourage, we connected to Microsoft Exchange through WebDAV, and most of the work is done on the client," he said. "That created challenges for us, especially around delivering end users features and scenarios like Tasks and Notes."

So MacBU collaborated with the Exchange 2007 development team to co-develop Web Services APIs. "Going forward, Outlook for Mac will connect with Exchange Server through these APIs, so the Exchange Server will do the bulk of the work," Tedesco said.

Win-Win All the Way?

Microsoft is offering Outlook on Mac to enterprises because of the increasing Mac presence in business. "We're seeing customers choose the Mac platform in the enterprise, but whether their business is all Mac or a mix of Mac and PC, they interact with other customers using Windows or Macs," Tedesco said.

"The leading mail client running against Exchange is Outlook, which is the de facto standard for enterprise clients," he explained. That led to the development of Outlook for Mac.

The move will benefit Microsoft, said Laura DiDio, principal at ITIC.

"Microsoft doesn't care about the hardware, it cares about the software," she told MacNewsWorld. "E-mail is the most used application in the enterprise, and this is a win-win for Microsoft. You have to think of the customer first, and a lot of customers are going to the Mac because of the iPhone and the iPod."