Rumors of Outlook 2004? Office 2004?

Ripcord · #1 October 7th, 2003, 06:30 PM

Has anyone heard anything about MS bringing out a new OS X-based version of Outlook?

Entourage and Mail+Address Book don't count since they're just about as poor excuses for Exchange clients as I can imagine. (Exchange was designed for the IMAP protocol. LDAP, SMTP, IMAP were afterthoughts and it shows - why didn't MS just build IMAP into Entourage, or port Outlook, instead of doing what they did?)

Right now I'm forced to run Outlook 2001 (which is a good app, but it's painful to me running ANY classic app, even in Panther)

I ask this especially because I've been hearing rumblings about Office 2004 for Mac... Has anyone heard anything about it?

spitty27 · #2 October 7th, 2003, 06:54 PM

i thought apple dropped office for x and were developing thier own suite. they already have a browser and presentation apps...maybe theyll bundle iApps + Keynote + Document (rumored name for apple's word processor) + Safari...... who knows

Ripcord · #3 October 7th, 2003, 07:42 PM

Don't start THAT rumor... That's definitely not true. People have speculated that this might happen eventually, but the only app that MS has dropped so far is Internet Exploder...

serpicolugnut · #4 October 7th, 2003, 08:14 PM

I believe the latest update to Entourage brings as much Outlook interactivity as you are going to get on the Mac from Microsoft.

They had stated a while back that they were examining the best way to bring this functionality to the Mac, and they finally settled on adding some of the functionality (Calendar, To Do List) to Entourage.

MisterMe · #5 October 7th, 2003, 11:10 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by spitty27
i thought apple dropped office for x and were developing thier own suite. they already have a browser and presentation apps...maybe theyll bundle iApps + Keynote + Document (rumored name for apple's word processor) + Safari...... who knows

Office:mac is not Apple's to drop. It is a suite of M$ products. As such, Office:mac will be around for as long as it produces profits for M$. And it produces a lot of profits for M$.

Arden · #6 October 8th, 2003, 01:30 AM

I believe Outlook development is officially dead on the Mac. Yes, it might suck, but that's life. Microsoft is definitely not dropping Office (and 2K4 just might be around the corner), but Outlook is gone and Entourage is here to stay.

Personally, I still use Office 98 and Mail.com for email (online only, no client or anything—I'm not paying for POP3 access because I'm cheap like that).

Ripcord · #7 October 8th, 2003, 01:34 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by arden
I believe Outlook development is officially dead on the Mac. Yes, it might suck, but that's life. Microsoft is definitely not dropping Office (and 2K4 just might be around the corner), but Outlook is gone and Entourage is here to stay.

Ugh, I hate to hear that. Outlook 2001 for Mac works really really well for me in an Exchange environment, but unless Entourage has some major overhauls, it just doesn't play well in the Enterprise. It's a decent home email proggie (since when is Office marketed exclusively at home users?), but it's not even second-rate when it comes to Exchange support.