It wasn't until late 2010, with the release of Office Mac 2011 (the most recent version to date) that Entourage was buried and a full version of Outlook for Mac was released. It didn't help that Entourage never quite reached parity with Outlook as an Exchange client. Various versions of Outlook Express and something called Entourage performed some or most of Outlook's functions through the early 2000's.īut those substitutes had no actual code from the baseline Microsoft Office suite, of which Outlook is a part, and the user interface was different enough from Outlook to create problems for support and IT departments. For many years, there were, at best, rudimentary and semi-functional Mac versions of Outlook, which created a self-fulfilling cycle that the Mac was not ready for or worthy of use in the enterprise.
Outlook and the Mac have a long and ugly history. This is great news if you live exclusively in an Exchange environment, but you may want to mute your celebration if you also deal with other calendars and contact lists created elsewhere.
The latest surprise release of Outlook for Mac 15.3 is largely what you'd hope to get in an Outlook refresh: At long last, a version that looks and works almost identically to the Windows version.
