Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit today announced some details of its next version of Microsoft Office for the Mac—and the big surprise is that Microsoft is committing to shipping a version of Outlook for the Macintosh. The Mac version of Outlook will replace the existing Entourage email and communication application that’s been part of Microsoft Office for several years; although Entourage has long features some Exchange capability, it’s always been a second-class citizen in the Exchange world—and it’s often unreliable monolithic database won it few friends even among Mac Office users. The new version of Outlook promises to make the Mac an equal player alongside its Windows counterparts—and it will be an entirely new Cocoa application, built using Mac OS X’s base technologies and featuring a new database system.
