Microsoft has announced that Outlook will ship with the next major version of Office for Mac. Currently expected to debut before next year\'s holiday season, Outlook will replace the present email program in the Mac Office suite, Entourage. Outlook for Mac will differ from the version available on Windows but the two will remain compatible.

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I think Mail in Snow Leopard finally gets full exchange support, so not sure that anyone is going to use Outlook/Entourage anyway. Currently Mail in regular Leopard works with Exchange pretty well if all you use it for is straight email.

Okay this is great news - I have been delving deeper into mac support and when you have a vista/2008/exchange/outlook setup on all the PCs, asking people who buy macs to use Entourage is a pain in the backside. It doesnt do everything that Outlook does, it doesn't setup in the same way (requiring obscure network and server settings to get talking to Exchange), it appears to be slower in our environment - for whatever reason Microsoft decided not to ship Outlook in Mac Office, I really don't know the history.

There is no question that this will make training and supporting users easier and will make it simpler for PC users to use Macs without telling them they have to resort to using Outlook Web Access. Great news for my work.

Thunderbird does more for me than Outlook does.
Shared calendering through Google is one extra.
Works great on a mac.
These office programs are not fully developed in mac versions.
Thunderbird + OpenOffice + Google contacts + Google Calendar. Couldn't ask for a better solution here.

iCal and Mail are fully developed Mac programs, they should do what you need just fine. Where Mail fails is in the features having Outlook + Exchange server have above and beyond just sending email. As I said above, Mail in Leopard (and probably Tiger?) works just fine with Exchange for simple mail. Can you even make Thunderbird work with Exchange at all?