Microsoft: Next Mac Office Due Late 2010 With Outlook

From PC World: Microsoft announced Thursday that the next edition of Microsoft Office for Mac will be released in late 2010. The new edition of the venerable office suite will include Outlook for Mac, a new application that will replace the Entourage.

"We'll bring forward all the functionality from the Entourage Web Services Edition, including public folders, managed folders, and category syncing, but with Outlook we're going even further and building a whole new application," said Microsoft Mac Business Unit general manager Eric Wilfrid.

Wilfrid said that Microsoft will create Outlook for Mac using Apple's modern Cocoa development frameworks, rather than the older Carbon system used by previous Office applications because of their legacy of having been originally developed for the Classic Mac OS.

"We're building on the most modern OS X frameworks to make Outlook beautiful, to make it high performance, and to make it well integrated with the OS," Wilfrid said.

Entourage has long been criticized for its large database, which is difficult to back up and can cause serious downtime if it gets corrupted. Wilfrid said that the new Outlook will use a new, modern database instead of the one used by Entourage.

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