MicrosoftI'm very disappointed with this "new" Outlook. First off, I don't like how it's being pushed on my users. If anyone switches to it, they quickly find out that they lose access to shared resources such as other people's calendars, or calendars hosted from shared mailboxes. The tasks feature is non-existent. Instead of loading users see a prompt to install the To Do app. The ability to open another user's folder (calendar, inbox, contacts) is gone. Instead users need to login to the OWA to load these. I have noticed that often, calendars hosted from shared mailboxes won't even load after being added through the OWA. None of my users can stay on the "new" Outlook long enough to see the supposed benefits. This software should not be offered to users at all until it's feature complete. Frankly, I have never liked Outlook for Mac. I have often called it the worst email and collaboration app available for Mac. It often loses the ability to search. It has caching issues when a user's mailbox gets above 20GB. It has no real archiving ability. The archiving function is the worst I have seen in any email client. To be able to view the archived content, users must reimport all of that content back into Outlook where it can bog down the app. The Windows version of Outlook allows users to simply open the PST file and close it again when it's no longer needed. Until Microsoft gives Mac users ALL of the features available in the Windows version of Outlook, I will continue pushing the built-in Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Reminders, and Notes apps. There are problems sometimes with shared resources using Apple's apps, but at least these apps work. They support open standards, which makes importing and exporting data easy, and getting help for these apps is not the huge time wasting runaround that Microsoft makes users go through to get help. Apple got Microsoft into the application software business way back when the Mac first launched, and I think that continuing to give Mac users the short end of the stick with Office for Mac is a lousy way to show gratitude. I absolutely will not use Outlook on my own Macs because of its many failings, only a few of which I have mentioned here. I also rarely use any other Office apps for Mac. I find Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to be far superior in ease of use and features. If I need to send a document to a Windows user, I can export the files into .doc, .xlsx, .ppt or just make a PDF.
