Microsoft has announced that Exchange support will be rolled into Entourage this summer via a free download. Yay! Why is this a big deal? This is a big deal because it will help Mac folks in an Exchange environment (and there are lots of Exchange environments out there, trust me). Right now the Mac e-mail offerings from Microsoft include Outlook Express, Entourage, and Outlook for Mac. Outlook Express is exactly what you would think it is, a simple e-mail client with POP/IMAP. Entourage is OE plus PIM functionality. Outlook for Mac is only for talking to an Exchange server. Outlook for Mac also only runs under Classic, and poorly I might add. Having at least a Carbon Exchange client that can also talk POP/IMAP is going to a huge relief for a lot of corp type Mac people I know. It's too bad they have to wait for "summer 2003" before they can get it.

Outlook for Mac was always an odd beast. It wasn't written by the Mac Business Unit, so it never fit in well with the other Microsoft Mac offerings. It was free, but Entourage wasn't. People who need to talk to Exchange will obviously need Office.

It always seemed odd to have three e-mail programs going when you only needed to have two, just like on Windows where there is only Outlook and Outlook Express. [Note: I'm only talking about Microsoft offerings. I know there are many other e-mail clients for POP/IMAP on Windows.] It was an odd mistake for Microsoft to make, since they are typically a very efficient company. Anyway, it's good to see this consolidation of features.

Soon I'll post my adventures in getting Evolution, from Ximian, running on OS X ;-)