One of the tools I cannot work without is Outlook. Over the years I’ve tried everything from Thunderbird with Sunbird to some really weird products like Chandler and Omea, that never really found the sweet spot that Outlook hits. I wanted to be free of the Exchange lock, which while powerful, is a real pain to share outside of the corporate environment (share a view of your calendar with friends and family? Not a chance…)
Naturally then, Outlook is one of the driving reasons behind maintaining a VM/Boot Camp partition for day-to-day work (obviously, the anchor is Visual Studio/.NET). I looked at Entourage from Office 2004, but was not entirely impressed it–I have grown dependent on RPC/HTTP (can’t stand the thought of VPN any longer just to check email), and that’s flat out not supported by Entourage (not in any of the versions I tried, at least).
So I have high hopes for Office 2008 due out this Jan 15. I’m hoping for closer feature parity between Entourage and Outlook 2007 (where will I find something like ClearContext?), especially with respect to RPC/HTTP. And finally, I’m hoping it shows up on MSDN–does anyone know if it will?
