For once, this naming collision isn’t a problem, because whether you bought the Office 365 subscription or are using an Office 365 service plan, you’re entitled to run this version of Outlook.įiguring out whether or not a given person has access to the new Outlook is more confusing than it needs to be, though. The long-standing problem with Office 365’s name is that it applies to two completely separate things: the little box you can buy at your local retailer, which contains a usage key for a subscription that allows you to run Office apps on your computer (the “consumer editions” of Office 365), and the cloud-based service that includes Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online, and various other services (usually collectively known as the “commercial editions”). Microsoft released Outlook for Mac to Office 365 subscribers only. However, synchronization is significantly faster than in Outlook 2011, and in my tests it seems to be much more robust as well. There’s no support for MAPI over HTTPS, which is not surprising given that the EWS synchronization core in this version is largely based on the core code from Outlook 2011. EWS support means that it can connect to Exchange 2010 SP2 and later (including the Office 365 service), while IMAP support works with Gmail and other cloud services. This version of Outlook supports connections using Exchange Web Services (EWS), IMAP, and POP. That raises some interesting questions that I’ll address later. While the rest of Office 2011 is stuck at version 14.x, the next release of Office for Windows (and the related server products, including Exchange) is already being called Wave 16.

Opening the “About Outlook” dialog reveals that the program’s official name is “Microsoft Outlook for Mac”, and the initially shipped version is labeled as version 15.3. One immediately interesting thing about the new version of Outlook is that it no longer includes a version number or year in its official name. What’s in the new Outlook, and how does it stack up against its Windows cousin? Most importantly, what does the future hold for Office on the Mac?

Since the release of Outlook 2011 for Mac, Apple has released four major versions of Mac OS X, Microsoft released Windows 8 and 8.1, and the Office team released Office 2013-not to mention the many changes and updates to Outlook Web App both for web browsers and mobile devices. Office 2011 for Mac was actually released in October 2010, and, while it was hailed at the time for being a major improvement over its predecessor, lately it’s been showing its age. Like cars, Microsoft products often get a bonus year added on to their names.

Microsoft outllok for mac