New Mac Mail vs Outlook 2011

Well, for me it's the opposite of what you want. I don't like the all in one approach. I have an MBP, and a secondary monitor. So for most the day, I have iCal open on the bigger monitor, and Mail on my laptop. It's nice to glance over, see my appt's, and do my work. iCal in Lion is actually pretty good. Some don't like the leather look to the top of the app, and the little torn sheets thing. I honestly don't notice it. The full day view, with appts in the main area, a glance of upcoming appt's over the next week or so, and the month view above is nice; for me.

Outlook 2011 is okay, but I tend to find all the MS products bloated, and clunky. I'm not crazy about the interface of it either. Again, to me...

In the end, Mail, iCal, and Address Book have their advantages. Outlook definitely has the integration pieces. But with the newer version of the afore mentioned, and connecting to an Exchange 2010 Server, I really don't feel I'm missing anything.

TexKen said:

For example, one thing with Mac Mail that I might not like is that everything appears to be in different apps (iCal and contacts) rather than in one app in Outlook 2011. Are there any other integration problems.

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That's not an integration problem. In fact, Mail and iCal work together better than Outlook's email and calendar functions some of the time. (eg. Data Detectors.) Having them in separate apps also makes it easier to have both on screen at the same time (but you can do this in Outlook with some work if you like.)

Outlook does have some features, especially Exchange features, that Mail doesn't have (eg. Server-side rule editing)

If you're on Exchange, you can set both apps up and switch between them pretty easily; your mail is on the server, anyway, so other than downloading everything twice, there's no reason not to try them both out.

I'm still running SL, so I don't know if this has been improved in Lion, but the problem I ran into, was when outlook users wrote messages with embedded graphics, it never rendered properly with Mail.app. I'm actually still using Entourage since my company's exchange server is so ancient that Outlook 2011 doesn't support it.