Outlook only limited improvement on Entourage
I have never like Apple Mail and until recently used Entourage. This was an OK product apart from its poor stability, database corruption and font crashing issues. In this aspect, Outlook is a much better product and seems pretty rock-solidly stable. However, user friendly it isn't and in this respect the user interface is inferior to Entourage. MS seem to have set out to deliberately complicate it. The layout is inflexible and not good for smaller screens. In a fit of total idiocy, they have missed out the re-send message button and command. Stationery, which we were promised, is missing - very disappointing for those looking to send corporate formatted emails. If you want to show download progress, you have to keep opening a separate window, each time you send/receive (cmd-7). The synching is currently poor with MobileMe. Notes don't sync at all and you would have thought that as it was a Mac product, MS would have ensured that the options for databoxes (home, home-2, work, other, custom etc), matched Address Book and MobileMe but no, they did not bother. When a databox does not match, no data at all is imported into Outlook at sync. I use the contacts in MobileMe as my master data set for all devices/programs and the missing data in Outlook is a real downer. Overall I would award MS a score of 4½ out of 10 (must try harder next term!)
Wilson