14 DAY TRIAL // Concomitantly with the first public details on the next iteration of Office for Mac, due in 2010, Microsoft also released the Web Services Edition of Entourage 2008 for Mac. Essentially, the promise from the Redmond company is that Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition is capable of offering customers a closer connection between Entourage and Microsoft Exchange Server, while kicking up a notch the level of parity between Entourage and Outlook with Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition.
“To take advantage of the latest innovations that Exchange 2007 has to offer, Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition uses Exchange Web Services to communicate with Exchange Server. In this update, Entourage uses Exchange Web Services to provide several calendaring improvements. The update includes support for notes, tasks, and category synchronization with the Exchange Server,” reads an excerpt of Web Services Edition’s description.
Still, Microsoft underlines that the infrastructure changes brought to the table with the advent of Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition, are designed to uses in the new era of product development when it comes down to the company’s email client for Mac computers. The software giant revealed on August 13th, 2009, that the successor of Office 2008 for Mac would no longer feature Entourage. Instead, Microsoft plans to deliver Outlook for Mac with the next version of Office for Mac, which will be available for customers by the end of 2010.
“Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition uses Exchange Web Services instead of WebDAV providing Mac users a better Exchange experience. Exchange Web Services is a modern protocol that enables client applications like Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition to communicate more quickly and reliably with the server running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 with Update Rollup 4 or later,” MacBU noted. “This rebuilt version of Entourage 2008 not only offers performance and reliability improvements to e-mail and calendaring but new syncing of tasks, notes and categories, and Autodiscovery.”
Customers have already been able to get a taste of the Web Services Edition’s improved data synchronization performance. In this regard, Microsoft revealed that a Beat build of Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition, released earlier in 2009 has been tested by various companies and organizations, NASA and Wesleyan University. Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition is designed to play nice with Entourage Office 2008 for Mac SP2, on Exchange 2007 SP1 RU4 or later.
Microsoft Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition is available for download here.