Over on the Office for Mac Team Blog is a rather exiting announcement that Outlook is to make it’s long awaited return to Mac OS X.

Back in the day, there was OS 9, we had Office 2001 and there was a freely downloadable version of Outlook for Mac, called Outlook 2001. Outlook 2001 was a direct port of Outlook for Windows. It ran beautifully and supported all the features of Exchange servers at the time. It used a regular PST file for it’s data store, it talked MAPI to Exchange servers and it was very stable. Along comes Mac OS X and Microsoft release a shiny new version of Office that is strangely lacking any email client whatsoever. Before too long, Microsoft announced that they were releasing a Mac-specific email client and along came Entourage. The first versions of Entourage weren’t very good. They didn’t support Exchange servers, they couldn’t use PST files and they had a very limited database size for email storage. A lot of these faults were eventually fixed, however Exchange support has never been as good and as complete as Outlook provided, even to this day.

We’re going to have to wait until some time in 2010 for Outlook, along with the next version of Office, however this is a positive move on Microsoft’s part — it shows that they are committed to Office for Mac and committed to Macs in Enterprise environments.