No. You most certainly are not--nor, in fact, were you ever--going to get that. For one, Outlook on Windows still supports versions of Exchange Server going back to at least Exchange 2003 if not earlier. This is because in addition to using Web Services to connect to Exchange 2007 and the upcoming Exchange 2010, Outlook on Windows supports MAPI, or the Messaging API. MAPI support is certainly not the magic spell that all too many people in the Mac world think it is, but it does allow Outlook to connect to a wide range of Exchange versions. This is important as, contrary to what the Exchange team would like, you don't just upgrade your Exchange version because a new one exists.

While there's nothing in Thursday's Microsoft announcement about specific protocol support in Outlook Mac, I would be highly surprised if it will support connecting to Exchange via MAPI. Given how even the Exchange team is deprecating MAPI starting with Exchange 2010, the idea that it would show up in what is essentially a new product to be released in late 2010 makes almost no sense. So it's safe to assume that Outlook on the Mac will be a Web Services-only client. Not running Exchange 2007 or later? Outlook Mac will be just a big e-mail client that opens .ics files too. Maybe there will be some LDAP access, maybe not. (I'd like to think the Mac BU won't dump LDAP as a separate protocol, but it's not out of the question.)

So right there, you're not matching up with Outlook. Before you pooh-pooh this as not being important, there are a lot of companies that are still on Exchange 2003. It works well for them, so why upgrade?

As for Visual Basic for Applications support in the upcoming version of Outlook, that's a coin toss at the moment. However, even if Outlook includes VBA, it's not going to have the OS-level hooks that VBA on Windows gets. It would be an Office-only tool. If you want to interact with the rest of the OS, you're using AppleScript. If Outlook doesn't have VBA, then there's a whole mess 'o stuff in the Windows version that won't work on the Mac version. The situation is a bit of a --either way, it's another place where Mac users wind up on the short end.

This isn't necessarily bad. There are features that the Mac version of Office has right now that don't exist on the Windows version because it would make no sense whatsoever. The same thing goes for the other direction--you're not going to see the Windows version of Office build an AppleScript engine just to match the Mac version of Office. The Mac BU isn't going to code a feature and associated its infrastructure just to fill in a checkbox. In fact, you might prefer certain things like oh, type, to be based on the Mac OS model. (Were I to be a cynical IT admin, I'd lay decent odds that the proposed feature set for the version of Entourage that was going to be in the next version of Office for the Mac and this "brand new exciting version of Outlook" would probably map out pretty close to identical. Would a company change a product name solely to change perception? Oh. Heck. Yeah. But I'd have to be pretty cynical to think that.) I find it fascinating that the same group of users that will scream about how bloated Word is, will insist on bloating Outlook just to match a feature list. But that's life in the computing world.