Via email, I got this question:

entourage used to sync directly with mobile devices like the palm, but replaced it in ent2008 with apple’s sync services. outlook does this too. why don’t you sync directly with mobile devices instead of doing through ical?

There’s two major reasons for supporting Sync Services instead of writing our own support: time, and being a good Apple citizen.

Today, there are dozens of mobile device manufacturers out there, and hundreds of different mobile devices.  Before the introduction of Sync Services, we had to write our own support for each of those devices.  There’s little commonality between the APIs that devices from different manufacturers use, so it’s a big investment in development time to support various multiple devices.  Further, as devices evolve, updates to the devices require updates to sync support.  Devices come out whenever they come out, which means that we had to be prepared at any time to start working on support for a new device.

The introduction of Sync Services in 10.2 offered up an opportunity for us to reduce our development costs, since we would only have to support a single sync instead of a myriad of different syncs.  Additionally, it gave us the chance to continue to be a good Apple citizen.  One of the major changes that Sync Services introduced is a back-end database called The Truth.  Apple’s own apps write to The Truth, and other clients can also read and write to this central database too.  That allows us to share our data with other clients, and to view data from other clients as well.

For more information about our Sync Services support and where we’re going from here, you can read this earlier blog post of mine: Q&A: Can I sync my Outlook:Mac 2011 calendar with Sync Services?

I saw this question on Twitter:

Anybody know if the new Outlook for Mac is scriptable? Seems to share same creator code as Entourage, but not same scripting interface…

Yes, Outlook has full support for AppleScript.  AppleScript is an important part of our internal testing for our suite.  We have always had great AppleScript support across the suite, and we have continually improved it in each version.  Outlook continues that tradition.

If you have existing Entourage scripts, you’re going to need to update them.  Outlook’s AppleScript dictionary has several differences to improve consistency and scriptability.  Pretty much anything that you could script in Entourage is also scriptable in Outlook.  The only places where you won’t be able to script something in Outlook that you could in Entourage are features not found in Outlook, such as newsgroup support and projects.

Speaking of twitter, you can follow me here, and there’s @officeformac too!

I saw the following question on Twitter:

Dear lazyweb: anyone know how to send a message from a different address in Outlook Mac 2011? The From dropdown only shows my e-mail address

I’ve also got a couple of email addresses which just forward to my primary email address, and I sometimes want email to show as being sent from one of those other email addresses instead of my primary one.  For example, I have an @acm.org email address which just forwards to my primary email address, and sometimes I want to send mail which comes from that @acm.org email address.

To do this, you’ll need to set up an account for this email address in Outlook.  Go to the Preferences, then select Accounts.  In the bottom left corner, hit the plus sign and select “Email…”.  Enter in your name and the email address of this account.  Under “Server information”, leave the username, password, and incoming server fields blank.  Then, for your outgoing server information, enter in the details for one of your other email addresses.  You might need to click on “More options” to enter more details about how to authenticate to this server (usually just the username and password for the other email server that you’re using).

Speaking of twitter, you can follow me here (but be prepared for content beyond the confines of the Office).

Chris asked:

Does Outlook 2011 support calendar sync to sync services like Entourage did?

You’re correct: Entourage supported contacts and calendar sync via OS X Sync Services.  Some heavy-duty users experienced recurring issues with self-duplicating items, which made for a pretty painful experience.

To avoid these issues, we rebuilt our Sync Services support from the ground up for Outlook.  We set a very high quality bar, with the goal of avoiding those issues that our Entourage users faced.  For our initial v14.0.0 release, we got there with contacts.  But we didn’t get there with calendar.  Close, but no cigar.  Close wasn’t good enough, so we held off.  We wanted Outlook to be the most awesome Outlook ever.  We decided that we’d rather not support it on the initial release rather than have a version that didn’t meet our standards.

We will add calendar sync in a future update.  I don’t have a date to share yet for that.  The team is working hard on it, and I’ll post when it’s ready.

I saw this question on Twitter:

Does anyone know what Outlook 2011 for Mac is using to render HTML emails?

Outlook:Mac uses WebKit to render HTML mails.  We also use WebKit to create HTML mail.  For those of you who didn’t like Entourage’s HTML mail, I think you’re going to find Outlook’s WebKit mail more to your liking.

Via a Twitter direct message, I was asked:

can i import my entourage data into outlook?

Yes!  For those of you who are currently using Entourage, you’ll be able to import your existing Entourage data into Outlook:Mac 2011.  We also support importing from Apple Mail, as well as importing PST files from Outlook for Windows.

You can follow me on twitter here, and you can also follow my team on twitter @officeformac.