Seems the adage “Do your market research” was absent at the Mac BU at Microsoft during the development of Office 2011. In case you’ve missed my previous posts the new and anticipated Outlook for Mac is missing a key feature used by the majority of Mac users. That being the ability to sync iCal calendars, and thus iPhones, iPods, etc with Outlook. According to the project lead this will be coming in a future update.

“We’ve seen questions come up regarding syncing with Outlook on Twitter and Facebook and wanted to take a minute to answer them here and make sure you have everything you need to know prior to the launch of Office for Mac 2011 which is next Tuesday, Oct. 26. For customers not using Exchange accounts, we wanted to give some background on our support for Sync Services. With Outlook 2011, we started from scratch with the goal of nailing reliability, performance, and features. We learned important lessons from struggles with Entourage in these areas and, with Office 2011 requiring OSX Leopard and up, were able to take advantage of substantial reliability improvements Apple made in its frameworks.

As we continue to develop Outlook for Mac, we’re taking a phased approach to ensure we are delivering reliable, high quality scenarios with Sync Services. In Outlook 14.0, the release arriving this month, you’ll find sync support for your contacts through Sync Services (Exchange users have full sync support for their content). We do understand that Calendar sync is important and are working on it now. It will be available in a free update to Outlook for Mac 2011 and we will keep you posted on timing.

Below are some answers to the most commonly asked questions. If there’s anything we haven’t covered, feel free to leave a comment below and we’ll get back to you. Additionally, on Tuesday we will have new Help & How To content which will provide additional details on how to sync your content.

If I am not an Exchange user, can my mobile device sync mail, contacts, calendar, etc?

For users not running Exchange, you can sync contacts through Sync Services and Outlook 2011 today. We will be adding additional support in the coming months including calendar.”

Seems though that the only thing they “nailed” is distain from Mac users – me included. From the comments of the above post.

“I am a current user of Office for Mac 2008 and was very much looking forward to the new version. My main interest is in Outlook 2011 as a proper alternative to iCal & Mail. I’m a big fan of Mac, but the incompatibilities with my Windows/Office using colleagues has been a long time frustration.

This lack of support for synchronizing Outlook to iCal is – in my opinion – a big big mistake. Had it been there then I would have bought the new suite on day one, almost entirely for Outlook 2011 for Mac. In fact, I think it would be a huge driver for Mac users to finally really adopt Office for Mac, and choose it over iWork.

Not being able to sync my calendar with my iCal and therefore iPhone and iPad still leaves Outlook entirely unworkable for me. And that also goes for the mail bit, since that is where I do receive and send my meeting invites. I truly hope you will release this update very soon. Until then, consider me a lost and disappointed (to-be?) customer…”

This is very disappointing news. I have been eagerly awaiting the release of Office 2011 and had been hoping we’d all be surprised not only with competent syncing but with an iPhone companion for Outlook as well.

I’ve been using Office since the 1990′s and even though this is arguably the best version it simply doesn’t meet my needs and I’m seriously considering moving to something else. I’ve kept telling myself that task and category syncing was just an update away and that “surely they’re working on an iPhone companion, just wait”. So I’ve waited for years now and you’re actually trending backwards?

Thanks, but no thanks.

With so many people relying on iPhone devices, calendar integration with Outlook:mac 2011 is now even more vital than ever. Working in healthcare, I have noticed a quickly increasing trend of healthcare providers who have migrated from other handheld devices to Apple iPad and iPhone devices. Where Entourage has seamless contacts and calendar synchronization with iPhone and Macintosh desktop applications via iTunes, Outlook:mac 2011 seems to miss the mark by not currently offering calendar synchronization. I hope that Microsoft is not shooting itself in the foot, disenfranchising the Apple iPhone community, by delaying iCal synchronization.

Wow. What a huge omission. No sale here.

Again my recommendation stands, don’t buy 2011 until sync services are restored.