| Microsoft is readying a successor to its popular Outlook e-mail and personal manager program, and Gold Coast Mac members were given an advance sneak peek at the May general meeting.
Microsoft representative Scot Travers gave about 70 members a step by step tour through a new product Microsoft is calling Alpaca. Intended to be a part of Office for Macintosh 2001, the new program will be available for Macintosh users before it is rolled out on the Windows platform.
 The demonstration got an enthusiastic response, as Travers detailed major changes to what is fast becoming the Mac’s standard e-mail program.
While Microsoft Outlook has become a de-facto standard in the Windows world, Macintosh users were left with Outlook Express, a program which had grown more capable with every release, but which is far less rich in features than the Windows version.
That changes with Alpaca. When it’s released, Mac users will be able to do the things Windows users have taken for granted, with added capabilities even Windows users won’t immediately have.
Travers detailed a feature set which includes full e-mail rules, allowing mail to be sorted, sent to folders, and even forwarded to other e-mail accounts. Formatting and composition of mail has also been given a major overhaul, with spell checking, word processor-like formatting, and full use of HTML.
The Personal Information Manager component, far less robust in Outlook Express than it is in Outlook, has also been considerably beefed up in Alpaca. For the first time, Mac users might consider using the Microsoft mail client as their primary contact database.
While Travers shared a wide-ranging demo of the new product, he was less specific about when we might see it. The best he’d do was “sometime this summer,” to be released as part of Macintosh Office 2001, the successor to Office 1998. While he would not give a date, speculation is that Microsoft would time any announcement to coincide with Macworld New York, set for July 19th.
In addition to showing off the software in development, Microsoft made a big push to interest members in Internet Explorer 5, Microsoft’s latest Internet browser. Travers brought along free CD’s for members, and gave a quick overview of the latest changes. Gold Coast Mac reviewed Internet Explorer 5 in the April newsletter, and detailed the new features, but members were still impressed with the new Scrapbook feature, which lets you save whole web pages for later offline examination, letting users form a web gallery on their local disk.
Microsoft and Gold Coast Mac joined to give away hundreds of dollars worth of software as door prizes, including copies of Encarta and Microsoft Office.
May 2000
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