I have to use it for the calendaring, but I don't go to many meetings. I've always found Outlook seems to want to be it's own email culture and its developers don't look outside that for new features until they have to. And it always feels a few years behind current UI technology.
Fortunately, someone has installed the IMAP Connector for Exchange and I use Opera to talk to that. It struggles with the backend storage sometimes, but I don't know if that's a configuration problem or bugs in the connector (probably the latter).
Wade.