Microsoft Outlook 2011 was released before Mac OS X introduced the Notification Center, but you can still implement consistent OS notifications with the help of some AppleScript.
Simply save the following code as an AppleScript (.scpt) file and then create a rule in Outlook to run it when new mail arrives. Once you have confirmed it’s working, you can disable the built-in Outlook notifications.
-- Get a list of all "current messages" in Outlook. tell application "Microsoft Outlook" set currentMessages to the current messages end tell -- Loop through the messages. repeat with eachMessage in currentMessages tell application "Microsoft Outlook" -- Only notify about unread messages. if is read of eachMessage is false then set displayNotification to true set messageSubject to get the subject of eachMessage set messageSender to sender of eachMessage set messageContent to plain text content of eachMessage -- Get an appropriate representation of the sender; preferably name, but fall back on email. try if name of messageSender is "" then set messageSender to address of messageSender else set messageSender to name of messageSender end if on error errorMessage number errorNumber try set messageSender to address of messageSender on error errorMessage number errorNumber -- Couldn’t get name or email; we’ll just say the sender is unknown. set messageSender to "Unknown sender" end try end try else -- The message was already read, so we won’t bother notifying about it. set displayNotification to false end if end tell -- Display notification if displayNotification is true then display notification messageContent with title messageSender subtitle messageSubject -- Allow time for the notification to trigger. delay 1 end if end repeat
Note: This script is based on a Growl notification script for Outlook by Matt Gemmell, which was based on an Entourage script he found on the internet.