I've have a customer with an Office365 Small Business Premium subscription. They have a MacBook Pro and an iMac desktop both running Mountain Lion with Office 2011 fully patched. When running Outlook, we see extremely high CPU usage by the Outlook process - it's averaging about 95%, which in turn causes poor performance on the MacBook in general - the spinning beachball repeatedly pops up rendering the MacBook unusable. I've been through a lot of troubleshooting on this to no avail. Here's what I've done so far:
- Reinstalled Office
- Created a new user profile
- Rebuilt the Outlook identity
- Rebuilt the Outlook database as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2360509
- Cleared out Deleted Items as per http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macoutlook/mac-outlook-1412-cpu-runs-very-high-since-install/82b8671b-f186-418e-b751-a5d6321f0f07
- Reindexed Spotlight
- Disabled autodiscover in AppleScript as per http://www.officeformachelp.com/outlook/exchange/autodiscover/
- Reduced the number of subfolders/items in "important folders"
At this point I'm open to suggestions! There's going to be a new iMac coming next week, so I'm going to be interested to see if this exhibits the same behaviour.