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Microsoft Details Shift From Entourage to Outlook for Next Major Release, Announces Office 2008 Business Edition

This is great news. Microsoft is replacing their sh_tty software with different sh_tty software.

I suppose they always have enjoyed bending people over and forcing their sh_tty products on people. I feel sorry for all the victimized people for taking it up the.....



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Microsoft hasn't and never will make a cent off me.
 
I've moved on to iWork, and overall I really love iWork, but I am very excited about this announcement.

Competition is a great thing for consumers, choice is great, and whatever one's preference for productivity apps, this is great news for the Mac platform.

Great job Microsoft. Great job.
 
HLdan said:
Ah, Microsoft is really "Microshaft". It's amazing, they have tried for years to keep Macs out of the business/enterprise sector. Now that Apple has designed Snow Leopard to have full Exchange support without ANY version of MS Office installed, Microsoft is now seeing a lost $$$ opportunity and NOW that are giving in and making a business version of the Mac Office suite. They are not gonna get my money, I will stick with Snow Leopard without any additional software. MS=FAIL.
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From what I have heard, SL doesn't have full exchange support, but instead it is very limited. It supports only newer versions of exchange, and only supports syncing though activesync the same way the iphone does. No public folders, shared calanders, etc. SL's exchange support might be great for the home or small business but is far from what an enterprise expects from a mail system.

Outlook is a great enterprise email system and it is about time it is available. It's a big reason why Macs aren't adopted on desktops in many businesses.
 
...and yet still no word on the A/V update to MSN Messenger.

Seems stupid because aMSN (3rd party msn client for mac) has been using webcam with msn it for a long time and its open source, not to mention Windows users have had this feature for years! Microsoft can't step up their game?
 
dagamer34 said:
Is the shift just for Outlook or is it for all Office Mac apps? And what difference does it make if they call it Outlook instead of Entourage if there isn't feature parity between the Windows and Mac versions?
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They're all moving to Cocoa, at least that's what it seems like. And I guess what I meant to say is hopefully the shift from Entourage to Outlook means the feature parity between Windows Outlook and Outlook for Mac will be much closer than there was before.
 
iwork

I have iWork but it isn't powerful enough to use for some important tasks I need to do daily. Numbers' functionality falls flat when trying to compare it to Excel's when it comes to pivot tables. When you have over 80,000 rows and 250 columns of data Excel handles it like a dream and Numbers looks at it and says "huh?".

If Numbers could handle pivot tables like Excel can I think I could wean myself from Office altogether.
 
Unless one has not other choice (employer demand) or requires some specific feature not available in alternatives, iWork, NeoOffice and OpenOffice offer more features and serviceability then the majority of users (Mac, PC and Linux) require.

Why anyone would pay Microsoft for Office is beyond me. Even those with employers that blindly demand that Office be used often use the other products at home without their employers even knowing (as i do).
 
I'm not sure if I should be happy about this news or not. A proper Cocoa Office will be nice but I can't say that me and Outlook have ever seen "eye to eye" (I honestly prefer the simplicity and speed of Mail so I'll be interested to see how well Exchange compatibility works in the Snow Leopard version) and I'm not happy that we have to wait until around November next year (depending on what "holidays" is defined as by Microsoft).
 
goof_ball said:
This is great news. Microsoft is replacing their sh_tty software with different sh_tty software.

I suppose they always have enjoyed bending people over and forcing their sh_tty products on people. I feel sorry for all the victimized people for taking it up the.....



-------
Microsoft hasn't and never will make a cent off me.
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Do you own an iPhone? If so you just paid Microsoft money. Apple license exchange support and they pay a pretty penny.
 
*LTD* said:
MS has already filed an appeal? Are they preparing one? Where did you read this?
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Sorry, I thought I should be clearer, the announcement was just just made yesterday concerning the injunction. It hasn't been announced yet, but its pretty obvious that MS will try to overturn the injunction - they have 60 days to respond.


FoxyKaye said:
"Business Edition" still without VBA support. I almost feel like nominating M$ for a Darwin Award.

I can't wait to see how the folks at the MBU justify this move.
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Nadine and others have already said that VBA support will be in the next (after 2008) version of Office.
 
pdjudd said:
Nadine and others have already said that VBA support will be in the next (after 2008) version of Office.
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I suppose Nadine and others will also be willing to upgrade my useless Office 2008 licenses as well. Sorry, the MBU really screwed up this issue from the start, and I don't care how much it gets sugar-coated by the MBU now, Office 2008 started life as an inferior product that Mac users were essentially cornered into buying because of the timing of Office 2007, the new docx etc. files, and the tardiness of a working XML converter for Office 2004.
 
"…Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition, scheduled for release on September 15th…"

Anyone else notice the irony of a "2008" product coming out in September of 2009?
 
If nothing else, at least SL got them off their butts and to finally try to give us what we've been asking for. Too bad I gave up on the MACBU a long time ago and switched all my Macs to Fusion/Outlook 2007.
 
Sounds promising. I hope this means a much more streamlined UI compared to the confusing mess that Office:mac has right now. I also hope they include OneNote, or at least stop trying to cram Word together with Publisher and OneNote as a single app.
 
dagamer34 said:
Is the shift just for Outlook or is it for all Office Mac apps? And what difference does it make if they call it Outlook instead of Entourage if there isn't feature parity between the Windows and Mac versions?
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There is feature parity from what I've read.
 
John Gruber and Jason Snell have the following take on the subject:

. . . that they’re pre-announcing this so far in advance to discourage current Entourage users from switching to the new Exchange-compatible versions of Apple Mail and iCal in Snow Leopard.

http://daringfireball.net/
 
FoxyKaye said:
I suppose Nadine and others will also be willing to upgrade my useless Office 2008 licenses as well. Sorry, the MBU really screwed up this issue from the start, and I don't care how much it gets sugar-coated by the MBU now, Office 2008 started life as an inferior product that Mac users were essentially cornered into buying because of the timing of Office 2007, the new docx etc. files, and the tardiness of a working XML converter for Office 2004.
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As the Mac BU said several times, they weren't able to get VBA ported over to make it universal without delaying it further. VBA was heavilly carbon. Office 2008 was more about making office universal and actually releasing it at a reasonable time to accommodate the availability of the new formats.

It was well stated months before its release that VBA would not be part of 2008 nor was it going to be updated for 2008 at all. It was either cutting it out or having a second delay - they opted for not delaying it. It was a very hard decision for the team and they have been living with it for a long time. You were not forced into buying it though. Nobody put a gun to your head.
 
pdjudd said:
Sorry, I thought I should be clearer, the announcement was just just made yesterday concerning the injunction. It hasn't been announced yet, but its pretty obvious that MS will try to overturn the injunction - they have 60 days to respond.
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No problem. ;) I'm sure they'll appeal it. I doubt there's any other option they'd consider. This is an interesting issue because it appears i4i actually has a case.
 
pdjudd said:
You were not forced into buying it though. Nobody put a gun to your head.
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That was, of course, until my users started getting Office 2007 docx and xlsx files emailed to them by researchers, foundations, and other business entities that they couldn't open in Office 2004, or that the Open XML Converter wouldn't convert properly because it spent almost all of 2008 in Beta with significant bugs - which was almost 14 months or more since Office 2007 hit the market. Of course, for the VBA scripts our researchers were using in Excel, they could always convert them to AppleScript, which no Windows user would be able to access. You're right, there wasn't a gun pointed at my head at all, just general incompetence from Microsoft.
 
wlh99 said:
From what I have heard, SL doesn't have full exchange support, but instead it is very limited. It supports only newer versions of exchange, and only supports syncing though activesync the same way the iphone does. No public folders, shared calanders, etc. SL's exchange support might be great for the home or small business but is far from what an enterprise expects from a mail system.

Outlook is a great enterprise email system and it is about time it is available. It's a big reason why Macs aren't adopted on desktops in many businesses.
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True, however I think you missed my point. I don't think MS would've done any of this had it not been for Apple creating support in SL for Exchange. This would mean a lot of corporate employees would not need a Windows machine to create calendars, check emails and handle contacts anymore, instead they will be able to do this on their Macs which further moves people away from being so dependent upon Microsoft Office, especially the Windows version.
Competition is great and this has got to be the reason why Microsoft did this. I strongly believe there would be NO Outlook on Mac if Apple had not built in Exchange support in SL.
 
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