Office 2011
I've been using the Beta 6 build for about 2 weeks.
I work at a company that has slowly been opening up to Mac users but much of our IT infrastructure is firmly Windows focused. We are HEAVY Outlook users, so much so that when I went to the Mac earlier this year I still was running Outlook 2010 in a Parallels Windows 7 session.
While there are a number of things I'm less than thrilled about in the Office 2011 version of Outlook, at the end of the day it is robust enough (unlike Entourage or Mail or iCal) and works well enough with the Exchange 2010 server that I don't have to use Parallels and Windows 7 anymore. I've slowly been importing my 15GB of PST files and haven't run into any major issues. Word, Excel and PPT are also much closer to the Windows versions that most of my colleagues use to while I'm still happier using Keynote, at least I can create almost perfectly compatible presentations and share with them using Powerpoint 2011.
Communicator is a big improvement, but it lacks what I had most wanted -- support for sharing desktop. My company is moving away from Live Meeting and Goto meeting so we can use the built-in sharing in Communicator, but given that the Mac version lacks this I'm not sure what my workaround will be (perhaps back to Parallels, grrrr).
Some of the things I've discovered in Outlook I'm not sure how to fix (and would appreciate any suggestions)
- No automatic spell checker (fix manually or when you send it will go out with errors)
- Signature defaults to above quoted text so can get confusing when replying to a thread
- When changing a meeting in calendar, no option to just send update to added/deleted participants
- In the calendar, adding resources like conference rooms needs to be done one at a time rather than en-masse making it difficult if you are searching for a single open room out of 25 possibilities
- Getting names to match up when sending email or meeting invites can be hit or miss; if you type the name too fast and don't choose the right one from the drop down (for example if you have someone's personal and work address listed) then you'll end up with a ? instead of the right person
At the end of the day I think MSFT did a really strong job with this release and it really doesn't suffer from nearly the same level of bastard red headed stepchild symptoms as most Mac versions of Office have in the past 10 years. That isn't to say that there isn't more work to be done to bring it in line with Windows, but for heavy Office users and especially those who work multi-platform then absolutely worth the upgrade.