Hello from the Enterprise side of the MacBU! For those who may not remember, I am a Sr. Product Manager focusing on the Enterprise customer segment, and one of my favorite parts of my job is sitting down with customers and talking about our plans, and getting input and feedback from them based on their environments and business needs. With our recent announcements, including the release of Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition (http://www.officeformac.com/blog/A-New-Outlook-for-Mac-Office), and Apple’s release of Snow Leopard today, I’ve been quite busy with these types of meetings. Folks are interested in Office 2008 compatibility with Snow Leopard as well as learning more about how to ensure their organizations have reliable Exchange support. I thought I’d take a minute to post about some of the common questions and hot topics that have come up during these conversations:

Q. Are there any differences with Office 2008 for Mac running on Snow Leopard vs. Leopard?
A. Office 2008 for Mac is Snow Leopard tested and ready! Best of all, with the launch of Snow Leopard, the bulk of the Word 2008 Spaces issues have been fixed after our collaborative efforts to address the problem.
 

Q. How does Entourage Exchange server support compare to Snow Leopard Exchange Server support via Mail, iCal, Contacts?
A. Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition offers the most complete Exchange client on a Mac with overall improved e‐mail and calendaring support for better reliability, compatibility and security. Based on our six year history in delivering Exchange support, we have spent time listening and working with our customers to best understand their needs to provide the most complete Exchange scenario with an integrated workflow between calendar, mail, contacts, tasks, and notes. To date, we’ve seen great response from customers on the Web Services Edition release, and are eager to continue to get essential feedback from them that we can apply to our new email application, Outlook for Mac.
 

Q. What are the top requests that Enterprise customers request? 
A. Each customer and their environment are different, but there have definitely been some consistent requests. The top one was delivered in Entourage, Web Services Edition which was the ability to sync your tasks, notes, and categories with Exchange Server. We’ve also been asked to improve the SharePoint experience for Mac users to allow for stronger cross platform collaboration, which drove the release of our Document Connection tool that shipped with our Service Pack 2 release, and we will continue to invest in SharePoint for the next version.

Some other features that are highly requested and have been announced are getting rid of the single database that we have in Entourage today, and deliver a file-based database. This will come out with our Outlook for Mac release. Finally, we consistently get requests for Information Rights Management support, which we will deliver in the next release of the suite coming out Holiday 2010.
 

Q. What does the MacBU have in store for the future?
A. Well, I can ‘t really go into much more detail than has already been announced, but we are continuing to listen to our customers and are hard at work to deliver on the top requested features in our core apps for the next version of Office for Mac (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook), and in connecting to our Microsoft server and service products such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Office Communication Server.

As always, we are listening and we greatly value your input! Please continue to submit feedback to us either through your account representative or through our “Contact Us” page at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/contactus.mspx.  Stay tuned for more exciting news and details as we drive towards the next version of Office for Mac!