For the past ten days or so, I have been giving Office 2008 demos, assisting Office 2008 customers, and generally representing MacBU at a Mac Conference in Europe.  Where is this conference exactly, you ask?  It is in Genoa (Italy), Messina (Sicily), Alexandria (Egypt), Limassol (Cyprus), Marmaris (Turkey), and Santorini and Katakolm (Greece).  How can a Mac event be in all these cities and countries during the same conference?  Well, all these are seaports, and the conference is on a boat.  (Sorry, “on a ship.” – I still haven’t gotten the knack of using all the special nautical terms.)

MacMania is a Mac conference that takes place on a cruise ship, and MacMania 8 was a cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean:

 

 

The conference is about 250 people from all walks of life, but sharing the same characteristic that they are such Apple/Mac diehards that they even spend their vacations learning more about the Mac. The ship has over 2000 passengers and about 950 crew members, so as you can guess, the ship is pretty big, with more than ten floors (oops, I mean “decks” – more nautical terms) and many banks of elevators, multiple restaurants, and even a small mall.

 

 

I presented on Office 2008. Sal Soghoian, a product manager / evangelist from Apple, talked about AppleScript, Automator, and Leopard, and Josimar King, a trainer from Apple, did lengthy presentations on each of the applications in the iLife and IWork suites.  Other speakers talked about photography and managing all your photos, about the best iPhone apps for road warriors, about efficient e-mailing, and many other topics.  In addition, there was a daily “Ingenious Bar” where the speakers and other Mac experts worked one-on-one with the MacMania attendees on specific issues.  These informal consultations proved to be a great way to hear about, and work on the tasks that customers use our products to solve, and to gather suggestions for improvements in future releases – such suggestions I have already sent to the product teams.  It also turned out to be a forum to hear what has worked really well, as several MacMania attendees went out of their way to tell me of positive interactions with the Microsoft Product Support team that covers Office for Mac, and the how much improved they have found the Office 2008 user interface to be.

The press were also represented by individuals like David Pogue (New York Times), Phyllis Eliasberg (ABC News), and Shawn King (Your Mac Life).

 

Photo courtesy of Shawn King.
 

 

Photos courtesy of Karen Schmucker
 

The next conference that you’ll find MacBU at is Macworld Conference & Expo 2009. As always, a big part of the MacBU team will make their way to Moscone Center in San Francisco in early January. I’m also coordinating a two day session, “Getting the Most Out of Office 2008 for Mac”, part of the Power Tools Conference at MacWorld. If you want to learn more about Office from the team that built it, go to the Macworld Expo site to learn more and sign up for this session.