I have been touring with our Product Managers and Program Managers as part of the Office 2008 for Mac District Launch Tour and have had some great experience meeting with IT Professionals (IT Pros) and listening to the needs of the enterprise. One of the things I have learned during this tour is that not many people are aware of the resources available for the IT Pros. I am a Writer with the MacBU content publishing team, and I wanted to point you to some of these resources. 

If you are looking for content that will help you plan and deploy Office 2008 for Mac in an enterprise environment, look no further than in your own friendly Mactopia site that has a section dedicated to IT Pros http://www.microsoft.com/mac/itpros. This section currently hosts the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Administrator’s Guide and the Microsoft Messenger for Mac 7 Deployment Guide.

The Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Administrator’s Guide is a resource for IT Managers, system administrators or anyone who is responsible for deploying Office 2008 in their organization. Some of the topics in this guide include Compare versions of Office for Mac that lists the improvements that have been made over the years in the different versions of Office for Mac. The What's new in Office 2008 and How Office 2008 delivers business value provide more details on the new features in Office 2008 and how Office 2008 for Mac can solve some typical challenges in a business environment. If you are planning to deploy Entourage in an Exchange environment, see the following topics for information on Entourage with Exchange: Entourage 2008 features supported by different versions of Exchange Server, Exchange Server and related requirements for Entourage 2008, How information is synchronized between Entourage 2008 and Exchange Server, Entourage 2008 deployments in an Active Directory infrastructure. To deploy Office 2008 for Mac using Apple Remote Desktop, see Installation by using Apple Remote Desktop.

There is a lot of information in this guide to help you with Office 2008 deployment. We update this content regularly to address customer feedback as part of our continuous publishing process. If you can’t find what you are looking for, then click the link at the bottom of a topic to send us your feedback.

If you want a downloadable and more consumable format of this guide, click the print icon next to the guide. This will dynamically generate a Word document that can be downloaded and printed. You can also print specific chapters by clicking the print icon next to the chapter. In the past, we had .pdf files that were difficult to maintain over time with changing content. But with this new functionality, printable content is no longer out of sync with the online content that is frequently updated.

With the release of Messenger for Mac 7, we recently added the Microsoft Messenger for Mac 7 Deployment Guide to the IT Pros section. Messenger for Mac 7 focuses on the corporate account service that uses Office Communications Server 2007. If you are planning to implement Messenger for Mac 7 in your corporate environment and would like to know how Messenger for Mac 7 works with Office Communications Server, check out this guide. 

For the Information Workers in your organization, Product Help is now also available on the Web at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/help.mspx. If users are connected to the Internet, they will have access to the latest online information. 

We also have training courses for Information Workers at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/courses.mspx. This training can be accessed from the Help and How to page in Mactopia. We continue to add more and more titles to our courses. Continue to check out this site for the most up-to-date information.

As I said earlier, if you can’t find what you are looking for, then use the link at the bottom of a topic to send us your feedback.