Since the launch of Office 2008 for Mac, we’ve been busy with a slew of updates that deliver improved stability and enhanced functionality. Within the corridors of MacBU, we refer to such efforts to continuously improve our products based on ongoing customer feedback as “Sustained Engineering”. At the heart of these dedicated efforts is our ongoing commitment to product quality and customer satisfaction after the product has been delivered into our customers’ hands. Last week the Excel for Mac team provided an update here on MacMojo on their efforts to bring Solver back to Excel 2008 as part of a future update. In the meantime, as the Word Lead Program Manager, I am pleased to inform you that product integration between Word 2008 and EndNote X1 has been restored.   And as the familiar term goes, it’s “available today”.

EndNote is a reference management product for citations and bibliographies developed by Thomson Reuters. In particular, EndNote’s Cite While You Write functionality has long been a popular companion solution to Microsoft Word. However, due to our modernization efforts of Word 2008’s plug-in SDK, third-party products that relied on the previous Word SDK also had to be updated by their respective manufacturers. Since the launch of Office 2008 in January, we’ve completed the modernization work of our plug-in SDK, as well as the necessary changes to Word 2008 itself, which we released as part of the Office 2008 SP1 (12.1) update in March.   With this update, Thomson Reuters was able to then work their magic to update their product. Last week, Thomson Reuters released an update to EndNote X1, which completes the remaining work to restore Word 2008 and EndNote X1 integration.

So somewhere in this journey of getting Word 2008 and EndNote X1 working together again there is a personal story --- one that makes it particularly exciting for me to be publicizing the restored Word 2008 and EndNote X1 functionality here. Earlier posts on MacMojo alluded to the fact that we prioritize our sustained engineering efforts based on customer feedback. To gain customer insight, we frequently meet with users, read feedback here on MacMojo and user forums, and collect crash data through the Microsoft Error Report Protocol (MERP).   When it comes to EndNote integration, I am particularly aware of the customer pain that resulted from it missing from Word 2008.   This awareness is in large part due to my additional status as a graduate student this year.   While I am the Lead Program Manager for Word (working remotely from New York City this year), I am also an M.A. student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with a concentration in International Relations in East Asia. This means writing lots of research papers --- and this is where EndNote functionality, or lack thereof, can have some interesting bearings on my coursework. Apparently this is true for many of my fellow graduate school classmates, who upon discovering that I work at MacBU (and on Word no less), have all found rather unique ways in making me quite guilty about the missing functionality. And at times when this is coming not from my fellow classmates, but from the professors, now that’s when it gets really interesting.  As a graduate student with a thesis to write, I can honestly say that the customer pain is heartfelt and along with that is my appreciation to all of those who have been patient. I also appreciate the invaluable feedback from my professors and classmates who I regularly see using Office for Mac, whether it’s in the lecture rooms in Schermerhorn Hall, the student lounges of Learner Hall, or the study rooms in Butler Library.   So when it occasionally appears that I am hiding away from my friends on campus, it is quite likely that I am working with my team on a solution to that very issue mentioned to me in the canteen earlier that day.   Rest assured that I regularly share such product feedback with my team --- often on that very same day --- which in turn helps us make Office 2008 a better product with each software update. Additionally, being a graduate student for me entails heavy usage of Word 2008 in “real-world scenarios” on a daily basis --- the kind that involves getting a letter grade no less!   Of the roughly 200 bugs we fixed in Word 2008 12.1, while most originated from customer feedback from all over the world, about 20 bugs were found during my own usage while burning the midnight oil on the fourth floor of Butler Library.

With one remaining semester left in my graduate program, I am particularly excited about the newly restored Word 2008 and EndNote X1 functionality. I’ll also be sure to tell my fellow classmates that neither “my dog ate my thesis paper” nor “Word 2008 doesn’t work with EndNotes” are plausible excuses for not getting our thesis papers done.