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usability participants needed for Outlook:Mac study in March

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As we have announced, Outlook is coming to your Mac later this year. My team is working hard on getting everything ready for you. To that end, we're conducting another usability study of Outlook:Mac.

The study will be conducted at my lab in Mountain View, California, during the week of March 22. For this study, we need participants who meet the following criteria:

  • use a Mac for work purposes
  • connect your Mac to an Exchange server
  • use mail and calendar on your Exchange server several times per week

It would be nice to get a few people who use both their Mac and Outlook on Windows to connect to Exchange, too!

If you meet these criteria, please contact me with the following information:

  • your name
  • email address
  • daytime phone number

You'll get a call or email from someone at Microsoft who will ask you some additional questions and hopefully get you signed up to come in.

If you're not in the Bay Area, or you're not available that week, or you don't meet these criteria, my team will continue to conduct usability studies for Office:Mac 2011 (and future versions of Office!), so don't lose heart. You can sign up to participate in future usability studies here. We've done hundreds of hours of usability testing for Office 2011 so far, and we have additional studies planned, so there are more opportunities coming soon.

Please feel free to forward this along to anyone who know who might meet these criteria and be interested in participating in this study!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2010
    Our school district just upgraded to Exchange 2010. Dumping Entourage and using Outlook Web (way better on a Mac now) and anxious for Outlook client for Mac.

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2010
    Welcome to Exchange 2010!  Having full access to OWA is quite nice,  isn't it? Have you tried Entourage for Web Services with your Exchange 2010 setup?  EWS has a lot of improvements that you might like over Entourage 2008, including sync of tasks, notes, and categories.

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2010
    Is Outlook going to be done through OWA as well?  Or it is connection on the back going to be like the Outlook connection on the Windows side? I've heard both.

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2010
    Entourage wasn't done through OWA.  Entourage 2008 and earlier use WebDAV to connect to Exchange 2007 and earlier, which isn't the same as how OWA displays your Exchange information.  Entourage for Web Services uses Exchange Web Services to connect to Exchange 2007 and later.  Outlook for Windows currently uses MAPI to connect to all versions of Exchange.  As of Exchange 2007, MAPI is de-emphasised. Outlook:Mac will use Exchange Web Services to communicate with Exchange.  If you're on Exchange 2007 or later, you should check out Entourage for Web Services to get a preview for what this means: faster performance and a lot of additional features that we couldn't get via WebDAV (task, note, and category sync; calendar attachments; and more).   My team has worked closely with the Exchange team.  You can see the fruits of this labour in many places.  The biggest one is Exchange Web Services itself: they really went above and beyond to ensure that Exchange Web Services brings what we need so that our Mac users can get the full benefit of Exchange.  Other benefits of this relationship can be found in Exchange 2010, which brings full OWA to Safari and Firefox -- they consulted with us regularly to help them make sure that OWA does what it should do, and they opened up dogfooding of Exchange 2010 very early to members of my team so that we could help out.  Personally, my Exchange account has been on an Exchange 2010 server for well over a year. Hmm, there's probably a whole blog post about this, so maybe you've just given me my next one. :)