Microsoft at Apple Expo: It’s not all about Office!
So, my last post was in French... If you are wondering here's what it was all about!
One thing different about the Microsoft stand at Apple Expo is that it is not all about Office! We look at what the Mac community is interested in and organize some presentations around these.
For example, this year we have some people from the Expression Media team demoing their products. We even invited Jean-François Vibert, a famous French photographer (https://www.actionreporter.com), to come and talk about how he uses Expression Media on his Mac.
We also have some presentation on Silverlight for Developers, collaboration between Mac OS and Vista, Antidote Rx – advanced French proofing and dictionaries available for Office and other applications.
Yves Cornil, one of our MVP, is presenting on creating a blog with Windows Live Space on your Mac, Apple User Groups, and connecting Mac and Vista together.
We also have space at the stand dedicated to Vista (integration with the Mac), Expression products, Xbox 360 (hey, Mac users also like to play - Halo 3 anyone?) and Mac Office of course!
Warning: We are listening to you!
That’s right, we are listening to YOU! Last year, when I was at Apple Expo, a customer came to me with a great idea! As promised, I escalated it back to our development team and you can find it now in Office 2008. It is small and simple and it makes me proud to be at Apple Expo, listening to your ideas for the next BIG thing for Office (but I can’t reveal what it is yet – I’ll keep you posted)! So please, don’t hesitate to drop by and make a suggestion ;)
À bientôt!
Comments
Anonymous
September 26, 2007
PingBack from http://www.artofbam.com/wordpress/?p=3098Anonymous
September 26, 2007
im swithing to yahoo messenger if you dont have a new version of msn for mac soon!!!!!!!!!11Anonymous
September 26, 2007
Great. Maybe someone there will suggest full Exchange support. Lord knows we're not doing any good here.Anonymous
September 26, 2007
"We also have some presentation on Silverlight for Developers" That's a pretty simple one: "Install Parallels or Fusion, Windows and Visual Studio...or you can use a text editor." How cool is THAT.Anonymous
September 26, 2007
The comment has been removedAnonymous
September 26, 2007
I own Virtual PC sofware. Is there a way to use the XP OS that is incorporated in it with Bootcamp, Paralles etc? So that I can run it on my Mac?Anonymous
September 26, 2007
Hope the Silverlight people had flame-proof clothes on! Glad to hear the MacBU is listening, and not afraid to take suggestions. Unlike another company whose lawyers won't allow them to! (In Cupertino.) Please keep listening!Anonymous
September 26, 2007
eponymous, Mac Office 2008 will have full Exchange Support in the Standard and Special Media Edition SKU's. Its specifically emphasized, sounds like the MacBU has listened to customers.Anonymous
September 26, 2007
I agree with the comment above, if Microsoft is serious about Mac compatibility for Sliverlight and Expression products, why does the Mac only get a Silverlight Player and 1 Expression product? I'll believe Microsoft is serious about putting the Mac on equal footing when I can develop Silverlight media and use the entire Expression suite without running Windows or an emulator.Anonymous
September 26, 2007
The comment has been removedAnonymous
September 26, 2007
- "Microsoft at Apple Expo: It’s not all about Office!" Perhaps, but for many of us (at least, for many of the more vocal of us) visiting this blog is all about Office. Purchasing decisions, both business and personal, hang on the feature set of Office. And some of us really want to know what will be available. We check the blog every day. We post asking for more information. It has to be obvious that we really want to know, and there's a very vocal set of us out here who just want the full details on what's going to be in Office 2008. Finally, the Apple Exopo rolls around and we start to get solid information, which we've been waiting for for what feels like an age. Maybe, just maybe, we might find out the information we need and not feel like we're being ignored by the people holding the answers.... "It's not all about Office!" And, the first time around, it wasn't eevn posted in English. The recent actual genuine information has been truly appreciated. But this one certainly carries an air of "kicked in the teeth". "What does it look like?" "How does Entourage sync with Exchange?" "How does (or even does) Entourage sync with a Windows Mobile PDA/phone?" (seen at least once, and sommat I'd rather like to know) Purchasing decisions ride on this information. People have been clamouring, really loudly, for at least the first two of that list. Please, just give us the information. At the very least, it will shut most of us up. :-P
Anonymous
September 27, 2007
So no Microsoft Messenger at all??? We want video chat with the world!Anonymous
September 27, 2007
The comment has been removedAnonymous
September 27, 2007
In the post, Eric proudly proclaims, "Warning: We are listening to you! That’s right, we are listening to YOU! Last year, when I was at Apple Expo, a customer came to me with a great idea! As promised, I escalated it back to our development team and you can find it now in Office 2008. It is small and simple and it makes me proud to be at Apple Expo, listening to your ideas for the next BIG thing for Office (but I can’t reveal what it is yet – I’ll keep you posted)! So please, don’t hesitate to drop by and make a suggestion ;)" And yet, on another thread (the "Velkommen" one), Eric reveals that Microsoft has IGNORED four years' worth of requests to bring Office Unicode support up to at least the level of the Mac OS itself: "BiDi languages and Unicode support has not change since 2004." Ridiculous. There are lots of lower-priced alternatives, including Apple's iWork suite, that handle right-to-left Unicode quite smoothly. "BiDi languages and Unicode support has not changed since 2004" is equivalent to saying "Office 2008 for Mac has no support for Unicode right-to-left languages."Anonymous
September 28, 2007
What's wrong with a first post in French ? Is there any rule that says this blog is english only ? Is this such an offense to not have english in a post ? French are well known to be pretentious, so try not to be like that yourselves... Anyway, just a few minutes later you have the same post in english... Not a big deal !Anonymous
September 28, 2007
If those are really the product boxes, I am disappointed, I was hoping you use either the new packaging similar to Office 2007/Vista or something smaller like Leopard's.Anonymous
September 30, 2007
I think it's great that you're sharing insights from the development process here, but I have to tell you - you need to address some basic quality issues in the Office suite. It's stunning to me that it's been out for years, and still, silly little things don't work correctly: if you select "don't hide extension" when you save a Word file, it hides the extension. No matter what you select for a page range when printing, you get the entire document. It's so frustrating because you got 95% of the last release right, but these silly, irritating little bugs - which would be understanding in a first release, but should be fixed pronto - make it very hard to take the idea that the next release is going to be a quality product seriously. As I read about it, I find myself thinking, "This sounds nice, but given my experience with the last release, perhaps I'm better off migrating to an open source alternative like NeoOffice." That option has its issues, too, but at least you're not paying top dollar for a product that appears to suffer from lousy QA. I'd love to read here about how you're going to improve some of that, because I suspect I'll really want to use the new Office release when it comes out... but I'm very hesitant to spend my money on it after my experience with the last version.Anonymous
October 03, 2007
You're listening? Any decent school would use Microsoft Exchange as their e-mail system Why did you omit exchange support on Student and Home version?Anonymous
October 03, 2007
"Mac Office 2008 will have full Exchange Support in the Standard and Special Media Edition SKU's. Its specifically emphasized, sounds like the MacBU has listened to customers." By "full Exchange Support" do you mean full feature parity with the latest Outlook for WindowsAnonymous
October 03, 2007
Why doesn't Entourage have an option to disable caching and work in Online mode like Outlook 2003? There are so many problems caused by Entourage's need to cache every single bit of data from the Exchange server:
- Consistency of data between multiple users. Since Entourage only works by periodic synchronization and not all Entourage users synchronize at the same time, Entourage users often experience discrepancies when working with shared calendars and folders. When several people access a shared calendar and multiple people are making changes, those changes are not immediately updated in Entourage. This results in missed appointments, overlapping appointments, duplicate contact entries and other issues due to lack of consistency.
- Disk space. Every email message, email attachments, calendar event, and contact entry in Entourage are copied to the user's hard drive. When an Entourage user opens a shared calendar or another user's shared folders, those contents are also copied to the user's hard drive. If an Entourage user has to access multiple shared folders, every single folder gets coped to the user's hard drive. I have seen an assistant who has a Microsoft User Data folder that is 70 GB in size due to accessing several large, shared folders.
- Time to synchronize. If a user has a large mailbox, setting up Entourage for the fist time can take several hours because Entourage has to download every single email message, attachments, calendar appointment, contacts, etc. And if Entourage has not been used in a long time due to vacation, for example, then Entourage has to go through the same slow sync process. All of these problems could be avoided if Entourage could be set to keep all data on the Exchange server rather than caching everything.
Anonymous
October 03, 2007
Make Entourage send and receive all changes immediately. I start typing a new message in Entourage and then save it to Drafts. Then I immediately quit Entourage and open Outlook Web Access. In OWA, I go the drafts folder and see that the message is not there. I have Outlook 2003 open on a PC and Entourage open on a Mac at the same time. In Outlook 2003 on the PC, I delete some messages. Then I immediately look over at the Mac running Entourage and see that those messages are still there. I add a new contact or new appointment in Outlook 2003 on the PC. But when I immediately look over at the Mac running Entourage, those contacts or appointments are not there. I delete contacts or appointments on the PC, but on the Mac running Entourage, those items are still there. Make Entourage send and receive all changes immediately instead of waiting to synchronize every couple of minutes.Anonymous
October 03, 2007
Why don't distribution groups created in Outlook contacts show up in Entourage? When using Entourage, why can't I create groups in the Contacts folder?Anonymous
October 03, 2007
I'd love to have Expression Web for Mac. Any news?Anonymous
October 26, 2007
Another city, another expo! I’ve been travelling on and off since Apple Expo in Paris giving some Office