Mac Mojo : Announcements

Ship It, Ship It Good

Pat Fox — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 05:10:00 GMT

Hello everyone, I thought this would be good time to jump in and introduce myself. I’m the Director of Marketing and Planning for MacBU – a longtime ‘softie and closing in on my first anniversary in the Macintosh Business Unit. Like most of us in MacBU, I’m a long time Mac user – and this will date me – I set up and staffed the original Mac lab in college, finally saving enough to buy a “Fat Mac” of my own. As they say, the rest is history.

Speaking of history, we announced earlier this week RTM of the English version of Office 2008, with additional languages following right on schedule. What does that mean for my team? Well, we helped the dev teams celebrate (yes, that was me cranking the air raid siren Geoff was hearing.) Beyond that, there’s a lot more cranking to do before we launch January 15th – advertising, PR, launch events, and of course, getting ready for Macworld!

Ah, Macworld. It’s going to be a great show and we’re planning a big presence. First, A Day at the Office – a day-long conference at the Moscone on Monday, January 14th, dedicated to extensive user training on the new Office 2008 for Mac. Tickets are close to sold out, but if you’re quick you might still be able to grab one. We also have conference sessions and hands-on labs where attendees can get great training on the new Office 2008 for Mac.

You won’t miss our big booth on the show floor where we’ll have demo stations set up for you to test drive the new product and theatre presentations every half hour highlighting the most popular new features. Even better, most of MacBU and some of our most knowledgeable MVPs will be on hand to answer your questions. We’ll be hanging out again with the community in our new and improved Blogger Lounge (wireless access this year!) Best of all, the product will be available at retail (and online) starting January 15th in North America (including at that swanky Apple Store close to the Moscone.)

And since this is a year to celebrate - we’re the exclusive sponsors of the Macworld Blast at the Warfield Theatre this year, where we’ll have our blow-out launch party Tuesday, January 15th.

This will be a fun night. Long before Office 2008 was on the drawing board, before Mark Mothersbaugh contributed to Art of Office and way before Craig published his “Ship It” lyrics. I was a big fan of our surprise musical guests for the evening…DEVO! (Well, not such a surprise anymore. Sherjo couldn’t keep it from Shawn King on Your Mac Life during an interview with Paul Kent from IDG Wednesday night.)

Now we’re all excited, but I’m not your casual spudboy; there’s ample evidence of my devotion even back in college, as one look at my senior yearbook photo will prove. If you don’t know the band or have never seen DEVO live, do yourself a favor and get one of the few tickets left. The first 300 attendees will get a special gift bag with some limited edition goodies cooked up by Mark Mothersbaugh and my team, so get there early!

This will be a party to remember – and I hope to see you there! Look for the guy wearing the energy dome...

Pat O

Office 2008 Hits RTM

Geoff Price — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:36:00 GMT

Here’s the latest official word – Office 2008 for Mac has Released to Manufacturing (RTM)!

We’re very pleased to announce that the product team has signed off, and our final build has left the building and is en route to manufacturing sites abroad. Needless to say there’s some joy in MacBUville, with festivities as I post. While we love building Mac software, actually getting that software into the hands of the people we’ve been building it for is something we’ve been looking forward to for a long time. For my teams, the RTM milestone is the last step in the process.

It’s quite a thing to think back on everything that has gone into arranging the bits on this one polycarbonate disc. One way to think about the approximate total man hours is that if a single multi-talented person had done all this work they might have started around the time that King John signed the Magna Carta.

I know it’s been said before, but I’d like to extend my thanks to the team. Office 2008 is MacBU’s most significant release to date. I’m excited about both the new user experience and capabilities we’re delivering now, as well as the work we’ve done at all levels to make this release a great foundation for future releases to come.

Though our work is finished, our operations, localization and marketing teams remain busy getting Office 2008 on shelves for our product launch on January 15th at Macworld 2008. A large portion of the MacBU team will be on hand at Macworld, and I know people are excited to show their work and talk to real users about the release. We hope to see you there on the show floor, in presentations, and at various events around town – watch Mac Mojo for more details about what we’ll be up to at Macworld!

I'm hearing the ship siren getting cranked again – off to check on the latest margarita batch.

Office 2008 for Mac: BFD!

sherjo — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:24:00 GMT

BFD! Big Friday Deals. Best Friday Destinations. The mall, online - wherever I can find them, I love a bargain. And there is no better bargain-hunting day than Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. En masse, we will drag our L-tryptophan dosed selves off of our couches and into the crowds in search of the ultimate deal. This year, in the giddy frenzy that is the road to Macworld and the worldwide launch of Office 2008 for Mac, we wanted to do something BIG. Bigger than big. The BFD-biggest deal out there.

So, for ONE DAY – if you purchase this coming Friday November 23rd – you can get an additional $100 mail-in rebate from us on any qualifying Office 2004 for Mac product (Standard Edition, Standard Edition Upgrade, EVEN Student & Teacher Edition!) AND, you can combine it with our Super Suite Deal, which means you can get Office 2008 Special Media Edition (about $500 street price) for under sixty bucks, if you include the $6.99 shipping and handling fee for Office 2008 (which we’ll send to you after it launches in January.)

Whoa. That is our BFD – Best. Friday. Deal. EVER. Never seen before. Unlikely to be repeated. Hope you like it. Get the full details and download the rebate coupon here.

Update on Office 2008 progress!

Geoff Price — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 02:08:00 GMT

Last Wednesday was our general “ZBB” target for the Office 2008 project, a major milestone on the road to release and something we’ve been pushing hard for over the past several months. We saw some fantastic surging by the development team to clear out backlogged product issues late into Wednesday night. Thursday, we sat down to review project status and metrics in depth, and to hear all teams report out on their plans and readiness to lock down for release. The bottom line takeaway that you may be most interested in: all teams have confirmed readiness to ship on the current schedule. As previously announced, this means RTM in December and general availability starting on January 15th (by region).

ZBB what? This stands for Zero Bug Bounce, or as alternately phrased, Zero Bug Backlog. At this point we have been logging, tracking and verifying all changes to the product in great detail for some time – collectively we refer to this list of logged issues as the “bug list”, though in reality it includes a variety of issues including bug/defect reports, tracking records for artwork or content, usability improvements, numerous suggestions (submitted by team members or beta testers, or representing customer or partner requests), and various other categories of issues. The ZBB milestone is defined as the date across which we will no longer carry logged product issues that are more than one week old. Hence, the “backlog” of issues has been cleared out, and all older pending decisions on what we are or are not going to change before we ship have been made. It also means that the developers have “caught up” or “outpaced” the incoming find rate of our test efforts.

From here on out, the focus is increasingly on lock down. We are testing for defects literally around the clock, using a variety of methods ranging from automated efforts such as “massive file testing” to targeted manual test passes and “ad hoc” free testing. We also continue to log and fix significant issues found in private beta testing. At this point we remain busy fixing bugs as they are found (any one of our millions of lines of code could be the source of a defect,) but there will now be increased scrutiny on making changes – i.e., is there sufficient customer need to justify a proposed code change given the associated risk of regression (the outside chance that making a given change causes a new and potentially more severe problem.) Stabilizing the product for release requires conscious commitment to slowing and eventually stopping the changes we’re making to it, and as a result we now start reviewing all proposed changes daily in “triage”.

I’d like to congratulate and thank everyone on the product team for an amazing effort on ZBB – our developers, testers and program managers have all done incredible work. I’d also like to thank every other person who has helped in the creation of Office 2008: planners, researchers, designers, artists, writers, editors, builders, product managers, recruiters, HR generalists, international teams, MVPs, beta testers, partners, vendors, contractors, our many friends at Apple, partners across Microsoft, and many others have all helped us get this far. Finally, a very sincere special thanks to all of our families and friends for their support during this push.

Collectively we’ve made nearly four years worth of heavy investment in modernization, improvements and features in Mac Office. We look forward to continuing to share more about the new suite here on the blog and out in the world straight through RTM and into next year. But, as folks like to say, at this stage of the project the most important feature is shipping.

We’re getting more excited about that feature every day.

“Velkommen, Tervetuloa, Velkommen” and “Bienvenue à Paris”

eric.paquin — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:50:00 GMT

So the cat is out of the bag! This morning, as the doors to Apple Expo opened, we officially announced the availability of Office 2008 worldwide from January 15 (dates will vary by markets). As part of the announcement, we also announced a new “Nordic Pack” that will include localized version of Danish, Finnish and Norwegian. Actually, Office is not the first product we offer in these languages; some of you might have noticed that the Messenger 6.0.3 update silently included them!

This means that between Office 2004 and 2008 we will have added 5 new languages (with Italian and Dutch for 2004). The localization team in Dublin has been working really hard the last few months to bring you all these flavours of Office 2008 (taking into consideration all the different flavours in the different languages, we will be signing off on 45 variations). In between the release of Office 2004 and now, we have been improving our processes to be able to introduce new languages in a more efficient and timely manner. It’s great for our team to see new languages coming to Office (for one, it keeps us really busy!).

We are now truly embarking the “Road to Ship”! With the new Mac Office 2008 website launched last week revealing some new features, it also means we can start showing Office in public! This starts this week at Apple Expo! I’ll also be showing Office 2008 at Apple Expo in Paris “en français s’il-vous-plaît!” So if you are around and want to discover the power of Office, drop by the Microsoft stand – 3 demos a day (12h30, 15h30 and 17h). I am really excited of finally being able to show you a product I’ve been working on for nearly 3 years now!

The show starts today and I will post my first impressions as soon as I have a few more minutes!

À bientôt!

Eric

Hello from Paris Expo!

sherjo — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:44:00 GMT

Amanda Lefebvre and I are here at Paris Expo - we're just ready to go over to the show floor now for the first time,and today we'll be talking to folks from Macworld UK, MacUser, MacFormat, ZDNet France and some other French outlets too, not to mention lots of customers.! Nous ne parlons pas beaucoup de Francais, so we'll probably stick to mostly English :-), and we finally get to talk about our new product line-ups (we've added a Special Media Edition, which includes Microsoft Expression Media digital asset management system) as well as the addition of three new languages - Danish, Finnish & Norwegian (the "Nordic Pack".) We're also announcing for many countries our Technology Guarantee: starting today (September 25th), if you buy Office 2004 for Mac, you will get Office 2008 for Mac after it launches in January for the cost of shipping and handling, so no risk if you're upgrading your Mac this week and want to make sure you're getting the latest!

We've already gotten some coverage from some of the pre-briefings that Amanda and Craig Eisler did last week, and Eric Pacquin from our Dublin subsidiary will be blogging live from the floor today in between presentations. Viva la France - today the Expo, tonight a stroll on the Champs-élysées tonight - I can't wait to meet up with all of our friends from our subsidiaries and other folks we haven't seen for ages. Watch for Eric's post later today!

Bonjour! Sheridan

Associated Press - Microsoft sets Office 2008 prices for Macs

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/software/2007-09-25-microsoft-office2008-mac_N.htm

CNET - Microsoft sets pricing on Office 2008 for Mac

http://www.news.com/Microsoft-sets-pricing-on-Office-2008-for-Mac/2100-1012_3-6209269.html

Seattle PI - Mac Office 2008 prices, packages announced / Prices set for Mac '08 editions

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/122399.asp?from=blog_last3

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/332962_macoffice25.html

TUAW - Office 2008 for Mav versions and pricing announced

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/09/25/office-2008-for-mac-versions-and-pricing-announced/

Macworld - Microsoft details Office 2008 for Mac pricing

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/09/24/officemac/index.php

ArsTechnica - Microsoft announces Mac Office 2008 pricing, upgrade details

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/09/24/microsoft-announces-mac-office-2008-pricing-upgrade-details

Announcing Art of Office

joeleblanc — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 02:09:00 GMT

The MacBU is excited to announce a new user-generated community site, Art of Office. Art of Office is a place for people to submit artistic and/or useful content made using Office applications (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint). Whether it’s creating pixel art using Excel (a la our Post-it Notes) developing an animated short story in PowerPoint or artistic pieces in Word, this online community allows you to share, rate, remix and discuss user-submitted content with other Mac Office users around the world. It’s a fun way to show unique applications of our product and helps people think of Mac Office in ways they may not have thought of before.

Some amazing art already on the site includes:

- Really fun postcards from Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo fame

- A wonderful retelling of one of my favorite math stories (yes, I have more than one favorite math story.) by Zeus Jones

- And of course, an awesome use of Excel by Rene Hernandez Miranda aka ‘pixelfreak’, a design student from El Salvador.

- I created my own profile with the files I used to create the post-it icons as well as some funny charts, random art generator, and useful stuff.

We also have artwork from Phil Torrone, senior editor of Make magazine and many other contributors that you can check out. So go create a profile, look around at others’ artwork and add your own creations. We all use Office to work with the files we need to for business, school and day-to-day tasks. This is a great opportunity to show off your creative, unusual or useful documents.

Office 2008 Coming January 2008

CraigE — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:20:00 GMT

We announced today that Office 2008 for Mac will be released to manufacturing (“RTM”) this December, which will allow for retail availability in the US in mid-January (planning for Macworld), and allow us to deliver Office 2008 to our volume license customers and global customers in the first quarter of 2008.

We had hoped to deliver the product in the second half of 2007 and as you know might imagine, this was a tough slip for us. Moving RTM to December means you, our customers, won’t have our product this year, and I am very clear a lot of folks are eagerly awaiting Office 2008. Slipping delays when our team can move on to our next release of Office for Mac - we’re working to get releases out on a more frequent basis, delivering more good stuff to Microsoft Mac customers more often.

As tough as it is, I firmly believe that this slip is the right call for MacBU. Delivering Office at the right quality level is super important to the entire team and to Microsoft’s long standing commitment to the Mac platform, and it was clear from our June and July quality checkpoints that no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t release our product in time for the Christmas season with the kind of quality we wanted.

We’re in an “all hands on deck” mode right now to ensure Office 2008 gets finished on time, and so you will not see final versions of our RDC client or file format converters until sometime after we ship Office.

Starting in September, we are planning a series of “sneak peeks” to show you more of the features and functionality of this release. I’m very pleased that we can soon start sharing more of what the team has been up to – stay tuned.

Come and get it! RDC for Mac v2 beta

nadyne — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:57:00 GMT

Today's the day! As Craig (our fearless leader) announced a couple of weeks ago, we have now made a beta of Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac, version 2, available. You can download it from Mactopia (scroll down to get to the RDC v2 beta, it's listed under 'other products').

For me, RDC is one of those little apps that nicely fits a need. In my office, I have a Windows XP box that lives under my desk. I don't have a monitor hooked up to it. Its primary reasons for existence involve booking travel through the corporate travel agent and filling out expense reports. I only access it through Remote Desktop Connection.

RDC v1 is a great little app. It saves me from having to have an extra monitor sit on my desk. But it's not a perfect little app. Like a lot of software, it was originally developed by someone on the team to scratch their own itch, and ... well, it shows. It's perfect for the original developer's own use, but it's not perfect in other situations. One of the issues with RDC v1 is discoverability. I've long since lost count of the number of feature requests that we've had for allowing the resize of the RDC screen. That feature has always been there, you just had to know where to go to find it.

We decided that it was time to update RDC. There were several reasons behind this decision, including a new Remote Desktop Protocol, the need to be able to connect to Vista, and the OS X switch to the Intel architecture. Instead of updating the existing code, we decided to re-develop RDC v2 from the ground up using the latest Remote Desktop Protocol. At WWDC 2006, we announced that we would update RDC, and we've had a team working on it ever since.

One of the major differences in RDC v2 is that we've completely redone the UI. I did a usability study of RDC v1 that revealed several issues. Users had a hard time getting everything set up on their Mac as well as on their Windows machine. Users couldn't figure out how to share files between their two computers, and some didn't believe that it was possible at all. People didn't realise that there was online help available for it, and often didn't even install it. For RDC v2, we wanted to address these UX issues and make RDC a more Mac-like app. Our new UI isn't hugely obvious when you first look at the application — the UI has always been quite minimal, and we've retained that in RDC v2. RDC v1 uses a disclosure triangle to show you the connection options. In RDC v2, to be a better Mac citizen, we've moved these options to a standard Preferences menu. This should improve the discoverability of many of the features that we've always had built in, such as being able to view your Mac's hard drive when you're connected to your Windows computer.

Another UI change is that we now support dynamic screen resizing. In RDC v1, you couldn't change your screen size while connected to a Windows computer. Now you can, and you can enter full-screen mode during a session too. I love this because I use RDC on my laptop. When I'm in my office, I hook my MacBook Pro up to a big 23-inch external monitor. Using RDC on that is different than using it on my MBP's screen, and now I can switch between them dynamically.

One feature request that we have received frequently was the support of multiple sessions in RDC. System administrators want this feature because they often need to connect to many machines at once. Users of RDC v1 who want this feature can probably name a couple of workarounds, but they were all pretty messy. RDC v2 supports this natively. You can connect to multiple Windows machines by saving connection settings for all of the Windows machines that you want to connect to. Then, you can simply launch those saved connections from the Finder.

My favourite new functionality in RDC v2 is a security feature. In RDC v1, you could share files with your Windows box, but you had to open up your whole hard drive to the Windows box. This never really concerned me — after all, my Windows machine is in my office and I'm the only person who has access to it. But it meant that I had to dig through the whole file system to get the file that I wanted. Now in RDC v2, I can choose what I share with my Windows machine: nothing, the whole hard drive, or a specific folder. I've been using internal builds of RDC v2 for a few months. I've found that, when I need to transfer a file from my Mac to my Windows machine (or vice versa), I just share the Mac folder where the file lives. Then when I browse my Mac's files from the Windows box, I just see the one folder which is exactly where I need to be. It's a very small thing, but it saves me a bit of time.

This is a beta, which means that we're not quite done yet. We've still got some issues to iron out. We want to release it to you so that you can give us feedback about it. To send feedback about the RDC beta, use Microsoft Connect. Several members of our team, including myself, will be reading your feedback to make improvements to it before its final release.

Hello from the new General Manager of the Macintosh Business Unit - Craig Eisler

CraigE — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:08:00 GMT

Hi folks,

Wow! I can’t believe I’m actually here - General Manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit. I would not have guessed this is where I would’ve landed when I rejoined Microsoft. But after looking at several great options over the course of the past couple months, I jumped at the Mac BU opportunity when I heard about it.

Why Mac BU? What first got my attention was the fact that it was a fantastic business focused on delivering great technology. As an Office for Mac user, I already knew we had a terrific set of products, and as I dug in, I discovered there was a terrific team of passionate people dedicated to innovation and excellence. Furthermore, Apple and Microsoft are great partners (have been for over 20 years), and there is still more we and Apple can do together. When I put all of that stuff together, it presented a very compelling opportunity. But the icing on the cake - the thing that I love - is the chance to work on Mac products and to get to work with Apple. I have been an Apple fan and Mac user for years – check out my recent blog posting: top ten things from Apple I love.

Microsoft and Apple are both great companies in their own right, and working in Mac BU, I get to experience the best of both worlds.

I am super excited to help Mac BU continue to rock the house with Office 2008 for Mac and beyond.

Craig

Get converted

Geoff Price — Tue, 15 May 2007 20:56:00 GMT

As previously announced, and as indicated by the lower frequency in blogcasting here, everyone at MacBU is exceedingly busy completing Office 2008, which is on track for release later this year. This work is our primary focus, and is the largest undertaking in our ten year history as an independent team. We are developing the product for versions beyond 2008 with broad investment in native Mac OS X architecture as well as adoption of a new, next generation document format: Office Open XML.

We've made great progress, and as previously promised we're releasing some of this new functionality in a form that you can start using right away: Beta release #1 of the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is now available for download.

This is a stand-alone Macintosh application that converts .docx documents - that is, documents saved by Word 2007 for Windows in the Office Open XML file format - into rich text format (RTF) documents so that they can be automatically opened in either Word 2004 or Word v.X for Mac OS X.

With this free converter we passionately want to get you up and reading the new documents you are receiving. We do not, however, want to see you inadvertently mess up any critical documents you are working with. For that reason, only one-way (read only) conversion is supported in this beta. When sending documents back to colleagues and contacts, we recommend saving to the default .doc format from Mac Word (listed as "Word document" in the save dialog). Similarly, we continue to recommend that you advise friends and colleagues who use Office 2007 and collaborate regularly with Mac users to save their documents as a "Word/Excel/PowerPoint 97-2003 Document" (.doc, .xls, .ppt) to ensure that the files can be robustly shared across platforms while waiting for final availability of Office 2008 for Mac.

Personally, I'm getting plenty of opportunities to use this new converter right out of the gate. Office 2007 for Windows is pretty widely deployed across the numerous PC desktops we have here internally at Microsoft. So far the converter is doing great, but then in most cases I tend to only need to read and review the documents rather than co-edit them (product plans, service agreements, draft letters, staff communications and the like). For active collaboration on critical or complex documents - e.g. where getting the formatting, tables etc. correct is essential - you'll want to continue to work with the older (.doc) format from the start.

Why a stand-alone converter application? We chose this route because it supports both Office 2004 and Office v.X for Mac users, while providing some bonus functionality such as batch conversion, and also keeping the team focused on Office 2008 by avoiding major test efforts around invasive changes to our shipping Office 2004 product. The user interface for the converter actually began life as an internal test tool (where you can imagine the batch processing comes in handy) - it was so slick it quickly became obvious that it was a great solution for the converter. You can drag and drop files onto the converter icon or application of course, but can also simply double-click .docx files to invoke it. The first thing I did is turn on this preference to immediately open a newly converted document in Word, so that I can skip the step of finding the new RTF document and dragging it to Word.

Why Rich Text Format? RTF (once called the "interchange format") is simply a highly convenient intermediate format for the beta converter to use; I'll let one of our Word experts (like Rick) expand on the technical reasons why this is the case if there's interest.

We plan to release a final integrated converter for Office 2004, which will appear as an update that allows you to simply open and save the new file formats as if they'd always been there (though, some of the newer functionality expressed in the formats will naturally only be available in Office 2008). We are on track to deliver this final integrated converter for Office 2004 six to eight weeks after Office 2008 for Mac is available. We also will release a final version of the stand-alone converter soon after.

Why wait until after we ship to release the final converters? The converters include and rely upon the same new code that lives in Office 2008 (so you're getting early access to some of the new code today - running natively as a Universal Binary, of course). As the code improves in the applications, so will the converters improve, and as a result the converters will not be final until Office 2008 is also fully complete and fully tested.

Incremental updates to the beta converter will be coming this summer, including those to roll in PowerPoint and Excel document support. If you have installed the new beta converter, these updates will be pushed out automatically through the Microsoft AutoUpdate service.

Congratulations to the product team here in MacBU on the great progress made as we approach the finish line on Microsoft's best ever release of Office for the Macintosh - Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac - and a big thanks for your hard work in building the converter.

P.S. If you are interested in learning more about the Office Open XML formats and the ways third parties are adopting and plugging into them, Brian Jones' blog is a great place to start.

MacTech’s Mac Office VBA to AppleScript Transition Guide

blairn — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:01:00 GMT

Mac natives inside and outside of MacBU have provided their efforts and expertise to produce a guidebook to help you navigate the transition from VBA to AppleScript. That's right, MacTech magazine's April edition will be a massive 150 page blockbuster entitled "Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript: MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition" and is authored by none other than Mac Office MVP and all around great person (so I'm told) Paul Berkowitz. Paul and many of the other Mac Office MVPs work very hard on AppleScript and lots of other important Office topics on behalf of all of us (check out the MVP page to learn more about this group of experts). MacTech - along with Paul and a cast of editors and reviewers whose combined experience with AppleScript and VBA boggle the mind - have stepped up big time with this book.

MacTech subscribers receive this generous tome as their April edition. Not yet a subscriber but want the guide? It's a great time to subscribe and, if you act now (before April 2), you might even be able to get a complimentary subscription. Or, support your local newsstand. MacTech magazine can be found in the mac tech section.

2007 Global MVP Summit

David Weiss — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 03:31:00 GMT

Starting this Wednesday and Thursday we will have our Global MVP Summit! What is this you ask? Glad you did. Let me tell you about it.

First the acronym: MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional. Our MacBU MVPs are a small group of people that both represent our customers and champion our products. They help us in lots of ways. The full details about the Microsoft MVP award can be found here.

For MacBU our MVPs help us to moderate our feedback forums, answer questions, work the booth at MacWorld, give us valuable feedback and of course they get to be part of our super secret betas. ;-) To become a MVP for MacBU you "are nominated by your peers, Microsoft employees, and other MVPs" Basically, you just have to kick butt in knowing how to use the product and helping folks out. We’ll see it, others will see it and you will be asked you if you want to help out as an official MVP.

The Newsgroups

You didn't know we had newsgroups? We do and it's where we get lots of feedback and answer tons of questions. Since our MVPs are superb, they answer almost all the questions single handedly. Most of the MacBU team lurks there too and you'll often see MacBU team members respond to questions directly. Seriously, if you have questions you should check them out:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups

Additionally some of our MVPs actually have resource sites of their own with information about using our products. The Entourage and Word sites are particularly active. Here are some of them:

MVP Resource Sites

In addition to helping out the community of Mac users, we bring the MVPs to Redmond this year to play a double elimination tennis tournament on our newly acquired MacBU Wii. Uh, what I mean is, they are coming so we can talk about how things are going and what we can do better. :-) So what are these MVPs going to be doing for 2 days? Here's some of the stuff on the list:

We'll discuss the core features of the upcoming version of Office for Mac.
Talk about major features and theory behind the actual implementation of those features for Word, PowerPoint, Entourage, and Excel.
The MVPs will present the Top 5 Office issues they've seen in the community and we'll discuss what we can do about them.
We'll discuss future versions of Messenger for Mac and Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac.
We'll talk about geeky stuff like our programmability story for Office.
Marketing will chat about the new Office 2008 branding, packaging and overall launch plans.
We'll give an update on the Office 2008 Beta.
The Mactopia Site Manager will chat about plans for a redesign of the product website.
We'll discuss the planning approach for the next version of Mac Office after Office 2008.

I'm sure you get the idea. What's really cool, especially for the folks in Redmond like me, is that when these MVPs get to come they are literally just down the hall in a big conference room. We can just walk down and chat with them. It’s also nice because since these folks are obviously under a NDA, we can chat with them frankly and get great feedback as well as explain things in greater detail than what we could do or say chatting on the MacWorld floor. :-)

All in all, it's going to be a great time and just one of those things that will help make Office 2008 insanely great!

Converters Coming! Free and (Fairly) Fast.

sherjo — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:11:00 GMT

There's been some pretty alarmist news stories this morning (apcstart.com; CrunchGear) about file format converters and Office for Mac. Because some of these stories seem designed more to inflame than inform, I want to reiterate our previously reported intention to provide free converters, clarify our timing for their release, and also give some direction on how best to avoid incompatibility until they are available.

Be it resolved: The Mac BU WILL issue free, downloadable file format converters that allow users to read the new Microsoft Office Open XML Format. We announced that publicly at WWDC, and nothing has changed.

Timing: We’re working on our file format converters as I write. We had to wait until Office 2007 bits and the new file format itself were locked down. During this time, we spent the last year and a half prepping and planning for our own development of file format converters for Office for Mac. This included the basic supporting work of a rich and compatible XML parser, code to understand the new package structure, and beginning work on reading and writing early development versions of the file format. So now that Office for Windows has been released, we are working on completing compatibility with the released formats, while also completing other major work such as moving our codebase to the Intel platform, which we have discussed at some length on this very blog and elsewhere. We are running on target and expect to release a free public beta version of the file format converters in Spring 2007, with final converters available six to eight weeks after we launch our next version of Office for Mac (which, as previously reported, will be available 6-8 months after general availability of Win Office.) The next version of Office for Mac will natively read the Open XML Format; users of the current version of Office will have converters in order to maintain compatibility with the new Office for Windows.

There will be a delta between general availability of Win Office (January) and converters from MacBU (expected late March/early April.) We realize this will be an inconvenience for some of you (trust me, we know - 90% of Microsoft has been dogfooding Office 2007 for many months, and we in the MacBU are well used to asking for down-reved versions ourselves). For now, we recommend that Mac users advise their friends and colleagues using Office 2007 to save their documents as a “Word/Excel/PowerPoint 97-2003 Document” (.doc, .xls, .ppt) to ensure the documents can be shared across platforms.

MacBOO to you! Happy Halloween and TidBITs Treats!

sherjo — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 02:00:00 GMT

Today kicks off our official sponsorship of TidBITS, and it's a real Halloween treat for us to work with this legendary online newsletter (sixteen years and counting) and the amazing Adam and Tonya Engst. We've been talking to them a bunch since Macworld last year about how we should do something together - ever since another good friend of MacBU, Neil Ticktin of MacTech Magazine, insisted that it should be so. :-)

Adam gave us a most gracious welcome in yesterday's issue of TidBITs, and though we weren't able to get the MacBOO t-shirts designed (sorry Adam!), we are offering some treats for TidBITS readers, which hopefully you all are or will be soon. Check out the DealBITS drawing here.

So, who's on the bus for Macworld '07? Maybe we can do MacBUs t-shirts instead? And speaking of Macworld, we've got some fun community stuff in store including sponsoring the Your Mac Life party again this year - watch this space for more details!