Mac Mojo : Update

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 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.

Coming soon

CraigE — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 07:52:00 GMT

I am happy to say that the week of July 30th we will be releasing a beta of our latest Remote Desktop Connection client (and it's a universal binary - I have seen a number of folks ask about that), along with Beta 2 of our file format converters. This update of our file format converters will include a significant Word refresh and the addition of PowerPoint (.pptx) support. Stay tuned for more details when the bits are posted in a couple weeks.

Wait, wait, I'm here

CraigE — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 20:46:00 GMT

My first blog post, while written by yours truly, wasn't posted by yours truly - my marketing team created an account for me and posted the blog entry so we could make sure it happened in a timely way during the frenzy of my first day. With the initial scramble over, I now have control over my account - so now I can post for myself, comment for myself - it's like I'm my own person. Watch out! :-).

First of all, I have now had 4 weeks on the job, and I am happy to report that I couldn't be more delighted with my decision to come to MacBU - the energy and passion in the team is truly inspiring. Our customers are in great hands.

I’ve had a chance to get caught up on all the various comments in this blog to date and I have seen a lot feature suggestions. I really appreciate them – I love it when folks take the time to share their view on our products. It’s inspiring to me to see how much people care about MacBU’s products.

I’ve also seen a lot of requests for dates and I wanted to address that. We simply can’t answer these requests in a precise manner – all we can do is identify rough time frames. It isn’t that we are being secretive or cruel - shipping software as complex as Mac Office is half art, half science, and calling a precise date way in advance is next to impossible. In some cycles where we’re just choosing what features to deliver we can target a date with more precision by cutting back on our ambitions. This release is more than just features that we could prioritize and cut – among other things, we have new file formats and are building universal binaries for our entire Office suite. Our entire team wants to ship great products that people love to use, and that means making sure the products work great. So while I appreciate that people want it now (believe me, we all want it now) and if not now, people want to know exactly when, I’m afraid that right now, all I can say is, we’re working hard and stay tuned.

So right now I know that folks want our software and that our users have lots of great feature ideas – I love it. I’d also love to have a broader dialog with y’all – so over to you, what do you want to hear from me?

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.

The Times They Are A Changin'

AndyRuff — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:53:00 GMT

For many Entourage users prior to today, March 2007 was a month to lose sleep over. The United States Energy Policy Act of 2005 shifted the observation of Daylight Savings Time from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March. As a result, a majority of us living in the United States lose an extra hour of sleep in the month of March. Further, many software applications and gadgets simply didn't know about the new DST rules as they were designed and developed before the law was passed, Entourage among them.

Today’s release of the 11.3.3 update delivers a significant change to Entourage’s time zone support, including support for the new DST dates. Prior to this fix, events in the month of March 2007 (starting 3/11) were off by an hour for the majority of US customers. I highly recommend customers update to this release of Entourage prior to the beginning of Daylight Savings observation in 2007. The update seamlessy ensures that your calendar is updated to reflect the new DST rules and improves overall time zone reliability.

Behind the scenes, the issue stemmed from Entourage’s inability to support multiple daylight savings rules. The last major change in daylight savings across the United States was in 1987, well before the creation of Entourage. Our calendaring engine assumed that daylight savings would always be observed at the same time year after year. We've fixed these issues in this update. Entourage now supports multiple daylight savings rules and improves compatibility with the Mac OS’ time zone and daylight savings functions (support for the DST change was included in Mac OS 10.4.6).

-Andy

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.

Office Delay? Ya Don't Say.

sherjo — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 03:27:00 GMT

No, seriously, you don't say (or shouldn't), because it isn't true. Over the last few days, some Mac sites have been reporting that the Universal Binary version of Office for Mac (officially unnamed, but currently code-named Office 12) has been delayed, but there is no delay or deviation from our development schedule. We're hitting our milestones, checking in our features, and making the move to Intel as planned. We've totally moved from Code Warrior to Xcode, so we've crested that hill. We usually ship 6 - 8 months after the availability of Office for Windows so we can do compatibility testing. This has been our shipping cycle for ages, and we're right on track. In fact, for Office 12, we've not even officially announced a launch date (but when we do, we should do it here first).

Mac Office Updates

Brianjo — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:58:00 GMT

Today we released update 11.3.0 for Office 2004 for Mac. You can get this update through Microsoft AutoUpdate or you can download it from the Mactopia site. You can trigger the update yourself by clicking Check for Update from the Help menu of your favorite Office 2004 for Mac application. In addtion we updated Microsoft Office v. X for Mac to version 10.1.8.

Here are the links to the download pages for these updates if you want to pick them up manually:

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.0 Update
This update contains several updates to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. In addition, this update includes all of the improvements released in all previous Office 2004 updates. (If you're an Exchange user, check out this page for some additional information about the Entourage update.)
Mactopia: Microsoft Office v. X for Mac 10.1.8 Update
This update contains several updates to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. In addition, this update includes all of the improvements released in all previous Office v. X updates.

Trouble signing in with Messenger for Mac 6.0?

Mary Starman — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:29:00 GMT

Ah, weekends. Time off, down time from thinking about bugs. Well, not if you’re Rebecca, one of our star Messenger testers.

Starting on Friday night, September 29, Rebecca was casually checking out the Messenger Newsgroup. (Hopefully this was after dinner and the kids were off to bed.) She’s seen posts from a few customers who upgraded to Messenger 6.0 and were having log-in problems. So she decided to check in with the newsgroup and see what was up.

Now, most of the time this happens, it’s a temporary issue on the server side, like too much traffic, and it sorts itself out quickly. Not this time. Rebecca checked the newsgroup again on Saturday and more and more people were seeing the same problem.

By the time I got to my desk Monday morning, Rebecca had worked individually with dozens of customers and had identified the problem. A fix was in the works that both the server team and our team thought would fix the issues. And we were fast tracking to release it.

Thanks to Rebecca’s weekend work, the test and dev team’s hard work during this past week, and the help of some of the newsgroup posters who helped us test out the patch, today we’ve posted Messenger for Mac 6.0.1. For any of you who were seeing log in problems, please download the update here and enjoy the new features in Messenger.

A big THANKS to all of the newsgroup participants who worked with Rebecca over the weekend and throughout last week, and who helped us test the patch!