Improved Mac Connections to Servers

A new add-on for Office 2008 for Mac will make it easier for users to post documents to SharePoint sites and Office Live Workspaces, and an update to Entourage (the Exchange e-mail client for Mac) will bring it in line with more recent Exchange e-mail protocols and make it possible to synchronize Entourage Tasks, Notes, and Categories with Exchange 2007 SP1. The free updates could indicate an increasing presence for the Mac in corporate environments, and underscore Microsoft’s commitment to supporting interoperability among Office for the Mac and various Microsoft business software products.

Closer to PC Parity

Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, which creates Office for Mac and other Mac applications, announced the following updates at the Jan. 2009 Macworld conference:

Document Collaboration Companion for Mac. While Windows versions of Office boast tight integration with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and its full-featured companion, SharePoint Server, the Mac versions of Office do not. Users cannot open and edit documents on a SharePoint site from within Office for Mac, but instead must access them with a browser (Safari or Firefox; Internet Explorer is not available on the Mac), download them, edit them locally, and then repost them with the browser. A free stand-alone application, the Document Collaboration Companion for Mac, announced at Macworld 2009, reduces the number of steps required for Mac users to check documents in and out from SharePoint Workspaces and Document Libraries, and resolves synchronization problems that sometimes resulted in duplicate files appearing on the server without being merged. However, users must still open a separate Office 2008 application in order to work on the checked-out document. Microsoft says that tighter integration with SharePoint is a top priority for the next version of Office for Mac.