Office for Mac to Be Improved

Office for the Mac will be produced for at least another five years and will undergo some improvements, Microsoft announced at Apple’s annual MacWorld Conference in Jan. 2006. The announcement suggests that Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit will continue to support (and profit from) Apple’s platform despite vigorous competition between the companies in OSs and digital media.

A Mar. 2006 update to Entourage (Microsoft’s e-mail and PIM program for the Mac) will support several important technologies included in Apple’s Mac OS X 10.4 (commonly referred to as “Tiger”), including the following:

• Sync Services, to synchronize Entourage data with devices such as mobile phones
• Spotlight, which shows e-mail messages, calendar items, and contact information in Apple’s unified search system.

Microsoft will also update Messenger for the Mac, an instant messaging client that supports Microsoft’s Live Communications Server (LCS) as well as the public .NET Messenger (or MSN Messenger) network. In addition to bug fixes, the updated version of Messenger allows IT administrators to control whether or not conversations are automatically archived.