Mac Mojo

If you've experienced either of the following issues when installing Service Pack 1, follow the links below to find your fix on the Mactopia Help and How-To pages: 

Office Setup Assistant opens when I try to open an Office 2008 application

When I deploy Office 2008 for Mac SP1, the update is not installed on client computers 

I am pleased to share with you today the release of Service Pack 1. We’ve paid attention to your feedback here on the blog as well as in other user forums and collected crash data through the Microsoft Error Report Protocol (MERP). The result is that you are going to have an even better experience with Office 2008 for Mac. This is a major update that focuses on overall stability, security and performance and you can get it for free from our download page.

I also wanted to give you a glimpse of the next version of Office for Mac. As with SP1, we are taking your feedback and using it to help us make Office for Mac better. We are very clear that Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an important feature to certain customers, and we will be bringing support back for VBA in the next version of Office for Mac - along with continuing our support for AppleScript.

Thanks to all who provided feedback on Office 2008, and we’ll continue to track our product forums and MERP for product feedback. In addition, folks who sign up for our anonymous Customer Experience Improvement Program are appreciated as they help us understand how the product is used. Please keep sharing your Office 2008 experience, it’s essential as we work on future releases.

As the newest member of the MacBU Marketing Team, I wanted to take a minute to introduce myself. I’m Mike Tedesco, and I joined the Mac BU almost 3 weeks ago as a Sr. Product Manager. My primary role is to be the voice of the customer to the MacBU for the Enterprise and Education segments. As an 8+ year Microsoftie working in the Enterprise space, and as someone who is also a weekend photographer for a wire service, I’m so excited to be working with a team that is super creative and works hard/plays hard!

As a photographer, I have been a longtime user of Expression Media (formerly iView Media Pro) and have come to depend on it not only for my photos, but for all of my digital assets. In fact (shameless plug warning), if you purchased our Mac Office 2008 Special Media Edition and have taken a look at the Expression Media Quick Start Guide, you have seen a number of my images from my trip to South Georgia Island. If you’re interested in seeing more, have a look at my galleries at www.tedescophotography.com.

My foray into using Expression Media came when some clients wanted to purchase a few prints, and I couldn’t find the photo shoot! I organized everything on my internal drives by year, month, and date but I could not find them. After some searching, I remembered that the files were stored on an offline drive. Had I been using Expression Media, I would have known where those files were in minutes rather than hours because Expression catalogs not only know what’s on your internal drives, but they keep track of assets that are stored offline as well. As a heavy user of this product, I’m happy to announce that today we are announcing Expression Media 2. A number of valuable new features are available, including:

    
•  The ability to create and view hierarchies of keywords for your files. I use this feature now to sub-categorize my sports photography into the specific sports, then by team, and finally by player so that I can find specific images even faster than before.
  
       

    
• Quick Look support on Leopard which means you can now preview items that are in a catalog without having to open the catalog itself. This is great if you have a large number of catalogs and you aren’t sure which one(s) you need to open.
  
       

    
• Multi-monitor Light Table support which allows you to have the Light Table open on one monitor while your catalog and tools are open on another. Any photographer who uses dual monitors will appreciate this addition!
  
       

    
• Full support for the Microsoft Office 2007/2008 file formats (DOCX, DOTX, PPTX, POTX, XLSX and XLT). With this addition, I am able to fully use Expression catalogs not only for my photography, but also for work and personal projects as I can manage my fonts, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, etc.

Good news for those of you who purchased the Special Media Edition, you can get this upgrade for free. Visit www.microsoft.com/expression/macoffice in Mid-May. In the meantime, for those who aren’t yet using Expression Media, you should check it out by downloading the trial today.

See ya around!

Mike

The best part of a product release is “Announcement Time”. And it goes something like this…

Today we launched Messenger for Mac 7.

What’s new you ask? Let me tell you! Messenger for Mac 7 includes cool new features for both the corporate service (works with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007) and personal service (works with the Windows Live service). But the biggest milestone here is that Messenger for Mac 7 delivers audio and video for the first time in the corporate service.

One of the exciting features in this release is Bonjour support in Messenger for Mac, available in both personal and corporate services. Using the Mac OS X Bonjour technology, Messenger for Mac 7.0 includes the ability to detect other Messenger for Mac users that are near by on the same local network. Are you at work on the weekend and want to check if anyone else is around? Turn on Bonjour to see who is there…

If you work in an organization deploying Office Communications Server 2007, I think you will enjoy the new features in the corporate service. Messenger for Mac 7 makes it a whole lot easier to track down co-workers you need to contact. Using the new search feature, you can easily search for people in your organization and start communicating with them.

You will also notice more detailed presence information that is compatible with the presence model of Office Communications Server 2007. Messenger for Mac 7 displays additional presence states to better reflect your contacts (or your own) availability. For example, Messenger for Mac will automatically set your status to ‘In a call’ when you are in an Audio or Video call. Messenger for Mac 7.0 also allows you to add a personal note in case you want to provide a little more information about your status (for example: “I’m available through Messenger only!”).

Through the corporate service in Messenger for Mac, you can now conduct virtual meetings with your co-workers using audio and video calls. You can communicate inside or outside your corporate network, you can communicate with co-workers running Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 on Windows, you can even participate in a multi-party Audio or Video conference.

Speaking of Audio and Video support, in the blog post "A Chat about Messenger", posted back in November, I shared with you background information on why AV is not available yet in the Personal service. We are on track with the plan mentioned in the last post, as we are delivering Audio and Video on Corporate service first. We are making progress and working on the delivery of Audio and Video for the personal service and are looking forward to getting the feature out there and in your hands as soon as we can!

There are a few other new features we included in the Personal service…

You can now assign nicknames to your contacts. Do you know two people named Jack and can never tell them apart in your contact list, since they both have their display name set to Jack? Put an end to the confusion and assign them some identifiable nicknames! Do you have a friend that insists on changing his\her display name to a different expression everyday? Use a nickname to reduce the amount of time you spend trying to identify your contact in the contact list.

Has anyone out there finally reached the point of having too many contacts for their own good and now can’t find anyone on that long list of contacts? Just use the new contact search field to look them up.

Better experience it all yourself… go check out Messenger for Mac 7 at the Mactopia site. 

And on that note, I’m going back to work now on the next version of Messenger for Mac! 

Thanks to all for sharing your feedback on RDC updates, today we released RDC Beta3 replacing RDC beta2, extending the beta period through the final release of RDC 2. You will no longer see a pop-up beta expiration message. The download is available here.

In addition to the updated expiration, you will also notice many improvements in the new build. I will point out a couple of major updates and let you discover the rest on your own. Beta3 includes a full set of Help topics, available through the new Help Viewer. The Help Viewer will be able to look online for the latest updates to content, just like Office 2008 for Mac’s Help Viewer. RDC support of non-English keyboards and languages has been implemented for French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, and Japanese. The RDC user interface and Help topics are also fully localized for these languages.

As part of these updates, we are also re-examining the final release version of RDC 2. Originally, in order to get RDC out sooner, we were planning on removing the ability to double click on RDP files to launch an RDC session. When this feature stopped working properly after the Beta 2 timeout, the feedback on this blog and in other online forums helped us decide that it wasn’t worth cutting to be done sooner. So we kept it, scheduled additional testing and will have the final release this summer. Beta3 will be available through the release of the final version. Stay tuned for updates.

So give it a try and tell us what you think! Please continue using the RDC Connect site for sending your feedback and suggestions. You will need to sign in with a Windows Live ID to submit feedback, which is why some of you clicked the Submit Feedback link and saw the page circling back to the front page.

Thank you!

The Macintosh Business Unit is going on the road! The Office 2008 for Mac District Launch Tour will kick off on April 29th in New York City and make stops in six cities in North America, including one stop in Canada. Our product and program managers look forward to meeting with IT professionals to provide in-depth sessions on Office 2008.

Join us for these technical sessions to get answers to the most pressing questions that IT managers and implementers are asking, and to learn more about Entourage/Exchange integration, Windows-Mac compatibility and Office for Mac deployment in your organization.  

Register to attend: https://microsoft.crgevents.com/Office2008MAC/Content/default.aspx?p=UC3HYF

Registration code:  MACTECH

Meet us in a city near you!

  New York City – Tuesday, April 29  

  Toronto, Canada - Tuesday, May 6

  Reston, VA - Thursday, May 8

  Los Angeles, CA - Tuesday, May 13

  Downers Grove, IL - Tuesday, May 20

  Redmond, WA - Thursday, May 22

You’ve been asking what MacBU’s plans are for Apple’s hottest new device, well… Hot on the heels of their successful integration of the Apple Remote with PowerPoint 2008 for Mac, Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit today announced a new product line of Mac-based Microsoft games using the Apple Remote as a game controller.

“If you thought driving PowerPoint with your Apple Remote was cool, just wait until you use it to play pool or chess!” says Sheridan Jones, Director of Product Marketing for MacBU. “We envision a whole line of Microsoft Games for the Apple Remote: Everything from sports to strategy!”

Said Craig Eisler, General Manager of the MacBU and co-inventor of DirectX gaming technology, “We’ve embraced the Apple Remote as a platform and extended it to a new category.” Eisler explained the vision of using the Apple Remote’s built-in accelerometers for gaming: “Picture swinging the Apple Remote in your hand like a tennis racket or golf club, then imagine that controlling an actual tennis or golf game on your Mac. Microsoft Games for Apple Remote is a big break-though for the industry. It’s going to be the best gaming device in the world!”

According to the company, productivity and playtime were meant to co-exist. To help promote Microsoft Games for Apple Remote, Microsoft included a preview game called “Prance Prance Devolution” within the productivity application PowerPoint 2008 for Mac in their recent 08.04.01 update. Inspired by MacBU’s great admiration for the legendary musicologists DEVO, the game is unlocked by pairing your Apple Remote to your Macintosh, then starting slide show in PowerPoint 2008 with any presentation containing five or more slides, advancing to slide 2, and pressing the following button combination on your Apple Remote: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, play, pause.

Additional Microsoft Games for Apple Remote will be available starting April 1, 2008 from an online marketplace appropriately called Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit Online Marketplace 2008 Special Microsoft Games for Apple Remote Edition (MMBUOM2008SMG4ARE). Pricing for Microsoft Games for Apple Remote will start at $1 per day with a minimum two-year contract. Microsoft Games for Apple Remote are side loaded directly to the Apple Remote.

April Fools!

If you have been using Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac public beta2, you will be greeted by a message when you launch the beta today. 

This simply means that the beta2 testing period has ended. We do this because the RDC public beta2 was released last October and has been out there for 5 months. As indicated on the dialog, you can continue using beta by dismissing the message dialog. Otherwise, the beta2 build you have stays fully functional. My team is moving full throttle to make the final release available for download from Mactopia by the end of May … if not earlier. Stay tuned, and thank you for your patience!

Update on RDC behavior after clicking "Continue Using Beta" - Some of you reported that RDC beta2 did not load the connection file you were launching RDC from, after selecting "Continue Using Beta". RDC beta2 will load your last used connection settings instead of the file you were trying to open. This is a known issue. Our current plan is not to do another beta because we are focusing all RDC resources on the final release. But I'd like to offer this workaround:

    
• After dismissing the beta expiration dialog, use RDC menu command File->Open command to open your connection file.

    
• This will launch a second RDC session that comes with its own beta expiration dialog, but you will be able to use your saved settings from the connection file after dismissing the second beta dialog.

I realize that this is inconvenient, especially for those of you who use RDC to run multiple connection sessions. My team understands this, and has been putting in extra effort to get the final release out to you as soon as possible. Again, thanks for staying with us!