Weekend Links

  • Article

OK, I'll have to just admit that Friday is usually a bad day for me to
blog. I end up taking care of the kids until 11:30 at night and so
I've been missing that midnight deadline that I set for myself in
doing my links post. I'm not going to change that goal though. If I
do, I'll just end up posting at midnight on Saturdays.

Last week I mentioned that I might get some sort of podcast
going. I've got some support for that around the office and so my
next steps are to get some good equipment together and to put together
some show bumpers and stuff like that. I'm hoping to have something
started in the next couple of weeks, so I'll add a note about my
progress next week. The podcasting is new to me, but I used to be a
television reporter in the Marines, so I'm really looking forward to doing
this.

Of course the big buzz this week (for Mac Office anyway) was Mary's
interview with David Flynn. In case you missed it, I'm linking David's
article and to some
of the sites that linked back to or commented on it.

As always, lots of good commentary and discussion out there about Mac
Office. Keep in mind that we haven't named Office 12 for Mac yet, so if you're
going to blog about it, I would stick with calling it Office 12 for now. We'll
definitely post more information about Office 12 as we get further along with
the product. I'm looking forward to being able to interview some of
the people working on Office and getting them to share a little
bit about what they're doing.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 23, 2006
    Greetings,

    Thanks for the update on the "Universal Office" (Don't you just love the name?).  I don't plan to upgrade my 17"PB to an Intel Mac until the "Universal Mac" is released.  Oh, and yes,  I will wait until Adobe "univeralizes" its suite.  A timetable of a year from now works for me.
  • Anonymous
    September 23, 2006
    On occassion I use Excel for mid sized projects where I work.

    At work I use XP.

    But at home, and on my laptop I use a Mac running Office.

    I'd love to do Excel programming at nights and on weekends on my Mac.

    But I can't because I can't find ADO, or useable examples of ODBC, for Office 2004.

    Is there any changes we'll see ADO, or somthing like it in Office 12?

    Thanks.
  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2006
    Territan -- We have a great relationship with the Windows Office team, and work with them quite frequently.  I have talked with them about our UI and our findings from the various usability tests that we have done.  (I say this as the user experience researcher who has been involved in all of the tests regarding our updated user interface.)  

    We learned the lesson in Word 6.0 that giving Mac users the exact same UI as is found in Windows isn't the greatest of ideas.  But we can work with their ideas to make them fit into the world of Mac users.  So while we've shared information with them, not all of it is necessarily relevant to them: our interface is different, and our users are different.  

    Right now, we can't talk too much about the UI.  Once everything is finalised and we're ready to talk about it, I'll be waxing poetic about lots of things that affect our user experience.  I've been kicking around ideas for a post about this exact topic, and hopefully that'll answer some of your questions.  
  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2006
    We do quite a bit of SBS 2003 installations - and frankly we think that SBS is a better small business server platform than OS X Server in a mac environment!  (We are are part of the Apple Consultant Network btw)  Mostly because of groupware...  Anyway, my big plea is that Entourage become a much more full fledged supporter of Exchange.  I noticed that the interview didn't address that at all - I'm sure hoping that's on the radar screen.

    Aaron
  • Anonymous
    October 02, 2006
    Please MBU: I do not care about UI or any other enhancements to look and feel. What my users truly need is feature parity in Entourage with Outlook. I mean Out of Office assistant isn't even in there, just some kludgey set a rule... There are other issues but its exchange connectivity is truly underwhelming. Repeat, Rinse, Repeat again: TRUE FEATURE PARITY!