year in review

If the boss can write a retrospective, so can I. :)

2009 has been an Entourage-filled year for me. At Macworld 2009 in January, we announced Entourage for Web Services. While EWS didn't get a lot of UI touches, I still got to make some UX improvements, especially with regards to perceived performance. The public beta gave us a lot of awesome feedback (as well as feedback that we shared with our friends on the Exchange team), and we released the final version in August. It was also included in the spiffy new Office 2008 Business Edition.

Aside from all of this goodness, we made a big announcement in August: Outlook is coming soon to a Mac near you. The next version of Office:Mac, which will be released in time for your holiday shopping pleasure in 2010, will include Outlook. The UI is Cocoa, it will work with Time Machine, and it will support Information Rights Management. I've been doing mountains of research on Outlook (and that will continue into 2010, so don't forget to sign up to participate in my usability studies) in 2009, and I can't wait to be able to tell you more about what's coming in that release.

I did manage some non-Entourage/EWS/Outlook work in 2009, too. We announced the Document Companion at Macworld, too, which I'd been working on for some time and was happy to get it out into the light of day. Office 2008 SP2 came out this summer, which included the new feature of path animations in PowerPoint.

Dennis Liu showed us how he is pretending to work with Office 2008. It's a scientific fact that no-one can be accused of not working if there's an Excel spreadsheet open. Heh. He also made Office 2010: The Movie for my friends on the WinOffice team. This is somewhat less flashy, but one of my co-workers put the new path animations in PowerPoint 2008 SP2 to work when he made a short film in PowerPoint.

Outside of MacBU, Exchange 2010 came into public beta, which includes some great news for Mac users: Safari and Firefox both support the full Outlook Web Access now.

What's in store for 2010? Well, the single biggest thing is that we're going to release the next version of Office:Mac. I'll be speaking at Macworld in February about administering Macs in Exchange environments. And there's more: this is just the tip of the iceberg. Watch this space ...

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 03, 2010
  Nadyne, I've been meaning for a while to send you my reason for not using Entourage and using Apple Mail instead. It all has to do with iPhoto. You can try this out for yourself. If I have a number of photos selected in iPhoto and want to email them, I can click the icon at the bottom and they are included in a message in my default email program. If Apple Mail is my default program, the photos are inserted into the message above the title of the photo and any comments I have added. If I do this with Entourage selected as my default email program, the photos are merely attached. The titles and comments are orphaned in the body of the message with no context. I realize that Entourage is a more full-featured email program than Apple Mail. However, I send out pictures regularly and Apple Mails is simply better in this regard. Fix this in Outlook (or even in Entourage) and I'll switch over.

• Anonymous
  January 03, 2010
  I ´ve a question for you. I´m part of a really small business, we are interested in office:mac but do we have to buy the business edition? Or can we buy the home & student edition? We are just happy with the features on Home & student. Our business is placed in Argentina. Thanks in advance

• Anonymous
  January 04, 2010
  The comment has been removed