Our hands-on journey together with the beta for Workplace 2008 continues. What about compatibility with Workplace 2007 for Windows? Exclusively Outlook/Exchange and XML files?
Office 2004 has offered our Intel Mac contingent quite a bit to complain about ; pace, interface, did we mention pace? Past that, compatibility difficulties with preceding and present variations of Workplace for Windows -- notably from the spot of Outlook PST files -- have plagued all Workplace for Mac customers. Using the introduction of the new Workplace Open XML file variety in Office 2007 for Windows, these compatibility troubles expanded to all files in the Office friends and family.
However "total integration with Windows Office users" has continuously been a promised characteristic -- and chief marketing point -- of Workplace for Mac, longtime users know that compatibility is much easier said than carried out. Though pre-
Office 2007 Term, Excel and Access files put together in Office for Windows may possibly be viewable or editable in the Mac,
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, the exact same can't be reported for e-mail data files designed in Outlook for Windows. Pondering the importance of e-mail with the workplace, we uncover the lack of platform synergy the two confusing and irritating.
So, how does the Office 2008 beta take care of these two hurdles? The outcomes, sadly, are combined.
In the a person hand, we have been pleased as punch to access our *docx files natively with write-access and, all formatting correct and intact.
In the other hand, we have been frustrated that PST support is still non-existent in Entourage.
The late stage of this beta doesn't give us a lot of hope that is a difficulty that will be resolved. On the plus facet, for Exchange consumers, Entourage 2008, even in beta, is much, much more effective at integrating with Trade Server 2007 than any former version. For end users who depend on server-side storage versus localized PST files, the integration with Entourage 2008 is nearer on the corresponding version of Outlook (on this case, Outlook 2007) than ever before just before.