Oh heart be still, I **must** have this product!

It's good MS is working so hard on these awesome features that users have been clamoring for. Much better than working on things like actual document compatibility, or macros in Excel. Who needs to actually get work done in Office? Especially when its so easy and fun to set an out of office message like this!

request.response

In my small office, I'm what passes for the administrator; we have 10 users (3 Mac/7 Win), not counting me, and we use a hosted Exchange server. I'm sure it's too late for Microsoft to consider feature requests for Entourage 2008, but here's what I'm hoping I'll see:

1) Ability to show multiple calendars at once; in Outlook 2003/2007, one need only check the boxes next to the calendars you want to see and they line up next to each other...they even have colored backgrounds, and the calendar name in the folder view is highlighted with the corresponding color. This is especially useful in our business, where our clients see two or more members of our staff in back-to-back appointments -- being able to show multiple calendars in the same screen makes this kind of scheduling easy. In Entourage 2004, you can only show one calendar at a time...you can open multiple calendars, each in a different window and adjust your windows to kind of fake it out, but it doesn't work very well.

2) Support for color coding on shared calendars. In Entourage, I can color code my schedule items, but no one else who is viewing my shared calendar can see my colors, and I can't see anyone else's color coding. Outlook users can see each other's color coding.

3) Outlook has a meeting request menu item, in addition to the regular add appointment item. In Entourage, you have to create the item and send invitations from inside the item. This is a small thing, but you would not believe the amount of grief my Mac users have given me about this. This would also be a very easy thing for Microsoft to add.

For my part, I would like to see a bit tighter integration between Entourage and Exchange. For example, if I want to add a shared folder to my folder view, I simply select the add shared folder option from the file menu, and I get a list of users who have shared their folders with me. In Entourage, I get no such list...I have to know the user id (not necessarily the same as the email address, at least, not with our hosting company) to get the item to show up. Note -- our hosting company has both Entourage and Outlook users connecting via OWA.

Still, I'm grateful that Entourage supports Exchange as well as it does...it's bad enough that I have to run QuickBooks in Parallels Desktop!

If this were not the only game in town, most Mac power-users would have long since found another team.

<Shaking head> Really? Seriously. First an Office Art web site and now Out Of Office replys - a feature that has been available to the rest of the world for almost 20 years?

I really think the Mac BU's offices have a carbon monoxide leak and Eisler is inhaling big. And if that's not the case, then I really believe they have run out of ideas on how to improve the software. Maybe that's why it was delayed - because they couldn't think of any new features to put in. "Well, Office 2007 has a new Ribbon and Mac Office doesn't have one, so let's put a ribbon-like thing on Mac Office 2008 to make it look like we did something useful and to make it more Windows-like, even though it's not a Windows program and no other Mac program has a Ribbon.

Now see, if I were heading the Mac BU I would do things like get rid of the bloated code from years of crappy coding, checking out other Mac programs such as iWork and Final Cut Studio to find how how to make Office more Mac-like instead of Playskool-like, or offer better cross-compatibility to coincide with the Windows release. I've been hearing Mac users bitching for years about better compatibility, and we get press releases about Office Art and Out Of Office reply's.

They just don't get it, and never have. Mac Office is just a revenue source that Microsoft only has to put minimal thought into. And regardless of what garbage Microsoft feeds Mac users about how wonderful Office 2008 is, we're smarter than that. Remember Microsoft, we've been watching crappy program after half-assed crappy program come out of the Mac BU for years, only to be discontinued and disappear. How about that Windows Media Player joke?

Mac Office is craptacular and Apple knows it. Apple had to write it's own office suite for backup because Office is going bye-bye and it's not a matter of if, it's when.

If you can't do it right, then just leave.

Instead of slowly throwing bones at Mac users feet, why don't they just give us a fully functional Outlook program for Mac? Scrap this Entourage nonsense and make Outlook for Mac!