However, it says you need Lync Server which comes with 'Office 365'. As previously told, OS X really sold me with its elegance and stability, and even though I tried running my MacBook with just Windows for a while, I found the driver support to be lacking in sophistication (Apple’s hardware driver support for Windows, while there, isn’t designed to run the pretty hardware at its best).From what I read at this link, Lync should be available to the public. My work is for a software consulting firm that works in the Microsoft space, so compatibility with my coworkers—and appearances in front of clients—was a significant factor. As I blogged at the time, I was originally attracted to the beautiful and affordable hardware but couldn’t conceive of a scenario where I’d actually run any OS other than Windows. The explanation is below: Basically, the equivalent to the registry keys for windows needs to be entered in the Lync config plist file on the mac, a file named MicrosoftLyncRegistrationDB.xxx.plist that you can find in /Library/Preferences/ByHost.As a relative newcomer to the Mac, my perspective is that of a switcher. Basically, you have to edit the plist for Lync, and enter a registry key equivalent.And while it was occasionally handy to use Word or Excel natively on the Mac (when it was too tedious to fire up the VM), Office 2008 basically just took up space in the netherworld of software-installed-but-not-committed-to.Not that anything else replaced it, at least not any native OS X applications. It wasn’t even particularly good as a POP3/IMAP email client. The main applications worked okay but were nothing spectacular and Entourage was simply a terrible excuse for an Outlook replacement. Realistically, the MacBook was fast enough to handle this with aplomb, and it was kind of practical in a variety of ways (for example, I could ‘switch off’ my work life at the end of the day).I obtained and installed Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, but—truth be told—it was about on par with Office 2003 for Windows. And my work life happened inside a Windows 7 Professional virtual machine in Parallels.Now I understand that some would suggest that MS Office suffers from rampant featurism and therefore cannot be the yardstick for measuring all other contenders. None of the document review features work, none of the styles are the same (or function the same), etc. Yes, I can open some Microsoft Office formatted documents in iWork, but then I can’t really do anything much more than perform basic editing functions. But they provide none of the advanced features that make collaborating on digital documents somewhat do-able. And they seem to be stable. The oftentimes militant public support that Mac people will profess for these applications can only be explained by a certain lack of familiarity of how work in an office—any modern office that’s not a design studio or one-person consulting firm—actually gets done.Outlook, because despite Apple’s best efforts to make Mail.app Exchange Server compatible, it’s still not as integrated with common business scenarios as Outlook and doesn’t have integrated contacts, tasks, or a calendar (I understand some of those things come separately on the Mac). And documents make up 75% of most knowledge workers’ work.Here’s why one might choose to use Microsoft Office for Mac 2011: It is what 90% of office workers use to compose, edit and circulate documents.
Office 2011 With Lync Driver Support ToI know there are some very strong—and possibly correct—opinions out there that suggest Keynote.app might actually have the advantage here.)Some thoughts about each individual Office for Mac 2011 application, one year into the journey: Outlook:Mac 2011 Outlook for Mac 2011, with Lync online meeting integrationOutlook on the Mac is great, plain and simple. (PowerPoint, for me, is a bit of an afterthought. Lync (this is an enterprise distribution only client for Microsoft’s software phone/VOIP/messaging platform) with Outlook integration, because if your office—like mine—only offers you a software phone line, you don’t really have a choice. Excel, because it is how business numbers are crunched, like it or not. ![]() Unfortunately, it was initially plagued by stability issues, and there were a few months after the launch of Office 2011 when “auto-updates” would be shipped pretty frequently. It works, and works well most of the time, and—importantly—provides almost all of the features of its big brother on Windows. I don’t know to what exact extent Microsoft re-wrote Word for this version of Office, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s 90% new code. Word:Mac 2011 Word for Mac 2011, with inexplicable dual toolbar/ribbonWord, ironically, has taken longer to get used to than Outlook on the Mac. But all in all, it’s more than usable, has an appropriate number of configuration options, and works stably. And I’m not 100% sure I understand why, when I have Outlook open on my Mac and on Windows (next to each other), messages arrive 30 seconds earlier in Windows than on the Mac. (Example: I always repeat the first row of a table automatically if the table splits across multiple pages. I will say that this doesn’t affect me in my day-to-day usage because I’m a conscientious document-saver, but it’s a little irritating, and it occurs mainly in boundary cases that QA simply hasn’t gotten to with any consistency yet. Still, I get crashes on obvious activities far too frequently, and the recovery is graceful only about 50% of the time in terms of document preservation. ![]() On day 1, I literally searched for the AutoSum icon for 20 minutes. It’s as if the Microsoft product planners couldn’t let go of their beloved toolbars, and instead decided to divide the commands between the new-style ribbon and the old-style toolbar. Instead, the AutoSum function is on a toolbar above the ribbon. As with all of the Office for Mac 2011 applications, I find the “dual tool bar” confusing and unnecessary: I don’t fully understand why the command buttons aren’t on the same part of the Office ribbons on both platforms. Install angular js for macI have yet to discover anything I can’t do with the Mac version that I can do on Windows. It’s the least-used of the apps on my Mac, but whenever I’ve had the occasion it’s been reliable and full-featured. (That sound you just heard? Doors slamming because the Mac business unit at Microsoft just figured out they have usability labs, and they’re quickly going to usability-test Office for Mac 2011.) PowerPoint:Mac 2011This one’s pretty good, actually. This is partially true because to this day, Microsoft insists of using ActiveX for certain on-screen functionality in SharePoint. To get a ‘full’ SharePoint collaboration experience on the Mac basically requires you to run Safari or Firefox, and even then you don’t really get the full integration possible on Windows. The problem it’s trying to address is that Microsoft’s other teams (the SharePoint team and the people who wrote SkyDrive, Microsoft’s attempt at copying Dropbox) still really don’t care at all about Mac users. But let’s start at the beginning: what is it? Document Connection is a workaround disguised as an Office application. Microsoft Document Connection Document Connection 2011, shown with typical resultWhere to start? This thing is an unmitigated disaster. I personally never warmed to Keynote so I don’t have a particularly sophisticated take on how it compares, but I think it’s reasonable to assume they have feature parity, and at the end of the day, it’s just a matter of preference.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorPeter ArchivesCategories |