Another MacWorld, Exchange enhancements, PST Import

Another MacWorld Expo came, and left. I’ve now been to 8 MacWorld Expos (6 SF, 2 NY) courtesy of Microsoft, in addition to the 4 I had gone to before (2 Boston, 2 NY).

And wow, am I exhausted from meeting so many customers, and answering so many questions. This was definitely a better year for me representing Microsoft Entourage - in the past, customers would ask (angrily) about what Exchange solutions for the Mac. With Microsoft Office 2004, we worked hard to deliver a good solution for our enterprise customers to use Entourage with their Exchange servers - and it’s clear to me that our customers have benefited.

As a result, there is definitely less angst about “How can I use my Mac with Exchange?” which is fantastic - and it reaffirms our Microsoft’s commitment to the Mac platform!

Heck, just check out all these articles about Microsoft and the Mac that showed up last week.

But most importantly, I can now finally reveal what I’ve been working so feverishly on since late July. [Note to friends: this is why you folks stopped seeing me around!]

If you click through some of those articles, you’ll see that coming soon, the MacBU will be offering:

-A tool to import .PST files from Mac Outlook 2001 into Entourage 2004. In fact, there’s a public beta for it today.

-Improved Exchange support in Entourage. Let me tell you folks, we’re Mac users here at the MacBU, and guess what - we use Exchange in our network. (Go figure!) So we really REALLY know what it is like to be a Mac user in a Windows world - and you can be sure that we know what you’re going through and that we’re hard at work on improving the situation.

Here’s what my General Manager, Roz Ho, had to say in this interview:

To address the needs of our enterprise customers, we’re excited to announce some important tools and enhancements at Macworld 2005. For example, we’ll be talking about the .PST Import Tool. This is something our customers requested to easily migrate data from Outlook 2001 for Mac to Entourage, so we’re pleased to say that it’s arriving in the next few months. We’ll be kicking off a public beta program as well to ensure our customers have a say in the final product.

Also, we’ve got a lot lined up to improve collaboration in the enterprise and deliver a much smoother experience overall. We’re upgrading Exchange support in an update to Entourage planned for later this year and will focus on a number of enhancements, including work on calendars and public folders, server/client synchronization, and permissions and mailbox quota management.

That’s a pretty good summary (and it’s actually a pretty good interview, so read the whole thing!)

Alrighty. Back to Program Managing those improvements out the door and to the customers with the rest of my fantastic team!

I swear, I’ve been more backlogged in email this one week of attending MacWorld, than I was going to Hong Kong for 1.5 weeks around Christmas/New Years. Figures.