Businesses are likely to show renewed interest in the Mac as a desktop client platform, following the release of Microsoft’s latest version of Office for the Mac. The suite should to make it easier for companies to operate mixed environments, as its new features are designed to better integrate with Windows-based infrastructure.

Office 2008 for Mac was released at Apple’s MacWorld show in January and will be available under volume licensing from February. It introduces a new-style user interface and the applications are now compatible with the Office Open XML file formats of Office 2007 for Windows.

“The focus area for this version is the simplification of getting work done, but if you’re an experienced user, you still have access to the tools you need,” said Amanda Lefebvre, marketing manager for Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit.

The core suite consists of the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications, which are compatible with the newer XML-based file formats introduced in their namesake applications in Office 2007 for Windows.

As well as file format compatibility, the applications have the same graphics-rendering engine as Office 2007, and feature a revamped look and feel influenced to a certain extent by the Windows version.

“We have added an elements gallery in place of the ribbon of Office 2007 and we have brought the functionality of Office forward in making things more discoverable,” said Eric Wilfrid, product unit manager for the Macintosh Business Unit.

Wilfrid added that work has gone into improving Entourage’s reliability as a calendar tool. Entourage replaces Outlook in Mac versions of Office.

“Entourage is now a first class citizen for managing time effectively, and we all use it ourselves internally here at the Mac Business Unit,” he said.

In business environments, deployment has been made easier by moving to Apple’s installer technology, according to Wilfrid. Because this is compatible with Apple Remote Desktop, administrators can deploy the suite remotely, and it includes enhanced customisation capabilities.

Many of the enhancements in the suite make it easier for Macs to integrate alongside PCs. “In the enterprise, most of our Mac customers also have Windows,” Wilfrid said.
However, on the downside, Office 2008 does not have any support for Visual Basic, which is widely used for automating business processes with Office documents. The decision not to include this was apparently taken for technical reasons, but Microsoft said it is looking to address the problem.

“We know there’s an ongoing customer need for programmability, and we’re continually evaluating how we might meet this need in the future,” Wilfrid said. The upshot is that VBA scripts created in Office 2007 will not work on Macs.

Office 2008 is the first version of Microsoft’s Mac suite to run natively on Intel-based systems, but makes use of universal binary executable files so that the suite also runs on older PowerPC Macs.