ASUMAC

Microsoft has released updated information for ASU customers concerning the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac volume license. Thanks to Shelly Sexton from Microsoft and Jon Finley from ASU for forwarding the information to the ASUMAC group:

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We have a lot of confusion around which version of Office for Macintosh will be available for our VL customers in October. This should help clear things up.

Office 2008 for MAC Business edition is a retail product and will not be available to VL customers. The features and functionality WILL be rolled into Office for MAC R2 that will be available via the MVLS site for VL customers.

For the Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition content, the Volume Licensing (VL) customers do have/will have access to all of the bits, but it won’t show as an additional or new SKU to what they see today. The only thing that is not being released in VL, that does come in the Business Edition FPP box, is the coupon promoting the 30-day trial of the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) that is available to VL customers today.

Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition in retail includes 2 discs:

Disc 1 – “Office 2008 for Mac” (now with SP2) includes:
Word 2008
Excel 2008
PowerPoint 2008
Entourage 2008
Messenger for Mac 7
Document Connection (access to SharePoint and Office Live Workspace)

Disc 2 – “Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition Extras” includes:
Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition
Remote Desktop Connection 2
7-hours of training from Lynda.com on disc
An installer that provides a new set of business-focused templates and clipart

For VL, we slipstreamed the recently released SP2 bits (equal to Disc 1) into the channel, and we added the Extras disc content (Disc 2) into the existing VL offering as well, so any of our existing VL customers and/or new customers will get all of the Business Edition content. The VL offering is still named Office 2008 for Mac, and it still retains the same SKU number. The 2nd disc will appear as Office 2008 for Mac Extras starting on 10/1. Customers can access the content through their MVLS account.

For those of you starting to deploy the latest version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, one of the reasons to hold back is how 10.6 will work with existing software. An online listing of compatible software is available, which may help determine if this is the correct time to deploy Mac OS X version 10.6:

http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/

The September 2009 ASUMAC meeting will feature a presentation by Apple Engineer Al Teran. Apple will be on campus to show and discuss the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). Come see what is new for the latest version of Mac OS X Client and Server. More info about Snow Leopard can be found on Apple’s site:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/

This months meeting will be held on the 15th of September at 10:00 am in Computing Commons 120. The meeting will also be online via the Adobe Connect/Breeze meeting service:

http://breezemeeting.asu.edu/asumac

Hope to see you there.

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