It’s been four years in waiting since Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit (Mac BU) gave the world a fully-fledged version of Microsoft Office. Sure, ask anyone from the Mac BU and they “but, but” and splutter until the cows come home that there was that wonderful Service Pack release a while back but just like their Operating System release schedule Office 2008 has been a long, long time coming.

For me there was really only one reason that I cared about its release, and no it wasn’t for a Universal Binary so it ran faster on my Intel Mac, although that is a very nice bonus, no for me all I wanted was a version on Entourage that actually had some real Exchange support in it.

In less time than it took to install the Standard version (the cheaper Edu/Home version has no support at all for Exchange in Entourage) I tried connecting to my work’s Exchange server and was greeted with the same crap message that it couldn’t connect. Game over, Office 2008, you suck balls, just like 2004 and version X.

You see ever since the last, and still to this day best, Exchange email client that Microsoft ever released, Outlook 2001, operations for the included email program in Microsoft’s Mac Office suite has been handled not by the Exchange development team but by the Mac BU. You’d think, “Hey, these two divisions still work for the same big company don’t they? Can’t they have a little meet & greet to sort this out?” But obviously that’s just a pipe dream and once again Mac users are left in the dark.

Entourage does have some limited ability to connect to Exchange servers but it does require that server to be running the option of Outlook Web Access (OWA) in order for the client to connect successfully rather than the Outlook standard of MAPI & HTTP-DAV. Unfortunately for me my employer’s IT gods deem OWA unnecessary as 99% of desks are PC’s and I’m left running Outlook 2001 via Classic or Outlook 2007 in Parallels.

I may be being a little harsh on poor old billion dollar Microsoft, Office does have some neat little things in it, namingly the ability to open their new whizz bang Office 2007 XML formats and the best feature I’ve found so far…. No more retarded transparent floating menus! Thank you!!! I’m sure there’s more in there too but frankly I could care less until Entourage grows some balls and gets out the kiddie pool.

If you’d like to know more about how inept Entourage’s Exchange ability really is there’s a great article by John Welch over at MacWorld.