The Macbook came delivered with a 30 day trial of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac OS X and a 30 day trial of iWork ‘06. I probably would have tried the full iWork ‘06 version if it had been available through SURFspot, the online store with educational software licenses for students, teachers and staff working at universities and higher education institutions here in the Netherlands. But there I could only buy a very cheap license (about 14 euros) for Microsoft Office 2004 while iWork still costs 71 euros in the Educational store of Apple.
The fact that Office 2004 looks a lot like Office 2003 on Windows XP wasn’t the most important reason to choose it. But it turned out that the fact that Microsoft builds it, has some advantages.
Messenger
The university that I work for (and that bought the Macbook) uses Live Communicator as a tool for chat and videoconferencing between staff. Everyone has an account and the Communicator is installed and started by default .
The Messenger application that is part of Office 2004 can, unlike its cousin on Windows XP, connect to both the MSN messenger network and the Live Communicator network.
Microsoft Entourage
Another bonus of the Office 2004 package is Microsoft Entourage. Now I understand that a lot of Mac users don’t like the application, but for me it provided vital connectivity with our Exchange mail system. The included Mail application isn’t able to connect to our server.
Finding the correct settings for the account of course wasn’t easy since the university doesn’t provide that info for Mac OS X users (not supported). The screenshot on the left shows the settings for our server, it might also work for others.
I also connected my Google Mail account to Entourage, that worked ok also. Only problem there is that after either the Macbook or my Windows XP system retrieves a message, it is archived. So only one of the two machines can collect the message.
No tasks or notes
Entourage was able to get notes and tasks from the Exchange server, even though it does have support for notes and tasks, that is kind of a pitty.
