Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac
The public release date for Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac is January 15, 2008. This coincides with the Macworld Expo 2008 trade show in San Francisco. However, for deployment and home use at RIT, we'll need to wait until the beginning of February.
Why? The consumer release may be January 15, but Microsoft won't release the volume license and work at home versions to sites like RIT until the beginning of next month. No matter your affiliation with RIT, you should wait until then to get Office 2008 to avoid over-paying (or paying at all) for the shrinkwrapped consumer version.
Will the real Office 2008 please stand up?
Whether you install from the volume license or work at home media kit, you get the "Office 2008 for Mac" edition. This "full" edition will include Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and those three applications support and default to Microsoft's new Open Office XML document formats that debuted with Office 2007 for Windows last year.
As with Office 2007 for Windows, we generally recommend that you continue to use the older Office 2003/2004 document formats if you upgrade to Office 2008. This can be set in the preferences for each application. (For example, to make this change in Word, you would do so from Word menu > Preferences > Save. We will investigate ways that campus systems administrators can deploy with this setting already chosen for you.)
The edition of Office 2008 RIT will receive also includes Microsoft Entourage 2008 with Exchange support. You can use it to connect with your RIT Exchange account to access mail, calendars, contacts, and Public Folders.
Finally, Office 2008 for Mac is bundled with Automator actions that you can use to automate repetitive tasks with the Automator application that comes with Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard.
A lesser edition of Office 2008, called "Office 2008 Home and Student," will not feature Exchange support in Entourage or the Automator actions. Therefore, we recommend that those affiliated with RIT use the "Office 2008 for Mac" edition, not the "Home and Student" edition.
Volume and work at home media kits
The volume license media kit, which is the one that systems administrators will use to deploy to RIT-owned computers, will work much the same as Office 2004. It will install without requiring a CD key, so it should be kept safe and not distributed outside RIT. We will have access a disk image, and commercially-pressed discs will be available for purchase through the Dell Premier site (Dell is our Microsoft Campus Agreement reseller).
The work at home media kits, which will be available for purchase in the bookstore, have their own individual CD keys. Therefore, these are the versions you should install on non-RIT-owned computers, such as your own personal system. Campus Connections' goal is to have the Office 2008 work at home media kits for students and faculty/staff by mid-February.
You should not install the volume license version on a personal computer, or the work at home media version (or its shrinkwrapped consumer cousin) on an RIT-owned computer.
Questions or comments? Email us at macits@rit.edu