Review by Jaewoo Kim

The Entourage that comes with the Home & Student edition does NOT work with Exchange email (cannot be used as a Exchange client). That is somewhat strange since there are very few reasons to use Entourage other than to use it as an Exchange client.

The Exchange compatibility has become important because most corporations use Exchange email. Moreover, most smartphones, including the iPhone, allows Exchange compatibility in which a user can synchronize contacts, calendar, and email with Exchange email accounts at no extra charge (Exchange email account is required). This allows seamless synchronization between an Exchange client (Outlook in Windows and Entourage in Mac) and smartphones such as the iPhone. For example, a user who updates a contact, calendar, or email in Entourage will also notice the same changes in the corresponding iPhone and vice versa. Unfortunately, the Entourage that comes with this package lacks this very feature because it doesn’t support Exchange email.

The good news is that Snow Leopard (next Mac OS due in September of 2009) has a native Exchange email support built in. So you will no longer need Entourage to use Exchange email and its synchronization capabilities.

The Mac Office 2008 supports all Office 2007 formats (.docx, pptx etc). It does NOT support VB scripts. So any Macros using VB will not run on the Mac Office 2008.

There is a definite lagtime when using the Office 2007 format on Mac Office 2008. My guess is that it takes a lot of CPU processing to convert the Office 2007 format to the Mac Office 2008 format. Office 2007, which I also own and run on Vista (using Bootcamp), is far more responsive and is more user friendly. The Mac Office 2008 appears to be a stripped down version of Office 2007. You will be able to use, however, almost all the features normally associated with MS Office on the Mac Office 2008.

As of this writing, the Mac Office 2008 does NOT support Windows Live. But there are plans by Microsoft to enable Mac Office to use Office Live in the future. You can still upload and download Office Live documents using the Safari (Mac browser) browser.