Boy Genius has posted some early screenshots of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. The screenshots reveal development on Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2011.
Much like Microsoft Office 2010 appearance, Office 2011 for Mac includes the ribbon on every application. This will also be the first time Outlook will be available in the Office Suite for the Mac. The appearance between Outlook for Windows and Mac appear to be similar, including a mail preview pane, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes available for use.
The screenshots also show a quick search in the toolbar for Outlook, Excel, and Word, for searching within your inbox, spreadsheet, or documents. Office 2011 is also said to include the same multi-use feature that Office 2010 includes, allowing for you and your co-worker to work on the same document at the same time.
Office 2011 for Mac computers is set to launch by the end of the year, just in time for the Christmas 2010 holiday season.
Office 2011 for Mac will bring ribbon support for applications. The ribbon will be similar to Office 2010 for Windows, but with the Mac theme support.
Office 2011 for Mac will not only receive cross-application ribbon support, but also sharing for documents and web application support. Users will be able to edit the same document and share between Windows and Mac users at any time, with real-time editing on both machines. Users will be able to make edits and changes to the same document, but not the same paragraph. This will work for Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications.
The old practice for earlier versions of Office would prevent users from opening the same document when edits were being made, usually causing in frustration for one or more parties, if a document was left open by mistake.
Microsoft also promised to deliver a full version of Outlook in the Mac 2011 version. the full version of Outlook for Mac will include .PST file importing, Time Machine and Spotlight support. Users who are already familiar with Outlook for Windows should be comfortable with the Mac release.
As posted on Technologizer, a bug has been reported by many companies using Microsoft Office 2003, causing protected files to become inaccessible. Microsoft’s Rights Management Service, a technology used to control access to sensitive documents, was found to be locking files from use. When trying to open a document protected by RMS, users would receive an error telling them to contact their system administrator.
The bug was found to be present in Office 2003′s Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word; Office 2007 and 2010 are in the clear. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, the bug was caused by an expired Information Rights Management (IRM) certificate. Microsoft has released hotfix for the bug and has posted it here.
RMS is a way for companies to encrypt and selectively limit access to documents and specific actions within them. Companies can use it to set usage rights and permissions through policies embedded directly into the files themselves. It can be used to decide what groups can decrypt them, under what conditions decryption is allowed to occur, whether a user is allowed to print, copy, edit, or do other actions within the files, and many other things. The technology is only usable with RMS-enabled applications, such as Office, SharePoint, and Internet Explorer.
