The story so far...

It's been a busy couple of days for me, but I've had a chance to catch up on the 68 comments responding to my late Friday post. I'd like to call out a couple of comments that made my evening last night when I wrote this – one was where Nick Caraway grants me an honorary MBA, but figures my time in MacBU will be "brief" based on my post. But the prize for most colorful comment has to go to Lucky Lou, who, after smacking me (and all of Microsoft, for that matter) for not offering up information in my post, would like me to "show some nuts for once and err on the side of not being the total wusses you're known to be". He ends by telling me he is rooting for the "overpaid white guy figurehead".  Cool – we in the nut-less, wussy, overpaid white guy figure head category hardly ever get rooted for. :-)

On the serious side, one of the themes I found could be summarized as "more transparency, more data". That is the goal of this blog and we are working towards that. While we can't answer every question in real time, we are listening and we are using that feedback to inform our decisions – and we really appreciate the dialog. I know things are relatively quiet on the blog – the team is heads down getting Office 2008 ready to ship. I'm trying to step into the void for the next few months, and things will liven up once the team is out of crunch mode.

The overwhelming request was "EXCHANGE!" We hear you, and we know this is super important to a lot of folks, and it is important to us too – like the rest of Microsoft, we use Exchange here in MacBU. We have been committed to Exchange support since our Entourage X Exchange update over four years ago, and we continue to work with our enterprise customers to set our priorities. We have a number of things planned for Entourage in Office 2008 and beyond that we are excited about and can't wait to share with you when the time is right (yes, I know for a lot of you the right time is right now, but for us, it isn't the right time – yet). Oh, and if you haven't seen it, we have a resource kit that provides guidance for using Office 2004 for Mac with Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Live Communications Server, Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server, and related products.

That's all for now – more later.