[Macpartners] Office for Mac 2011 Support Announcement

[Patrick M McNeal]

Good Morning,

Information Services & Technology (IS&T) is pleased to announce full support for Office for Mac 2011.

Microsoft released Office for Mac 2011 on October 26. Since then, IS&T, in collaboration with IT colleagues across campus, has tested its core components (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook). Based on test results, IS&T recommends that members of the MIT community use caution when deciding to upgrade and wait to install Office for Mac 2011 on production machines until your Department, Lab, Center (DLC) or other IT provider is ready to support you locally.

IS&T will continue to provide support for Office for Mac 2008 during the transition.

New Features
Office for Mac 2011 provides several new features, including:

 *   Replacement of Entourage with Outlook for Mac (Though Outlook for Mac looks similar, it does not contain all of the features found in its Windows counterpart.)
 *   Support for the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language

Known Issues
There are several issues which you should take into consideration before installing Microsoft Word for Mac 2011:

 *   It does not support PowerPC (PPC) hardware.
 *   It is not compatible with EndNote X4.
 *   Characters, including <  >  |  \  "  and /, must be removed from a file name before it can be opened.
 *   The new user interface may take some time to learn.
 *   Exchange accounts are excluded when importing accounts from Mail.app into Outlook for Mac 2011.
 *   Outlook for Mac 2011 does not support a way to replace signatures.

For a complete list of known issues, see Microsoft's Word<http://mac2.microsoft.com/help/office/14/en-us/word/item/bb539409-4be8-48da-a1b3-842cf958fffb?category=7bac4eee-5679-4927-9246-39569667abec>, PowerPoint<http://mac2.microsoft.com/help/office/14/en-us/powerpoint/item/043cd4a2-cf51-4a38-a68e-18eba9e63143?category=a55c51a0-47c3-47a3-9878-d132280982a6>, Excel<http://mac2.microsoft.com/help/office/14/en-us/excel/item/4ba243ae-1afa-4283-ba6a-d2a020dcc07a?category=29b6bd0c-76a8-4209-97a1-837d57b59c0b> and Outlook<http://mac2.microsoft.com/help/office/14/en-us/outlook/item/f14a9ab2-bb71-4104-bfba-57ceca090f06?category=e88d108b-3a43-4636-9fe8-475447441a9b> known issues pages.

Licensing
Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 is covered by MIT's Microsoft Campus Agreement<http://ist.mit.edu/services/software/msca/overview>. MIT departments, faculty and staff may install this software on any MIT-owned computer, provided that it will only be used by current MIT faculty, staff or students for MIT purposes only. MIT students are not covered under the general terms of MIT's Microsoft Campus Agreement. Students should contact the software liaison<http://ist.mit.edu/services/software/msca/office-pro> for their department, lab, or center (DLC) to determine if their DLC funds student access to Microsoft Office as part of MIT's Microsoft Campus Agreement. Students who are not covered can obtain Microsoft Office at academic pricing through educational resellers such as GovConnection<https://web.mit.edu/ecat/ecat3/personalorders.html?Submit=Place+Personal+Order> [certificates<http://ist.mit.edu/services/certificates> required].

How To Obtain
MIT faculty and staff and departmentally funded students can download the Office for Mac 2011 installer from IS&T's Microsoft Campus Agreement for MS Office Professional download site<https://msca.mit.edu/cgi-bin/msoffice> [certificates<http://ist.mit.edu/services/certificates> required]. To reduce costs, IS&T will not be providing installation media to software liaisons.

Training
IS&T will soon make available an online training library that covers each of Office for Mac 2011's core components: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

Getting Help
IS&T's Office for Mac 2011 product page, which includes links to a number of other documents, can be found here:

http://ist.mit.edu/services/software/office/2011

If you have questions or need assistance, please contact the Computing Help Desk at helpdesk at mit.edu<mailto:helpdesk at mit.edu> or 617.253.1101. You can also submit a request online at http://ist.mit.edu/support.

--Patrick

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Patrick McNeal
Macintosh Platform Coordinator
Systems Engineering, Information Services and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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