Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

Watch Where You Buy Microsoft Office for Mac From

So some of our Mac users have been asking about upgrading to the new 08 version of Mac Office.  They were telling me the upgrade price was $228 and standalone was $380 ... and that was even off the discounted Willow Creek Association site.

I couldn't believe it could be that high considering Microsoft's great charity pricing so I went to look for myself.  Sure enough $228 and $380!!!  We even have our own GCC Apple webstore so I checked their too ... same pricing ... what the?

I fired off a quote request to my Dell rep.  He came back with an initial quote of $52!  So I shoot an email to our Apple enterprise rep, BTW he's a great dude, asking what's up.  After a while he sent back this reply ...

"Unfortunately, Apple doesn't offer the [MS] charity licenses. I hate to say this, trust me, but go to Dell!"

So the moral of the story?  ALWAYS make sure you are getting charity pricing for your Microsoft software ... even the mac stuff!!

This is not to slam the WCA site ... they get their pricing from Apple and thus are helpless.  Nor is this a slam on Apple ... though it's disappointing they aren't offering charity pricing.

For MS charity pricing you might try: CDW, Zones, Insight, CCB ... but honestly in my experience Dell consistently beats everyone else on software pricing.

My buddy David has a lengthy post about charity pricing well worth the read if you're new to purchasing charity licenses.

Office 2008 for Mac now available via MS Home Use Program

I just noticed Office 08 for Mac is now available via HUP ... our Mac users will be happy ... $20 for Office 08 is sweet! :-)

What is the Home Use Program?  The Home Use Program is a benefit of Software Assurance, one of Microsoft® ’s volume licensing programs. It provides a simple way for employers to enable employees to work at home with the same Microsoft® products they use at work.

Another Server Flavor?

Another recent order arrived today ...

This will be an experiment to see how well Windows Active Directory ties to OSX Open Directory ... if all goes well our Macs and PC's will be able to authenticate to the OSX Server using their Active Directory credentials.  Why?  Well, for now just to access various mac shares and the XRAID where many of our media clips live ... down the road ????

Our OSX "server" hardware ...

And just to be clear - we still do not officially support Macs, but we try to help as best we can with our limited time and resources.

Parallels Coherence

Parallels, a virtualization product that let's you run Windows on a Mac simultaneously, released a major update Wednesday.  Build 3186 brings quite a few improvements and new features over the prior build ... probably the biggest new feature is called Coherence.

Coherence allows you to run the applications you have installed in your virtual environment right in your OSX desktop.  In essence this is a pseudo form of software virtualization.  The application is virtual, yet I can interact with it as if it's installed native.

For instance ... I live in MS Outlook.  There is NO complete full-featured Outlook clone for the mac ... perhaps the next version of Entourage??  Parallels is nice in that I can have Windows running on the mac and switch over to the windows world when I need to run windows apps (like Outlook).  Wouldn't it be slick if you could just drag the Outlook windows from the windows world over to the mac world?  Now you can :-)

So here's a screenshot of my mac desktop where I have Outlook running ... even the reminders window pops up in the mac side.

You can create favorites/shortcuts to the windows apps you want to use on the mac side ... I added IE as a favorite for now until I see what the mac version of IE is like.  You can even hit the apple key which acts just like the windows key thus the start menu suddenly appears.

You can also watch a short video demo of coherence in action from the parallels website.

At least right now to get the update you have to manually go to the parallels site and download the latest version and then install.  It will update over the top of the older version (make sure your VM's are shutdown and parallels is not running).  After you install make sure you install the parallels tools inside your VM ... this is very important.

So again props to parallels for making a stellar product.  Some of the new features are very sweet!  Now to see if VMware is up to the challenge with their upcoming Fusion product for OSX.

I'll wait a few more days before I post about my mac experience thus far.  For now I'll just say it's not living up to all the hype (e.g. thank goodness I can run windows on this mac!)