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We’ve been talking a lot about why Office 365 provides the best cloud productivity experience for customers of all sizes. Office 365 allows everyone to confidently work together regardless of their preferred platform, so it’s no surprise we’ve been receiving questions about what Office 365 can offer to Apple users.
The quick answer is a lot! End users still get a phenomenal experience across the Mac, Safari or iPhone so they can easily work with co-workers on PC’s. The IT department also benefits with access to Admin pages and can set up one set of policies for secure access.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the Office 365 capabilities supported on Apple products along with links to related resources that might be useful.
Mac - Office for Mac 2011/2008
Email with Exchange Online - With Outlook® for Mac 2011, users can connect to the cloud service and get rich messaging features, the ability to check calendar free/busy status, and manage task and contacts.* Microsoft Entourage for Mac 2008 users can access email and calendars as well. (*requires Office for Mac 2011 SP1)
Documents via Word, Excel and PowerPoint – Customers who are using Word for Mac 2011, PowerPoint for Mac 2011 and Excel for Mac 2011 (SP1 required) will be able to open, save and upload files to and from SharePoint Online as well as co-author from within Word for Mac 2011 and PowerPoint for Mac 2011 using SharePoint Online. Users with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac SP2 will also be able to connect to SharePoint Online through Document Connection 2008.
Browser - Safari
Email with Exchange Online – Using Outlook Web Access to get straight to email, calendar, tasks and contacts directly from a browser, anywhere! You just need Safari 3 or above on Macintosh OS X 10.5
Documents via Office Web Apps –make light edits on the go from SharePoint online or view a PowerPoint Broadcast. You need Safari 4 on Mac.
Online meetings via Lync Web App – You can join conferences and access meeting-wide instant messaging (IM), whiteboard sessions and polls. For more information, see Quick Start: Participate in online meetings with Lync Web App. Communicator for Mac 2011 is not supported with Lync Online at this time.
IT Admins can access Exchange Online and SharePoint Online admins pages using Safari 4.
iPhone
Mobile Inbox with Exchange Active Sync on iPhones - You can easily connect your iPhone to your Exchange Online inbox for on the go access. You can read a great help article how to set it up. Your IT department can also set mobile policies like Pin Lock, Remote Wipe etc on the iPhone to ensure similar mobile device management.
Document Viewing on iPhones - You can access documents and view attachments leveraging a mobile browser and Office Web Apps. For more detailed information check out this article.
-Andrew Kisslo - Group Manager, Office 365
Additional FAQs
Will Office for Mac 2011 be available for customers to purchase through Office 365?
Office for Mac will not be available for purchase through subscription as part of Office 365. However, customers who are using Office for Mac 2011 will be able to use some of the Office 365 hosted services. See following questions for detail.
Does Outlook for Mac 2011 connect to Exchange Online?
Customers who are using Outlook for Mac 2011 or Entourage for Mac 2008 with Exchange Web Services will be able to connect to Exchange Online to have a rich client experience through Office 365 for email, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes.
What are the System Requirements for Macs and Safari?
Customers can access detailed requirements online for the latest information here.
Are Office for Mac 2011 customers able to connect to SharePoint Online?
Customers who are using Word for Mac 2011, PowerPoint for Mac 2011 and Excel for Mac 2011 will be able to open, save and upload files to and from SharePoint Online as well as co-author from within Word for Mac 2011 and PowerPoint for Mac 2011 using SharePoint Online. Customers will also be able to connect to SharePoint Online through Document Connection 2008.
Does Communicator for Mac 2011 connect to Lync Online?
Customers who are using Communicator for Mac 2011 will not be able to connect to Lync Online through Office 365 at this time.
Are customers able to use the Office Web Apps from a Mac?
Customers can access the Office Web Apps from Safari and Firefox, commonly supported browsers on Macs.
What about Single Sign On?
For more information, see Prepare for Single Sign On.
Is Microsoft OneNote Mobile for iPhone supported with Office 365?
OneNote Mobile application on iPhones is not currently supported in Office 365.
Does Exchange Online in Office 365 work with native OS X apps like Mail, iCal and Address Book?
Yes, with Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard or newer. Check out the help article here.
1 out of 5 people found this post helpful.
Personaly I would like to see a good 365 sharepoint client app for the ipad.
If you look at Office365, being able to use it on mobile devices is one of the major selling points.
The current BPOS customers we serve are also using more and more devices like the ipad and want to have access to their documents. Ofcourse also offline. So the webapp are in most cases not an good option for these people. Also the interace as presented in the web apps is not very suitable for these kind of devices. So there are some good third party apps for the ipad which do a good job with sharepoint (online) . But when you want to edit a document, you have to use another third party app. The whole mobile experience feels a bit clumsy this way. It would be great if Microsoft did make an app for ipad or android tables wich offers the best online and offline functionality including simple editing. Although I really think Office365 works great on desktop internetbrowsers, for the ipad it is not when working with sharepoint and want to edit documents and use them also offline.
Again; Office365 is a very good product I think, but keep in mind that many mobile customers want easy access to their documents and are used to the ‘simple’ ipad interface to handle them.
only an idiot will use 'cloud' computing. storing my files on servers to which I have no access will never happen. 'cloud' computing is for fools.
@Fred. Love the passion, all perspectives welcome! Reality is you are already in the cloud and don't likely think about it in that context. For example your personal bank or bill pay, your paycheck processor, your cell phone account, all your car or motorcycles registration data, etickets for your next flight, your Yahoo/hotmail/aol/gmail etc account
The cloud isn't magic and isn't for everyone but the reality is that the cloud can bring redundancy, security, scale and finally lower costs that are impossible to do on your own.
Hi, I'm a Mac user and currently trying the Office 365 beta. I'm pleased with the cloud aspect of the service but I miss what I think is crucial to a Mac user: Integration with OS X native apps, namely Mail and iCal. Hope that in the future this will be considered. If so, I'll strongly consider adopting the service for our small company.
JS - Nooooo! iCal and Mail apps on Mac are a terrible joke. And not a funny one. What I would love to see is the same identical web interface on a Mac running Firefox or Chrome as a PC running Explorer. The UI is different. With HTML5, having the same UI across all platforms should be possible. Stop punishing us Mac folk MS. Us Users can love you both ;)
I'm a student, and what I'd really, really like to have would be a killer implementation of OneNote on iPad. Last semester I typed hundreds of pages in it and installed Parallels on my Mac just to run it. Evermore and Omni Outliner are nowhere near as good.
I agree with Andy. I use OneNote at work, and my wife loves it for school, but we really need it for iPad and Mac.
@ Andrew_MSFT. Looking forward to trying the Office365 Beta and especially interested in the fact Office licenses are included in the Enterprise plans. For a business growing >50% staff annually being able to incrementally provision productivity accounts and cover Office licenses in one go would be a great improvement for us. However, more and more of our staff are working on Macs so it's disappointing to hear that Office for Mac won't be included in this - will this be the case for the full Prod release?
Office 365 Beta is very good. product.
Will it be possible to connect a mac using webdav with sharepoint online in office 365?
@Andrew_MSFT: In my previous efforts of using a hosted SharePoint solution, I found that it did not integrate with the Mac's Finder like it did Windows Explorer. This was the only way to move multiple files into or out of SharePoint.
Will MS enable the ability to use Finder with SharePoint????
is mozzila firefox's 4. beta compatible?
Andrew_MSFT,
I am trying to get in touch with someone in the Microsoft Office 365 online marketing dept. Who is the best person to speak to?
As a partner we are very much enjoying the office 365 experience and are “dog fooding” the platform for our own uses. It is so much better than BPOS especially from a management perspective, great work !
We are moving our clients forwards towards readiness for go live and so far most are very impressed with the offering. I do however echo the earlier comments about support for the mobile population. As this blog post is relating to Apple products I’ll focus on the Mac, iPad/Phone/Pod type of devices. Is there any further information about when a compatible Lync client will be available. Lack of support on these devices is severely hampering our ability to help customers with these devices.
Many thanks
Mark