Or, “When Things Fall Apart.” And boy can things fall apart when you install the SP2/12.2.0 upgrade to Office for Mac 2008. To begin with, unless you absolutely have to upgrade, it is definitely a good idea to wait. There are some serious issues here, which Microsoft will hopefully address soon—showstopper issues that can create significant headaches for Office users. Everybody got their dancing shoes on? Good, let’s begin the tango with a look at some of what this service pack contains.

The Mac BU at Microsoft has acknowledged a security issue, and has released a fix, and plans to release an update.

The problem is that the Microsoft Office Installer changes permissions for the Microsoft Office install and the Automator Library folder to user 502, or the second account created on a given Mac. It’s not a huge problem, because there is no threat if you only have one user, and if you have more than one user, all that they can do is mess with your Office install. They cannot really do anything malicious to your Mac.

Pat O, Director of Marketing and Planning for Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit announced via Microsoft’s Mac Mojo blog that Microsoft Office 2008 will “launch” on January 15th. On January 14th, many MacBU team members will be available at Macworld for the “A Day at the Office” conference, “a day-long conference at the Moscone [...] dedicated more »

The New Entourage 2008, scheduled for release in January 2008, is not a nice player when it comes to Time Machine. If you back up your Entourage files, your backup drive could run out of space in a matter of weeks. Entourage stores every single file it uses in one huge database file, and whenever more »

Office 2004 users, you’ve got an update available. The folks over at Redmond have issued update 11.3.6, which address several security issues within the productivity suite. It’s hard to tell what the updates actually fix because it seems like Microsoft is beginning to follow Apple when it comes to providing vague update descriptions. If you more »