Jamf Blog
October 24, 2018 by Daniel Weber

Managing Microsoft Office 2019 for Mac

Members of Microsoft walk through the latest version of Microsoft Office for Mac and explain steps you should take to deliver the best experience for your users.

We’re hard-pressed to think of a more in-demand workplace tool than Microsoft Office. Workers across roles and industries depend on this suite of tools for much of their job.

In today’s session, Jeffrey Kalvass and Paul Bowden of Microsoft walked through the latest version of Microsoft Office for Mac and what steps you should take to deliver the best experience for your users!

Bowden, a principal engineer in the Microsoft Office for Mac Product Engineering team, started the presentation by breaking down the differences between Office 2016, Office 2019 and Office 365. He talked about the generation development of the product since fall of 2015 to August 2018.

“When we build features, they’re either tagged as client-side or service-backed,” said Bowden. “Our principle for what goes into a perpetual release is we take all of the client features and couple of service features, and that’s really the difference of Office 365 and Office 2019.”

Microsoft also incorporates customer feedback into product development. When asking customers about their pain points on managing Outlook, top-requested capabilities were in two areas: account setup and managed preferences. Kalvass, senior program manager with Microsoft on Outlook for Mac, talked about how Microsoft addressed these key areas of feedback in Office’s latest version:

  • Performance – increased quickness and efficiency
  • Stability – improved crash and force quit rates
  • Core experience parity – added key features and capabilities

Speaking of these key features, Bowden and Kalvass then walked through Microsoft Office 2019. Lots of exciting functionality is being introduced, including the ability to prevent adding personal accounts, force preferences to be disabled in the UI to respect managed preferences, and disabling import and export. Another key feature that was added handles a problem that many organizations struggle with — preventing the creation and editing of signatures.

Bowden and Kalvass then jumped into a live demo of managing Outlook, walking through the functionality listed above, and showing the audience how to:

  • Automatically add Office activation email address in Outlook on first launch
  • Set domain or full email to be added instead of Office activation address

With Jamf, you can seamless deploy Office 2019 to your Mac users and let them enjoy these great new productivity features.

Keep an eye out for this presentation video to be available in the coming weeks and see these Office 2019 workflows firsthand.

Photo of Daniel Weber
Daniel Weber
Jamf
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