Microsoft's Mac Business Unit yesterday posted the first in a series of teaser information releases regarding their forthcoming Office 2008 for Macintosh product. In this first post at Mac Mojo, the MacBU team talks about the unfortunately-acronymed OOF (Out of Facility) feature -- more commonly known as Out of Office. For years now, Mac users have asked for an easy-to-use, flexible tool for setting Out of Office notifications without using Outlook Web. With Office 2008, Microsoft promises to deliver just that. Check out Mac Mojo for full details.

Microsoft continues to cite a December/January time frame for the release of the new version. ITS will work to get Office 2008 to the campus community as quickly as possible following that release.

"Phishing" is any fraudulent attempt to get you to hand out your personal information to people who shouldn't have it. MarvQuin offers eight savvy tips for protecting yourself from phishing scams. Read the entire article for the full scoop, but here's a quick rundown:

1. Be immediately suspicious when an email message asking for personal information is particularly urgent, or particularly disappointing.
   
2. Never click on links in any mail that you are the least bit suspicious of, especially if the mails asks for personal data. Call the company instead.
   
3. Use only secure websites when providing personal and/or financial data (all modern browsers use a special padlock icon on the browser window to notify you that a site is secure).
   
4. Look carefully at the URL of any site asking for personal information, to make sure it belongs to the organization you think is doing the asking.
   
5. Use the phishing protection tools in your browser (if any are available).
   
6. Look at your online accounts periodically to make sure nothing's amiss.
   
7. Keep your browser updated.
   
8. Report phishers -- there are several commercial and governmental organizations fighting phishing, and they have addresses set up to take reports of illegal activity.

   Again, consult the article for full details. Good tips to keep in mind as you browse the web.

Microsoft yesterday opened a new Mac Office 2008 preview website, with extensive video documentation of the new suite's interface and features. Take a minute to check it out. (Warning: The entire site is Flash-based, and can be quite slow to load.)

Microsoft's Mac Mojo blog continues to put out new information about the forthcoming update to the Office suite. Today's entry from User Experience lead Han-yi Shaw talks about the new Elements Gallery feature.

So, what is this new Elements Gallery? Well, it’s a visually rich gallery that allows you to quickly find commonly used, but often times hard-to-create elements. For example, many users know that you can create beautiful tables, charts and diagrams in Office, but not everyone knows where to find or create them. The Elements Gallery is intended to unlock the power of Office by making our rich functionality more discoverable and accessible. No longer do you need to search through hierarchical menus and tunnel through dialogs only to find another sea of commands. With the Elements Gallery, you can focus your time on exploring and perusing the collection of professional and attractive designer content. “Great looking Office documents made easy” is an important pillar of Office 2008 and the Elements Gallery is a cornerstone to this effort.

Faculty and staff email accounts will be moved to an Exchange 2007 email server on Friday, September 21st, at 5:00 p.m. Your email quota will increase from 100MB to 1GB.

All mailboxes have now been moved to the new servers. It may be necessary for you to make some changes to your current setup, depending on the method you use to access your mailbox. Click on the links below for complete instructions on how to make the relevant changes.

1. Outlook full client from off campus (formerly known as “RPC over HTTP,” now called “OutlookAnywhere”)
2. Smartphone/ActiveSync
3. Entourage

If you are using Outlook Web Access to access your mailbox, http://www.mail.davidson.edu will automatically redirect you to the new site for a period of time. However, you should update your bookmark to point to http://webmail.davidson.edu.

If you are using Outlook and are connecting from on campus or from off campus using VPN, no configuration changes are required. If you have any problems accessing your mailbox, please notify the help desk.