The relationship between Microsoft and Apple has been changing over the last 20+ years, from close friendship to big time enemies, from collaborative partners to supportive business partners. And whereas the personal relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had quite an impact over many years, these days everyone is mostly interested in which company allows what on the other’s territory: Apple has created smooth integration of the iPhone with Microsoft’s Exchange server (even though IBM had been a much closer ally with Apple than Microsoft), and Microsoft’s Mac divison is putting quite some effort into Mac support.
When it comes to SharePoint, Mac users so far were pretty much out of the picture:
- Internet Explorer (for Windows) is the only browser supported for the current version of SharePoint. However, Safari and Firefox (on the Mac as well as Windows) work surprisingly well with MOSS 2007. Not that I would recommend a client to roll out this combination in production, but since my own computer happens to be a MacBook Pro, I more often than not am surprised how far I get with this setup.
- Microsoft Office 2008 (the Mac version of Office) is the main product Microsoft offers for its Mac-based clients. Since SP2 (version 12.2.0) Office for Mac includes Document Connection for Mac, which allows basic SharePoint integration for Mac users.
- So far offline use of SharePoint content is supported poorly even on Windows and with SharePoint Workspace 2010 (the file-artist formerly known as Groove) Microsoft takes a big step forward. However, SharePoint Workspace 2010 will not be made available on the Mac. According to ZDnet UK the Mac BU at Microsoft is working on a separate product that will allow Mac users to work offline with files stored on a SharePoint site, i.e., while not being connected to that SharePoint server.
- With SharePoint 2010 Microsoft will (officially) support not only Internet Explorer 7 and 8 on Windows, but also Firefox and Safari on both Windows and the Mac. Depending on who presents that information there are slight variations, but in New Orleans during Microsoft’s Partner Conference in July 2009 I was promised by a product manager that all versions of Firefox (Linux even?) and Safari will be fully supported.
So where does that leave us? Microsoft obviously is sersious about including the Mac community as user clients and that’s good news:
- Organizations can opt for SharePoint as collaboration platform and are not stuck with Windows only for their users. Said in another way: organizations that so far would not even look at SharePoint because of its missing Mac support will now have a closer look.
- SharePoint more and more is being used in Extranets and while administrators can control (read ‘dictate’) which browser to use internally, that approach does not work so well with outside partners.
With Lotus Notes still going strong (with a long history of Mac support) and Google Wave coming up (working on the Mac via browser), Mac support for SharePoint can be expected to grow.
What’s your Mac experience with SharePoint?
