Hon­estly, this is prob­a­bly one of the first really good things that I’ve heard about Office 2008 for Macs. The MacBU team has just announced on Mac Mojo that the Office update will now come in a pack­age file and use Apple’s Installer.

I am happy to announce that Office 2008 for Mac will use the Apple-​recommended Apple Installer tech­nol­ogy for Office 2008 instal­la­tion. This means that the data that Office installs will ship on the disc in .pkg format, installs will work well with Apple Remote Desk­top (ARD) and will be Applescript-​able. Once installed, the user has the free­dom to move the Office folder to a dif­fer­ent loca­tion on the system and Office will run from there. I hope that this will make Office for Mac configuration/deployment easier for IT admins.

You can read more about installers and Apple’s rec­om­men­da­tions for them on Apple Devel­oper Con­nec­tion . Being able to easily deploy Office through ARD is great news for IT people.

My favorite piece of news though is about fonts (empha­sis added):

In addi­tion to the change to the Apple Installer, we’ve pro­vided IT admins greater abil­ity to cus­tomize their deploy­ment with optional font installations.

The cur­rent prac­tice for Office on Macs is to auto­mat­i­cally copy a gazil­lion Microsoft True Type fonts into a user’s font direc­tory the first time they open an Office appli­ca­tion. This behav­ior is truly obnox­ious, espe­cially if you already have a ton of fonts that you are trying to manage. It’s also wrong. If those fonts are actu­ally needed for every­body for that appli­ca­tion, they should really be put into /Library/Fonts/ at the time of the installation.

I don’t have a lot of good things to say about Microsoft these days, but I am at least happy that their Mac team is taking steps to create a better “Mac Application.”

Via Daring Fire­ball.