MacOffice Professional is changing the face of Office suites on OS X. For years, Mac users have had to live with second-class office suites: no support for current document formats, no database support and no native Intel support. Web technologies have been poorly supported at best and VBA (Visual Basic For Applications) macros were completely incompatible with Mac office versions. MacOffice Professional changes all of this, bringing professional yet easy-to-use word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, relational database, equation editing, charting and drawing to all users of Mac OS X 10.3 or later.

Microsoft recently completed an extensive consumer survey that revealed nearly one out of every five online U.S. adults (17 percent) has been a victim of at least one Internet scam, and 81 percent of those admitted they did something that led to the crime, such as opening an email message that appeared to be from a legitimate person or company. According to Microsoft experts, some of the biggest threats facing consumers online this year are fraud-related attacks that criminals use to trick consumers, who think they are dealing with a trusted source, into revealing personal information. Despite the growth of online crime, the survey found that more than half of online U.S. adults age 18 and over (58 percent) admitted they had little to no knowledge of current online threats and scams.

We started this investigation asking the same question Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Henry Waxman asked: where have all the emails gone? However, after five months of very in-depth research, we’ve come to the conclusion that the missing email messages are the least of our concerns. In this critical article, we provide our analysis of the priorities that need to be considered. We look at the root causes for the problems with White House email and lay the groundwork for what will be our final recommendations.

Read this OutlookPower article.

ZATZ Senior Editor James Booth has taken an interest in sailing, in particular, long-term, self-sustaining voyages on the open ocean. With the millions of ZATZ publication readers worldwide, there must be a few sailing experts among our readership. James is asking them to contact him at jbooth@zatz.com, that he may pick their collective brains regarding sailing and IT technology.

Microsoft has opened up the second beta for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 to more than a million Microsoft Developer Network and TechNet subscribers under a new technology preview program.

More than 150,000 technical adoption customers have been testing the first private beta of the service pack, but this second beta is feature-complete and contains new technologies not found in that first beta, Ray Mohrman, the group product manager of Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group, told eWEEK.

Google Pack, Google’s software download package, has added Sun’s office suite, StarOffice 8, to its offerings. StarOffice, which Sun normally sells for $70, is free through Google Pack. StarOffice is Sun’s answer to Microsoft Office. In 2000, Sun released StarOffice’s source code, which is the underpinning of OpenOffice.org, a Sun-sponsored open-source project.

StarOffice 8 lets users create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It supports most Microsoft Office formats, except for the new formats in Office 2007. It can also export documents as PDFs. The Google Pack version of StarOffice integrates a Google Search toolbar in all of the StarOffice applications.

The largest spam attack ever tracked wound down Aug. 9 after delivering enough big, fat PDF files to increase total spam size 445 percent in one day, according to Postini, a hosted e-mail filtering company that’s been tracking the attack since it started Aug. 7.

Postini tracked a 53 percent jump in spam volume from the day before the attack started to the day it launched, according to Senior Marketing Manger Adam Swidler, in San Carlos, Calif.

Microsoft will try to convince U.S. regulators that vacant television airwaves can be used for wireless services without interfering with broadcast signals. The unused TV airwaves would be available for other services by early 2009, when broadcasters are due to switch from analog to digital signals.

Microsoft has completed the largest purchase in its history, sealing its $6 billion takeover of Internet advertising firm Aquantive. The software maker closed the deal on Friday, according to a filing Aquantive made Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the filing, Seattle-based Aquantive said that its board has resigned, as planned, and that it has notified Nasdaq to delist its stock, with the shares now converted into the right to receive a cash payout of $66.50 per share from Microsoft. Aquantive is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft.

WinPure, provider of affordable data cleansing and data deduplication software, have now added Microsoft Outlook compatibility to their software range. The new feature will allow the user to directly import Outlook contacts into ListCleaner or Clean & Match 2007, enabling users to clean, correct, standardize and deduplicate their contacts that are stored in Microsoft Outlook.