I saw this and thought those of you with Mac customers might find this useful if Office 2007 is around or potentially around in their businesses.  Also of note is the fact that beta, trial and RTM seems to be very blurred today. 

Do you ever deploy beta code? I do, often in small environments with big warning labels, but I do do it.

Following on from some of your less than exuberant feedback about the new Mac converters, I looked into it.

To summarise, the Mac BU have released the beta 1 of the file format converters of Office for Mac.  You can download the converter for Word documents here. More info is at the ever useful macmojo blog

First thing to point out is that this is a BETA and also that it is a BETA 1.  There is a bug-ette in that apparently it doesn't handle some reserved characters from non-english languages or some special Unicode characters such as ™.  Any docs that have these characters seem to screw up or don't convert at all.  Apparently the issues with Unicode was documented in the help with the beta.  There is a fix which will roll out with beta 2 of the converter which is due out soon but I can't tell you when.  This is good to know but doesn't answer why it apparently needs admin rights to run.

What interests me about this is people's expectation for product quality from a beta 1 now.  I remember the day when anything short of RTM was not to be used in production and when beta 1 would be considered only for the enthusiast.  Now that we live in the world of Internet startups, betas seem to be the norm.

Office Rocker! : beta by far: the role of trial software - click for more!

ttfn

David