It’s Entourage that has had the biggest upgrade. On the email side, it now properly supports Exchange servers, although it lacks all the bells and whistles of Outlook. Demonstrating that at least some parts of Microsoft have a clue about security and spam, there’s support for digital signing and encryption of messages, warnings if applications try to access your address book or send mail, and an automatic block on downloading pictures in HTML email (which you can override). The spam filter remains rubbish, however.

Entourage is also now the home of the ‘Project Center’, a kind of Microsoft Project-lite designed to group emails, contacts, events, tasks, notes and documents related to a particular project. It’s simple and easy to set up, with a Project palette appearing in all the Office programs. Compared to the capabilities of Project, though, it is anaemic; anyone used to Gantt charts will be disappointed. For smaller scale efforts, though, it might prove of use.

More of this kind of integration between the individual programs can be seen in the Scrapbook palette, an improved version of the multiple clipboard feature seen in Office 97 for Windows onwards.

As well as being able to copy into and paste from the scrapbook from any Office application, you can use the scrapbook to paste images, clippings and other files stored in a project’s repository. This is genuinely useful in everyday use.

MSN Messenger is the strange bedfellow to all these Office apps. You’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing new in the version 4.0 supplied with Office 2004. Cosmetically, it’s virtually identical to the current version. But Microsoft intends it to be a vital collaborative tool. Word users can now chat with others about their documents and review changes using Messenger, without having to leave Word; contacts in Entourage all have a Messenger id field and a button for messaging them if they’re online; and the Project Center offers a button for sending shared project files using Messenger. Given the extent of the integration, it seems odd that Messenger doesn’t include any of the collaboration features of its Windows cousins, such as ‘whiteboarding’, but perhaps we should be grateful for the scraps thrown from the Windows banquet table.

Other additions are minor. Smart buttons are a useful little Office-XP acquisition that highlight possible tasks and problems. More Aqua graphics and transparencies are scattered throughout. That embarrassing inability to deal with long filenames has now been expunged. And printing is improved in both Entourage and Excel.