Jeremy White
(With apologies to Paul Masson)
We have had a long struggle this spring, and now into summer. We've been working hard to make Wine, and therefore CrossOver, run Microsoft Office 2007, particularly Outlook. I had hoped that we would have this working much earlier in the year. The signs were promising; we had the installation issues figured out and early runs were very encouraging.
Unfortunately, reality has been crashing down hard lately. This last weekend was particularly rough.
We had done a large round of internal testing, and were feeling pretty good. We built a release candidate to share with a group of private testers, thinking that if all went well, we could ship this week. I then went camping with my family (and we had a great weekend camping). Sadly, on Sunday, I came back, only to find nothing but negative beta reports; failure after failure. And to make matters worse, we had 4 ticks that had hidden in our stuff and chose to come out only on Sunday night after we'd unpacked.
But the bottom line is that we can't ship until we feel confident that it will work well across a broad range of scenarios, not just on our desks with our versions of Office.
So we had to regroup this weekend. I think we've now come to understand that certain non US versions of Office, and Enterprise editions, have some issues (and they're challenging for us, as they're not easy for us to buy). So hopefully we'll be able to get CrossOver 7 shipped here shortly. And then as soon as we do that, we're going to turn around and push out another release of CrossOver Games; we've got some fixes in the pipeline there.
Of course, our own struggles reflect those of Wine itself. We are eagerly looking forward to the upcoming release of Wine 1.0, after 15 long hard years of work. We look forward to providing a stable and polished way to use Wine 1.0 in CrossOver, as well as doing the work to bring Wine to 2.0 and beyond.
And now my family and I are off to Yellowstone. We're not camping, so hopefully the ticks won't get us...
Cheers,
Jeremy