Sharepoint Online on the Mac

Our office is predominantly PC based, but we do have added a Mac mini recently in order better support our customers.
What has become apparent very quickly is that the integration between OS X and Microsoft is not quite there especially when it comes to Office 365.
We are Microsoft Cloud partners which means we have internal use rights to Office 365 E3 which is the full gamut of products. It is essential we use it ourselves fully so that we can demonstrate to our customers and be confident supporting it.

The goal of good software is to provide a great user experience in my opinion. On the Mac I would want to be able to open files directly from Sharepoint in Finder.
Office 2011 for the Mac comes as part of the E3 plan and included within that is Office Document Connection. This doesn’t provide the functionality I want.
The Internet tells me I should be able to connect using WebDAV however this is broken in Mavericks.

Parallels is a program that allows you to run Windows as a virtual operating system which integrates with OS X.
So basically the process is:
1. Install Parallels (~£70)
2. Install Windows (~£90)
3. Update Windows to latest service pack and updates
4. Install Office 2013 from E3
5. Install Office updates
6. Install Microsoft hotfix (KB2846960)to make sure you can map a windows drive letter to Sharepoint
7. Add Word 2013 and Excel 2013 to the mac launcher
8. Use Word and Excel as you would normally and it accessing the windows drive letters
9. IF your sharepoint library is less than 5000 files (ours is not) then Skydrive Pro should also work from within Windows and OS X.

This may seem like a hassle but in fact it gives you access to Word and Excel 2013 and direct access to the sharepoint drive.