We’re thrilled about the growing number of people who are using Microsoft Office every day to get things done at work, at home, at school and on the go. For instance:
On the heels of such positive momentum, we’re excited to talk about big improvements in the way we’ll deliver the next version of Office to consumers.
Along with the great product innovations we’re delivering in Office 2010, we’re introducing even more choice and flexibility for consumers in how they can try, buy and experience Office 2010 on new and existing PCs. This includes:
For consumers who purchase a new PC, Microsoft is working with major PC manufacturers and our retail partners to make it simpler than ever to try and buy Office 2010.
Through our retail partners, Microsoft is introducing an all-new Product Key Card to help consumers more easily access and experience Office 2010 on new PCs that have been pre-loaded with Office 2010. The Product Key Card is a single license card (with no DVD media) that will be sold at major electronic retail outlets.
An added bonus: The card’s packaging is smaller than the full package (DVD) product, and is eco/retail-friendly. The key number contained on the card will unlock Office 2010 software that has been pre-loaded by the PC manufacturers on their PCs, and enables a simpler and faster path for consumers to begin using any one of three full versions of Microsoft Office – Office Home & Student 2010, Office Home & Business 2010, or Office Professional 2010.
As part of Office 2010 software that will be pre-loaded by the PC manufacturers on their PCs, we’re introducing Microsoft Office Starter 2010. Office Starter 2010 is a reduced-functionality, advertising-supported version of Office 2010, available exclusively on new PCs. Office Starter 2010 will provide new PC owners with immediate exposure to the Office 2010 experience on new PCs right out of the box.
Office Starter 2010 will include Office Word Starter 2010 and Office Excel Starter 2010, with the basic functionality for creating, viewing and editing documents. Office Starter 2010 will replace Microsoft Works, offering a consistent Office user experience, such as the Ribbon, with a simple path to upgrade to a fully-featured version of Office 2010 directly from within the product.
For people who want to try or buy Office 2010 on existing PCs, Microsoft is unveiling Click-to-Run, a new and enhanced download experience for consumers. Click-to-Run makes it easier than ever for customers to try or buy Office digitally by significantly reducing the time and effort required to download Office 2010 over the Internet. Click-to-Run automatically downloads and installs any software patches when connected to the Internet, helping people maintain and keep their Office software up-to-date. Click-to-Run uses virtualization technology so it allows customers to maintain multiple versions of Office. This enables them to try Office 2010 side-by-side with the existing version of Office.
We will have the broad beta of Office 2010 later this year and invite people to become familiar with Office 2010, in the way that works best for them, and then easily upgrade to a full version of Office Home and Student 2010, Office Home and Business 2010, or Office Professional 2010 when they’re ready to buy. To find out more information about Office 2010 visit www.microsoft.com/office2010.
Takeshi Numoto, Corporate Vice President, Office
Hi, I’m Tucker Hatfield and I’m a Program Manager on the Office Graphics team.
Pictures are great – worth 1,000 words they say – so it’s a great idea to use them to spice up a document or add some flair to a presentation. The problem is that they usually end up being self-contained rectangles in the middle of things, and they don’t really flow into the content. You can put borders or effects on them to make them look more artistic, but up until now the only way to isolate part of the picture was to go into an expensive photo editing package and learn the cumbersome process of selecting and removing portions of the image.
Background Removal is a new feature in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook that makes this process quick and easy for any picture. Unlike similar tools, the Office Background Removal tool doesn’t just select color ranges or trim to a border you draw. Background Removal uses new capabilities and algorithms from the Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK to achieve better results automatically with very little effort or fine tuning from the user.
So, how does it work?
Even though I can’t explain the deepest secrets of how the code works, I can show you how to use it effectively. Let’s start with this picture and assume that we want to remove the background and keep only the flower.
Clicking the Remove Background button in Picture Tools will start the process. First off, Background Removal tries to figure out what portion of your picture is the foreground, the portion to keep, and which is the background, the portion to remove. The first step in this process is the marquee selection area that gets drawn when you first start Background Removal. When you first start the tool, you’ll see the marquee and portions of the image are overlaid with magenta. Everything marked with magenta is what Background Removal has marked as the background. The normally colored portions are foreground, and will be kept.
You’ll probably notice that the marquee is inset slightly by default. Why is that? Well, it’s rare that the subject of a photo fills the picture completely, and insetting the marquee slightly makes it easier for Background removal to figure out what is the foreground and what is the background. In general, the less background included inside the marquee the more accurate Background Removal will be.
As you can see above, if the goal is to isolate the flower, the default marquee size doesn’t really get the desired result. As it stands, the result would look like this:
To further refine what we get, we’ll need to adjust the shape and size of the marquee. The important rule to remember is that you want the marquee to contain everything you want to keep. It’s okay if there are portions of what’s in the marquee that you don’t want to keep – the magic will do its best to figure out what to keep and what to ignore – but nothing that sticks very far outside of the marquee will be kept, so it’s important to make sure everything you want is inside. Let’s size the marquee so that it is just slightly bigger than the flower. The marquee is sized just the same as any shape or image, by grabbing the handles and resizing or dragging the whole shape to a new location.
Background removal figures out what you wanted and isolates the flower, which results in everything but the flower being removed.
Since the system Background Removal uses to isolate foreground objects from the background isn’t simply based on color choices or contrast values, it can extract even similarly-colored objects from the background.
Or you can even choose to keep something other than the obvious…
Of course, no matter how good the logic is that’s trying to figure out what the foreground of the picture is, there will always be some cases where simply adjusting the marquee can’t figure out what should be kept and what should be discarded. For those cases Background Removal has some simple tools to mark up and refine your selection. We’ll talk about how to use those tools remove the background from an image that presents a problem in a future post. For now, let me close with a couple of quick illustrations of how you might use that flower we removed in the first example.
Hi, my name is Alan Myrvold, and I am a security tester on the Office Trustworthy Computing Team (TWC). This post introduces the new password rules feature in Office 2010.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have been able to password protect documents for several versions by setting the “password to open”. What we felt could be improved was the ability to enforce password strength rules, similar to what may be required when logging into your computer at work.
In Office 2010, the encryption password can be set using the Office Backstage View:
This password can also be set on the General Options dialog from the Save As dialog, as the “Password to open”, just like in previous versions of Office.
Password encryption is just one way to protect sensitive information. Depending on your business needs and risks, using IRM or BitLocker might be better choices.
Although historically Word and Excel used 40-bit RC4 encryption, faster computers mean that 40-bit keys are now considered weak. The Office Open XML format (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx) introduced in Office 2007 provided an opportunity for us to improve our mechanism and algorithms used for password based encryption of documents. The Office Open XML format uses 128-bit AES encryption. We also use a slower key derivation algorithm to make brute force password cracking slower. RC4 is still used when saving in Office 97-2003 binary formats. For encrypted Office Open XML documents, the password is the weakest link. A short or commonly used password makes the document less secure, since it is easier for an attacker to guess it.
If an attacker needed to try all possible passwords of 5 lowercase letters from a-z, there are only 265, or about 11 million total passwords to guess during a brute force search. Searching dictionary words might even more quickly find the password. An 8 character password, chosen from lowercase and uppercase a-z, plus digits 0-9 is a much larger space of passwords to guess by brute force, 628 or about 200 trillion, and is more difficult to find with dictionary attacks too. These are all worst case efforts, and NIST estimates far less entropy in user chosen passwords. Having less entropy means that attackers can use heuristics to search the password space more intelligently than brute force.
Attackers can also harness the parallel processing power of graphics cards to help with their attack.
But, for brute force attacks, assuming 10,000 password attempts per second, the length and character set of the passwords can make a big difference.
Enforcing a minimum password length and character set complexity requirements can make passwords more difficult for attackers to guess.
How do I enable password complexity?
By default, complexity settings are not enforced, and registry settings are used to control this feature. Although I am describing the registry keys here, the Office Customization Tool (OCT) will be the easiest mechanism to deploy these policies within an organization, but these settings aren’t present in the OCT yet.
There are 2 registry settings to control this, PolicyLevel and MinLength.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Security\PasswordComplexity HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Security\PasswordComplexity
When the policy level is 2 or 3, then the password must contain characters from at least three of four character sets, lowercase a-z, uppercase A-Z, digits 0-9, or non-alphabetic character. When this complexity is enforced, the minimum password length needs to be at least 6, but can be more depending on the MinLength.
When the policy level setting is 3, then Office will use the Windows domain policy as well as all the settings at level 2. This allows a custom password filter that is installed for Windows passwords to be used. If you are offline or a domain controller cannot be contacted, then the Windows password settings aren’t used, and only the level 2 settings are used. If you don’t have a custom password filter, then using level 2 saves a trip across the network, and would be the best choice.
Depending on whether the password is too short, or not complex enough, an error dialog will appear
and then you can re-enter the password.
Oh dear. We’ve designed the Office Open XML password encryption to be strong and difficult for attackers to crack, which makes password recovery slow. There is no back door, no key escrow, and the 128-bit AES key makes guessing the password the best option.
Unfortunately Microsoft support cannot assist you, as described in KB article 189126.
Microsoft support engineers cannot help you retrieve passwords of files and features in Microsoft products that are lost or forgotten.
Because a forgotten password might result in the loss of critical business information, it is possible to disable setting new passwords in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, using the DisablePasswordUI setting.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Security HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Security
This setting only prevents new passwords from being set. Existing password protected documents can still be opened. The DisablePasswordUI setting, along with the password complexity settings are designed to help balance the need to secure information with the risk of information loss.
The password rules feature is just one security enhancement in Office 2010, and future blog posts will cover more improvements we’ve made.
Thanks. Alan Myrvold Security Tester, Office Trustworthy Computing
Visio 2010 brings many new features that make Visio more powerful and easier to use. This post gives a few quick highlights on Visio 2010, along with links to more detailed posts on the Visio team’s official blog.
One of the first things users of Visio 2010 will notice is that menus and toolbars have been replaced by the Office Fluent UI, which makes frequently used commands easier to find. Here is the Home tab of the Visio Ribbon:
The new Ribbon UI is accompanied by a redesigned Shapes Window—shown below in both expanded and collapsed mode—which lets you easily combine your favorite shapes from multiple stencils into one view.
Visio 2010 also includes many enhancements to the diagram creation experience. One such enhancement is the Quick Shapes Mini Toolbar, which allows you to hover over a shape and click to AutoConnect a new shape, as shown in the below screenshot. This is one of the ways Visio has integrated Live Preview into the diagramming experience.
For more information on Visio 2010’s features for editing and organizing the information in diagrams, see the following posts:
Visio 2010 makes it easier to give a polished, professional look to your diagrams. The “Auto Align & Space” command is one of our new layout features; it cleans up your diagram’s layout while preserving its basic arrangement, as illustrated below:
For more information on how Visio 2010 makes it easier to create visually appealing diagrams, see the following posts:
The above are only a taste of the new features in Visio 2010. Head on over to Visio Insights and stay posted for more exciting updates!
My name is Shawn Lipstein and I work in Microsoft’s Office Design Group (ODG) as a User Experience Research Lead. I wanted to take the opportunity in today’s post to both introduce ODG and share a bit about what we do. I’ll also give you a peek at future posts we’ll be writing.
The Office Design Group is made up of both User Experience Designers and User Experience Researchers. Our job is to represent you, the end-user of our software products. We partner with product teams within Office to identify user needs and create compelling experiences. By understanding who you are and how you work we can build better software.
We identify user needs and create compelling experiences in a number of ways. For example, User Experience Researchers work to understand user needs early in the product development cycle using methods such as Field Visits. A field visit is when Researchers visit with users in their own environment and observe how they work with software to get their tasks done. Researchers also utilize methods such as Lab Studies (see image below) where we bring users into controlled lab environments and have them work through real world scenarios. While doing so, we use prototypes as primitive as paper drawings to actual working builds; depending on the phase we are at in the product development cycle.
The above image is a photograph of a Lab Study conducted using an early working build.
As another example, User Experience Designers work to solve difficult design issues in innovative ways by using methods such as Wire Framing where the basic idea of a design is blueprinted. Designers also produce many iterations of a solution using high fidelity drawings and even working prototypes to ensure that all possibilities around the interaction, visual look and feel, and animations have been considered.
The images below show an example of the ‘Office 2010 Backstage’ going from a sketch to a working build (click on the images for a larger version).
1. Early on in the development cycle Designers will develop a multitude of hand drawn concept sketches.
2. Wire Frames are made to explore layout and proportion as we begin to refine our ideas.
3. A high fidelity rendering is created to finalize the look and feel and to clearly communicate the design intent to the rest of the team.
4. A screenshot of the final build shows the accuracy that is achieved in relation to the high fidelity rendering.
As you’ve read above, the Office Design Group - made up of both Designers and Researchers - use a number of techniques to identify user needs and create compelling experiences. I’m excited to get feedback from a broader set of customers as we begin to make 2010 available. This feedback helps to ensure our software is intuitive and usable.
ODG plans to post more topics in a series on this blog about ‘Office 2010 User Research & Design.’ Some questions that my colleagues are planning to answer are:
I look forward to reading your comments and questions about this and subsequent posts.
There have been several improvements made in Excel 2010 to the function library and the Solver add-in. The function improvements have been made to address issues reported in academic papers as well as customer feedback. To quote the Excel team blog:
“In Excel 2010, we made many improvements to Excel's function library. Excel 2010 will feature an accurate and consistent function library while remaining compatible with previous versions of Excel. “
In addition to the accuracy improvements, we also have introduced various new functions to the Excel function library to ensure that users have a consistent function library with implementations that match standard practices. As are result of these improvements, we have also made some UI changes to help users adopt the new functions.
Here are the blog posts that describe the function work in detail:
Excel 2010 will also provide an updated version of the Solver add-in:
“In Excel 2010, we have made a number of improvements to Solver that make it easy for beginners to get started and more advanced ones to find solutions to all types of problems. “
The Excel 2010 Solver will offer a new user interface, new solving methods and new reports. The UI for the Solver Parameter dialog has been improved to make it easier for users to navigate.
In addition to the UI changes, the new Solver will also feature 3 solving methods for solving spreadsheet optimization problems:
New reports added in the Excel 2010 Solver are:
Enjoy!
In the Project 2010 client release, we’ve concentrated on making it easier to get started, easier to plan, and easier to report. This post gives a few quick highlights of Project 2010 and you can find more detailed posts on the Project team’s official blog.
Easier to Get Started
One of the first things you’ll notice is that the menus and toolbars have been replaced by the Office Fluent UI, which makes frequently used commands easier to find. Here is the Task tab of the Project ribbon:
Additionally, we’ve improved copy/paste so now when you paste a bulleted list into Project, we maintain the hierarchy and formatting. Also, take note of task 11 - yes, we now support word wrap.
Easier to Plan
Nope, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. The tasks in the above picture really don’t have durations or dates. That is because we’ve added a new feature called User-controlled Scheduling. User-controlled scheduling brings together control and ease of use so you can now be completely in control of your schedule. If you don’t know all the information about a task, Project won’t force you to enter values. If you don’t want a task to move, Project won’t move it but will warn you when there are potential scheduling issues.
In Project 2010, tasks can be automatically scheduled or manually scheduled (using the new user controlled scheduling feature). Auto scheduled tasks behave exactly like tasks in the previous releases. Manually Scheduled tasks (designated with the pushpin icon) won’t move unless you explicitly tell them to.
In the picture:
As I said above, task 3 won’t move even if task 2 does. In this case, task 2 has increased in length and while task 3 doesn’t automatically move out, Project does warn you that the task needs attention by adding a red squiggly to the finish date and updating the bar style. From here you can decide what needs to be done – move the task out, ignore the warning, etc.
Additionally, we’ve added a new view called the Team Planner. You can think of this as a resource Gantt chart. It allows you to easily see how your team’s work is laid out over time, quickly spot problems, and drag and drop to resolve those problems.
Easier to Report
We’ve added another view to Project 2010 called the Timeline View which allows you to summarize your project quickly and then share the timeline into other Office apps. Using the above schedule, I can create a simple timeline in Project:
And then when I paste it into another Office app such as Outlook or PowerPoint to share it with others, the tasks are pasted as individual shapes so I can then apply additional formatting and polish.
The final feature I’d like to call out is Sync to SharePoint. You can synchronize the tasks from within a project plan into a SharePoint tasks list, or open a tasks list directly in Project. Any changes to the plan in Project can by synced to SharePoint and vice versa. This allows you to share your plan with users who don’t have project or to collect status updates automatically from your team.
This really is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to features we’ve added/updated in Project this release and I haven’t even mentioned Project server yet. Continue to check out the Project team blog to learn more about the updates we’ve made to Project 2010 this release. Additionally, sign up now at www.microsoft.com/project/2010 and be notified when the Project 2010 beta is available!
Hi, let us introduce ourselves. I’m Tim Weber (UX Researcher) and I’m Tricia Fejfar (UX Research Manager) in the Office Design Group (ODG). As Shawn indicated in his “Designing with Customers in Mind” post, ODG includes UX Researchers who work to understand user needs and to integrate user feedback into our software design process. We want to tell you a little bit about some of our research for Office 2010 and how it’s made the overall experience better for users like you.
UX research is complementary to other types of research that Microsoft does, including market research and product planning research. While there is overlap among these different types of research, you could think of UX research as providing information to help create the Office experiences you have in Excel, Word, SharePoint, PowerPoint, Visio, Project, etc. As UX Researchers, we answer questions such as:
Throughout the product cycle, UX researchers answer these (and many more) questions. Basically, we get to do the fun stuff of interacting with our customers and see obvious impact in our product from the customer feedback we collect.
When most people think of UX research, they think of Usability studies or as we call them – Lab Studies. While we do conduct lab studies there are many other methods we use to collect data from users around the globe. Some examples are cognitive walk-throughs, multi-user remote studies, eye tracking, field studies, workshops, focus groups, and surveys.
It really depends on the research questions that we have and how much time we have to answer the question. For example, in a typical lab study we are working closely with the UX Designers in our group and Program Managers from the product teams to iterate on feature designs. We bring people from outside of Microsoft into a small room (a.k.a., the lab) that contains a desk and a PC so they can work with our software. Inside the lab, there are some cameras and a piece of one-way glass so the researcher, the designers, PMs, testers and developers can all monitor whether or not the software being studied is meeting the needs of the user. We conduct these lab studies in order to find problems that affect the usability of our software and we typically do a few thousand hours of these studies for each release of Office.
One of our favorite pieces of equipment to use in the lab is the eye tracker. The eye tracker allows us to see what people are looking at while they are using our software. This is incredibly useful when building new UI like the Ribbon and the Backstage because the mouse pointer doesn’t always tell an accurate story about where people are looking on the screen. Below is an example of output (a heat map on the left and gaze plot on the right) from one of our eye tracking studies conducted on the Backstage view using an early prototype.
The heat map on the left tells us where people spent most of their time looking for something. The longer someone looks at a specific location, or the more times someone’s gaze returns to a specific location, the hotter the color on the heat map. The gaze plot on the right tells us the path the eyes followed to get to a particular location.
The study participants’ goal was to open a recently used file. To complete the task successfully, a participant needed to open a specific file – the third in the Most Recently Used (MRU) list shown in the middle pane (of the 3 panes displayed on the screen). All participants were successful on this task. What we learned from the pictures above, however, was that while people eventually located the correct file, they spent a lot of time searching through the templates section in the right pane before going to the MRU.
This finding made us reconsider our design and we decided to split the MRU and templates sections into separate places with their own tabs in the left navigation pane. The screens below show what these places look like today (Recent and New):
Eye Tracking, however, is only one of many research tools used by the Office Design Group to help prepare our software for your use. Another way we gather research broadly is through our Send-a-Smile feedback. You may have read an earlier blog on Send-a-Smile (SaS). If not, we encourage you to take a look so you can start using it today!
We really do take your feedback seriously. Our researchers spend hours and hours a week to deeply analyze SaS user experience comments, look for trends, and triangulate with other data. For example, SaS comments sent in during the Technical Preview led to several changes in Outlook:
Send/Receive button in the Technical Preview
Send/Receive button in the upcoming Beta
How Private Appointments looked in the Technical Preview
How Private Appointments look in the upcoming Beta
Besides having researchers based in the US and in some of our Remote Development Centers, we also have the technology to do virtual multi-user remote studies. This technology was developed by members of our group. We call this setup our Virtual Research Lab (VRL for short), which allows up to 100 remote participants to simultaneously log into our servers and run through specific tasks on our software. We are able to recruit people from across the U.S. and internationally to participate in our studies from the comfort of their home, office, or anywhere they have access to the internet. With this technology, we can gather data from more users in a shorter period of time and we’re also able to expand our participant population. All of this is good for Microsoft and you the end user.
Another technique that we’ve used a lot more in this product cycle to get more early validation is what we call “kitchens”. Kitchens are weeklong events where small teams of people from multiple companies around the globe come to our Microsoft campus to “play” around with working builds of our software. For these events we typically invite people from the IT or Developer community and ask them to build their real-world solutions on top of our early working code. Participants in the kitchens get access to an advanced preview of our new release of Office and are able to provide in depth feedback during a concentrated effort. Also, participants and our engineering team (including Developers, Testers, Program Managers, UX Researchers and Designers, Product Planning and User Assistance) get lots of face-to-face time with each other to better understand concerns and answer questions. These Kitchens are held several times throughout the product release cycle and are valuable to us because they allow us to address user feedback early and fix missing gaps before we release more broadly during the Beta timeframe.
As we mentioned earlier, these are just some of the research tools and techniques we use throughout the Office development cycle to better understand user needs. We hope you enjoyed reading about them. We couldn’t do any of it without great people like you! Look for one of our upcoming posts on Design Tools and Techniques used in ODG. We look forward to hearing what you think! Thanks for reading.
Greetings Office Engineering readers—Clint here from the Access program management team. In partnership with Channel 9 the Access team is launching a new show called The Access Show. It will feature Ryan McMinn, myself and others from the team. We will talk in-depth about what is new in Access 2010 and Access Services and share feedback from the community.
Additionally, at the SharePoint Developers Conference we recently disclosed more details about the new server capability of Access 2010 called Access Services. Access Services is a new SharePoint 2010 feature that allows users to create browser accessible databases with the Access desktop application and host them on SharePoint. Through Access 2010 and Access Services you can keep your organization agile and your data secure:
Here is the inaugural episode and a short demo where Ryan creates an Access Services application that runs in the browser:
You can learn more about this release at the Access 2010 Intro Series RSS feed.
SharePoint Conference 2009 is underway and the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) team is getting ready to talk about the new capabilities in SharePoint 2010 that we’ve been working on. Taken from Brad Stevenson’s overview post:
“BCS is an evolution of the Business Data Catalog (BDC) capabilities of SharePoint 2007 that enhances the capability of SharePoint as a platform for developing composite applications. It provides out-of-box features, services and tools that streamline development to deeply integrate external data and services. BCS provides the capability to connect SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 applications to any external system, whether it be a Line-of-Business (LOB) system, (such as Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, or Siebel) a web 2.0 service, or a custom home-grown application.“ Brad Stevenson, Sr. Lead Program Manager
“BCS is an evolution of the Business Data Catalog (BDC) capabilities of SharePoint 2007 that enhances the capability of SharePoint as a platform for developing composite applications. It provides out-of-box features, services and tools that streamline development to deeply integrate external data and services. BCS provides the capability to connect SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 applications to any external system, whether it be a Line-of-Business (LOB) system, (such as Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, or Siebel) a web 2.0 service, or a custom home-grown application.“
Brad Stevenson,
Sr. Lead Program Manager
Check out the rest of the overview post on the BCS Team Blog. Be sure to bookmark the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed to get informative “How To” guides, insight into features, and demos of what we’ve been building. In the following weeks you’ll find updates from our sessions at SharePoint Conference and a guide on how to get your current Web services ready for BCS, with more to come.
- Lionel Robinson, Program Manager
On February 11, all eyes will be on Vancouver, British Columbia as we watch top athletes compete for the gold in the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
To show what people can do with Office 2010, Microsoft is launching a new contest that will give two ‘blogathletes’ the ability to showcase their blogging talents and highlight power of Office to help you get your work done no matter where you are. The contest will showcase how Office 2010 technology lets you easily connect, share and collaborate across the PC, phone and browser. You can learn about some of these cool new features by checking out these blog posts:
People from all walks of life use Office everyday to work, keep up with school projects, and stay in touch with friends and family. With Office 2010 we are adding new features and functionality that will take collaboration and the ability to work from anywhere to the next level. We are excited to share that, and the Vancouver Games, with everyone.
The Microsoft Office team, with support from U.S. Olympic Committee, is sending one female blogger and one student blogger to the Games, as winners of our Office Winter Games online contest. The winning bloggers will use the latest Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Office 2010, to report daily right from the Olympics, alongside members of the credentialed press corps.
Winners will have access to places normally off-limits to spectators, including the hospitality center for the USOC, called the USA House, where athletes and their families are, and the official Olympic Media Centers. In addition to a week at the Olympics, they will also get the technology (including a new Acer Aspire 4810 Timeline laptop) and the press access needed to report from the Games - plus a trip to the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
If you’re a blogger, enter the contest by going to www.officewintergames.com before November 1, and submit a short, 250 word blog post telling us why you should go to the Olympics. Our panel of judges, including Olympic gold-medal speed skater Bonnie Blair and CollegeHumor.com stars Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld, will select the top candidates. The semi-finalists will be posted to contest site where everyone will have the chance to vote to send their favorite bloggers to the Vancouver Games.
You have less than six days to enter, so submit your entry today.
May the best blogathletes win!!