Today’s post is just a quick status update to keep everyone in the loop on the progress Office 2010 is making, as well as to provide finalized details for our Office 2010 Technology Guarantee.
Starting today, consumers who purchase and activate Office 2007 will be able to download Office 2010 at no additional cost when it becomes available in June 2010.
All you need to be eligible for this program – Office 2010 Technology Guarantee – is the following:
The Office 2010 Technology Guarantee will be fulfilled online, via download, at no additional cost.
For more information about the Office 2010 Technology Guarantee, and to sign up for an e-mail reminder when Office 2010 is available, visit www.office.com/techg.
In addition to the Office 2010 Technology Guarantee, were excited to confirm that Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 are on schedule and will release to manufacturing (RTM) next month.
For businesses, we will launch the 2010 set of products, including Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 worldwide on May 12. To find out more about the Worldwide Business Launch, visit http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx.
For consumers, Office 2010 will be available online and on retail shelves this June. Until then, you can get the Office 2010 beta at www.office.com/beta.
Let us know in the comments if you have any questions or topics you’d like to see us discuss here in the future to help you prepare and leverage Office 2010.
Jevon Fark, Sr. Marketing Manager, Microsoft Office
It’s been a busy few weeks for many Office product team blogs so we wanted to take a step back and highlight some recent posts you might be interested in.
In addition to the three posts highlighted above many of the other teams in Office also continue to post on a regular basis. Check out all of the team-specific blogs on the sidebar of this blog. Can’t find something you’re looking for? Leave us a comment and we’ll help you find it.
Enjoy!
In our previous post entitled “Mobility in Office 2010” we briefly described the office applications available on your phone that would keep you productive on the go. In this post we will deep dive into Excel Mobile 2010, which supports over 100 of the formula functions available in Microsoft Excel 2010. In addition, its support for creating and displaying all of the common chart types brings the visual experience on the phone closer to that on the desktop. In this post, we will see how Excel Mobile 2010 can be used to perform what-if analysis on the phone to solve business or money related personal problems. We will also have a sneak peek into new gesture support in Office Mobile 2010 for touch devices.
Imagine you are a procurement manager with a car sales company. While you are on your way to office you receive a phone call informing you of the availability of a sample of the new car model which is hitting the show rooms next month. You plan to check out the car model before reaching the office and also to negotiate with the distributor on the discount to meet your profit target numbers. Assuming your discount percent is a function of quantity, you want to find out the optimum quantity of cars to purchase and the discount that you should obtain from the distributor so you meet your target profit numbers.
When you open the Excel spreadsheet your company uses to analyze costs on your phone, it looks something like shown below -- with space laid out to fill in the details like manufacturer’s name, car model, cost price, discount, selling price, quantity etc.
When you double tap the content you’re interested in, the sheet zooms in to a readable view (shown below) where you can easily edit your content (and you can adjust the zoom level further from View Menu | Zoom).
As soon as you fill in the discount and quantity details the profit gets calculated from the formula embedded in the sheet in the tabular format as shown below.
If your target profit percentage was a minimum of 10% then by simply looking at the table you would now know that you need to purchase somewhere between 180 to 210 cars and look for a discount not less than 6%. You can now simply change the quantity to see the numbers changing and optimize your figures accordingly. You could also create a chart out of the data shown in the table above to visually see the impact of changes you make on profit%.
This scenario was specific to business users but it shows that Excel Mobile 2010 can be used to solve many day-to-day problems ranging from keeping a personal budget, comparing auto lease options, maintaining your travel expenditures, to just using it as a smart calculator.
We saw in the above scenario how a double tap could be used to toggle between readable and overview zoom levels. If yours is a touch phone, you could –
With the above five supported gestures we are excited for you to see for yourself how intuitive and easy it is to use Excel Mobile 2010. With all the supported formulas, charts, and gestures in addition to the other numerous features, we hope you find Excel Mobile 2010 useful in many different scenarios . We’ll follow up with similar scenario-oriented posts in the coming months, but in the meantime, please let us know if you have questions or feedback in the blog comments. Will this scenario help you? What Office scenarios do you currently use your mobile phone for?
Hello, my name is Rich Grutzmacher. I am a Program Manager on the User Experience team. As Clay wrote in his post, we created the Backstage view to provide a location for Office's OUT features (i.e., the things you do to the whole file, rather than the changes you make to the content within it). One of the new and exciting Backstage features in Office 2010 is the ability to save your files directly to Windows Live SkyDrive from within the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote desktop applications. Many of you are already using this new functionality in the Office 2010 Beta and your feedback has been great. Thanks! When Office 2010 is released, you will find this feature by clicking the Save to Web button on the Save & Send tab in the Backstage. There is no need to register for this service if you already use Hotmail, Messenger, or Xbox Live. Just sign in with your existing Windows Live ID and you’re ready to go.
Figure 1. Screenshot of an Office 2010 RC build. Save to Windows Live SkyDrive is one of the features on the Save & Send tab in the Backstage view.
Windows Live SkyDrive lets you store files in the cloud, so you can access them from any computer or device at any location. You no longer need to e-mail files to yourself or save them to a USB flash drive just so you can work on them at home or edit them on a different computer (e.g., laptop versus desktop). When you save your files on SkyDrive they are always available to you, wherever you need them.
In addition to saving files to a private location for your own personal use, you can also save files directly to shared folders on SkyDrive. Saving to a shared folder makes it easy for you to collaborate with others when working with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. You no longer need to worry about whether or not the people with whom you are sharing your files will be able to open them, since the Office Web Apps will be available on Windows Live for everyone to use. You will also be able to collaborate more efficiently with others when you use the Office 2010 desktop applications to edit files saved on SkyDrive. We call this co-authoring, or collaboration without compromise. There’s only one version of the output AND you know when others are working on it with you. There’s no check-in/check-out required. No waiting your turn. No losing control of when you share your changes or when you see others’ changes. You can always edit the file at any time regardless of what edits others might be making to the file at the same time. Check out the links below to learn more about co-authoring with the Office 2010 desktop applications.
In a previous mobile blog post, we briefly introduced our supported mobility scenarios in Office 2010. Those mobility functions rely on support from SharePoint 2010 mobility. Today’s post describes how to setup your SharePoint server environment so you can take advantage of mobile access.
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 includes support for using feature phones to access documents, lists, calendars on SharePoint 2010, performing people and document searches and receiving SMS alerts on SharePoint content.
Microsoft SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 allows Windows phone users to access offline documents on SharePoint 2010.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 supports accessing information from a web browser enabled mobile phone or other devices. It delivers:
When you access Microsoft SharePoint 2010 site from mobile phone, this view will be automatically redirected to mobile view as a picture below.
User can click or choose the “View All Site Content” link on top of the home page. It will switch to the following kind of library:
The following sections will tell you things you need to know for deployment.
You can preview the mobile experience on a desktop web browser. To do this, add “?mobile=1” to the end of a SharePoint URL for a document, home page, web part page, wiki page, list view page, list item details/edit/new form page, or Search center page. This does not work for all pages/lists/documents but can show you an idea of the mobile experience.
This section walkthroughs configuration that needs to be setup to deploy SharePoint 2010 for mobile access also provides a list of mobile browsers that support mobile view.
As mobile phones connect to the public Internet, the SharePoint server needs to be accessible outside of the corporate firewall. IT administrators can publish SharePoint via an SSL VPN gateway, use a mobile proxy or expose SharePoint server to internet directly.
One option is to use an SSL VPN gateway server, like Microsoft’s forthcoming Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) Server, to publish SharePoint sites across the firewall as illustrated in the diagram below. The SSL VPN server needs to support the mobile devices that you are planning to enable access too. Microsoft UAG server, currently in Beta, supports mobile browsing access. If you are interested in evaluating UAG server, please refer to “Welcome to Forefront UAG” to understand more UAG in detail. Forefront UAG RC0 is available at here.
Once the SharePoint server is published outside the firewall, the Alternative Access Mapping settings in the Central Administration page need to be configured. In addition, the sites to be published need to belong to a zone which allows cross firewall access. These settings are found under Central Administration. Go to System Settings and under System Settings choose Configure cross Firewall access zone.
To configure the SharePoint Workspace mobile client to access and offline documents on a SharePoint server, users need to enter the UAG server address in the settings page.
Mobile Proxy Servers such as Microsoft’s Mobile Device Manager or Blackberry Enterprise Server can also handle behind-the-firewall access to SharePoint. The server needs to pass the mobile browser’s HTTP headers directly through to SharePoint to operate properly.
SharePoint Workspace mobile client works with Microsoft’s Mobile Device Manager.
SharePoint can be placed on an extranet to enable device access. Only basic authentication is supported, however, and with any Internet-facing servers we recommend a combination of technology and policy safeguards such as SSL.
There are no configuration requirements for mobile phones which are within the corporate firewall.
While most mobile-enabled content is readily accessible out of the box, there are some data types that are either not supported or require additional configuration steps.
Web part pages, document libraries/picture libraries, lists (e.g., calendars, contacts, tasks, etc.) blogs, wikis, Office documents, Search and MySite are available out of the box. The “list view” and “image” web parts are mobile enabled out of the box. Want to mention that MySite and Search functions are only available on MOSS server.
Other web parts need to have a “mobile web part adapter” written which enables mobile functionality. More details on mobile adapters can be found in the Developing Custom Mobile Solutions section below. Pages under the “_Layouts” folder are not available as mobile pages.
SharePoint provides a mobile web part framework for developing custom solutions. By adding mobile web part adapter render classes to the web parts, existing web parts can be interacted with as part of the mobile experience. Some base adapter classes are available for common functions. The SharePoint 2007 mobile SDK can be a good starting point to learn about this development option. For SharePoint 2010, SharePoint mobile pages can be customized by modifying the underlying layouts page. In addition, a mobile page can be configured to redirect to an alternative mobile page.
SharePoint 2010 supports a wide range of mobile browsers as list below. You don’t need to do any additional setting on mobile device.
SharePoint Workspace mobile client is available exclusively on Windows phones.
To access mobile pages, the URL is the same as that of the desktop browser page. However, it can vary depending on the configuration and presence of web proxies. If the proxy-enabled URL is not known, the user can choose the “E-mail a link” button on the Page tab of the SharePoint ribbon in web part page, wiki page, list view page to receive the address in email body. SharePoint 2010 will automatically redirect to the mobile page if a user accesses the URL via a mobile browser.
Recognition was made by USERAGENT to recognize for accessing mobile browser to redirect to mobile view is managed by the file “compat.browser” within the server’s IIS directory that manages device profiles (If the web application port is 80, the file path will be "\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\App_Browsers\compat.browser"). With a text editor, the file can be modified to change redirect behavior. The IsMobileDevice attribute of that mobile browser when set to FALSE will cause SharePoint to bypass the mobile view for that browser.
Please refer below MSDN document for browser profile definition.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228122.aspx
Within the firewall SharePoint Workspace mobile client uses NTLM or Kerberos authentication schemes. Outside the firewall Basic authentication scheme over SSL is used to communicate with the SharePoint server published on UAG.
Recommend enabling SSL communication for mobile browsing access to maintain secure communications between the mobile device and SharePoint server.
When 2-factor authentication is required, it needs to be handled by the SSL VPN or proxy server and the mobile device.
Finally, administrators should be aware that mobile browsers might cache information on the device. Recommend setting policies around device locking and types of information accessible on mobile phones to minimize the risk of privacy or other issues if a device is lost.
Hopefully this information is helpful to you – please let us know if you have any questions in the comments.
Today, over on the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit Team Blog we announced the availability of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 Beta.
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an assessment and planning tool targeted at IT Professionals to help them begin the deployment process. The tool inventories your current environment and assesses the readiness of those computers for migration to the new technology, in this case Office 2010. MAP is an agentless tool, this means it can discover the computers in your network without installing any components on the target computers. MAP uses technologies already available in your IT environment to perform inventory and assessments. These technologies include Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Remote Registry Service, Active Directory Domain Services, and the Computer Browser service.
MAP was originally created in 2006 to assess hardware readiness for desktop migration via an agentless inventory architecture. Over the course of the next three years MAP has been extended to assist Microsoft customers and partners to more rapidly and accurately plan for the deployment of the latest Microsoft platform technologies including Office 2010, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, SQL Server 2008, and more.
MAP is a Microsoft Solution Accelerator that serves as the starting point to help an IT Professional begin planning for Office 2010 deployments and outlines the next steps for your deployment. If you are just getting started with MAP review all of the capabilities of MAP on the MAP website.
We are particularly excited about this announcement as this release offers a complete assessment for Office 2010 readiness. Use MAP to perform an inventory and assessment of your IT environment and create two forms of output. The first is targeted at technical decision makers; this is a summary proposal which outlines the readiness of your environment for Office 2010 and outlines the next steps to drive the deployment. The second output is targeted at the IT professional; this is an Excel workbook detailing the readiness and inventory of the Office applications in the environment. Check out the sample MAP Office 2010 outputs:
The actionable recommendations and assessments presented in these outputs shorten the time it takes to plan your Office 2010 migration.
You can get the MAP 5.0 Beta from the MAP Connect site (Live ID required). Download the MAP beta and get started planning your Office 2010 deployment today. We look forward to your feedback on the assessment process and tools.
-Brian Shiers, Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft Office
A few weeks back we went through an overview of mobility scenarios in the post Mobility in Office 2010. Today’s post describes how to search and look up information on SharePoint web sites with your mobile phones.
There are various investments in SharePoint 2010 focused on enabling mobile experiences, including using Smartphones and feature phones to access documents, lists, calendars on SharePoint 2010, performing people and document searches, and receiving SMS alerts on SharePoint content. These features are accessible from almost any phone that has a web browser or microbrowser. Some of these detailed features include:
When you access SharePoint 2010 sites from your phone, the normal desktop view will be replaced with a mobile view, similar to the image below.
User can click or choose “All Site Content” link at bottom of the home page to view the following types of information:
Staying in touch with critical business activities and providing updates from the field keeps companies more connected with their employees, partners and customers. MySites in SharePoint 2010 provide a full social portal experience with people and content profiles, expertise management, recommended content and organization browsing. On mobile phones, MySites make it easy to check status updates, keep informed of where colleagues are, and stay current on what activities they are engaging in. Users can also browse through personal profiles to view others activities and contact information.
Mobile access to team sites enables viewing and editing of lists, document libraries, wiki pages and LOB data. Pages are displayed in real time so the latest updates are always available.
For time sensitive content, a mobile alert can keep SharePoint users notified via SMS. Like SharePoint email alerts, SMS alerts can keep users informed of:
SharePoint 2010 enables the power of SharePoint search features to help locate and view information from virtually anywhere.
In terms of search there are two main usage scenarios. One is content search and another is people search. Search makes finding people and documents simple. Queries can be done by name, title, department or other criteria. Colleagues in your corporate directory and SharePoint contacts can be found in people search. People search connects with mobile profiles so the search results are sorted by social distance - so that the contacts closest to the active user appear.
Documents can be found by document type, making it easy to get back to a PowerPoint slide deck, Word document or Excel spreadsheet.
Once the document is located via search or by browsing a SharePoint site, it can be viewed with Office 2010 mobile viewers. A find function helps jump to a particular section for further review.
Word documents can be viewed either in text mode for easy scrolling and reading or as an image to see WYSIWYG layout. The supported file formats include: Doc, docm, docx, dot, dotm and dotx.
Excel spreadsheets can be viewed easily as well, and supports freezing rows or columns. Individual cells can also be jumped to directly. The supported file formats include: xlsx, xlsb and xlsm.
PowerPoint presentations support an Outline view; slide thumbnail view and showing full slides. The supported file formats (which may be subject to change) include: pot, potm, potx, pps, ppsm, ppsx, ppt, pptm, pptx.
This post provides a brief at look the various mobility features in SharePoint 2010 and how they enable people to stay connected on the go. These features are part of what makes SharePoint 2010 an effective platform for getting to key information from a mobile phone. In the coming weeks, stay tuned as we will introduce more information about mobility in Office 2010.