Have you ever closed Word after making a bunch of changes, and then accidently clicked ‘No' when asked if you want to save your changes?  Then you suddenly realized what you have done, only to find that there was no way to recover your work?  You are not alone.  In fact, so many people were in similar situations that we improved Office 2010 so you can get that document back!  We call this feature Versions and I would like to spend a little time introducing it to you.

How do we protect you from accidently not saving a document?

In prior versions of Office we periodically save your document in the background when you are editing a document.  We keep this file around so we can use it to recover your work if the application crashes.

For Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Office 2010 improves on this idea.  In the Backstage view we expose the periodic autosaved files from your current editing session and allow you to compare or restore them as the newest document. We purge them when you save and close your editing session.

Additionally, if you close an editing session without saving, we now keep your last autosaved file and let you access it from the Backstage view, under Recent Documents, or from Document Information when you open your document again. So now you can recover that unsaved work with a few simple clicks.

To ensure that we don't clutter your computer with these autosaved files, we only keep these files for 4 days, or until the next time you edit your document.

Now you can enjoy Office 2010 Excel, PowerPoint and Word with the knowledge that the software is working to protect you from losing your work. 

Today is a great day for the Office 2010 team!.  As Nick Simons posts on the Office Web Apps blog:

Brian Hall from Windows Live has also written more detail about the Office Web Apps on Windows Live -- check out his post on the Windows Live blog.

My name is Mirko Mandic and I am a Program Manager on the Office User Experience team.  Today’s post is about the work we are doing in Office 2010 to improve the most frequently used Office command – Paste. 

Despite its usefulness, Paste doesn’t always work like users expect it to.  Their feedback and usage data (Paste is the most frequently undone action) indicate that pasted content often does not look like what they expected.  Changing the format of the freshly pasted content to look correct can be time-consuming.  Undoing and redoing a paste is tedious and interrupts the user’s workflow.  Instead of being a quick stop en route to a great looking document, pasting can seem like a complex task that comes with added “repair costs” (as one of our users described it).

Some of Office users have found creative ways to achieve better results when pasting content into an Office application.  For example, some users tell us they take their content “through” Notepad before pasting it in an Office application in order to strip away the formatting. 

Prior versions of Office offered some powerful, but underused pasting tools.  The Paste Special dialog enabled the users to achieve their desired result by picking the specific Paste format, such as pasting the formula or the formatting only.  Unfortunately, few users found these tools.  And those who found them faced several challenges – the names of the formats were often not descriptive enough to suggest results and pasting via the dialog required multiple clicks and a lot of mouse movement.

The Office Paste Recovery feature tried to help users fix incorrect pastes by offering alternative Paste options after the content had been pasted.  Word even offered a setting in the Options dialog to modify the default Paste format.  While some found these features useful, their wide adoption was hindered by discoverability and efficiency issues similar to those for the Paste Special dialog.

In Office 2010, we’re combining the rich functionality of the Paste Special dialog and the Paste Recovery feature into a new Paste Options gallery.  The Paste Options gallery includes Live Preview – hovering over each Paste item allows users to preview the Paste formatting with their actual content.  The new Paste Options gallery helps users get the right results the first time, making the task of copying and pasting content into a document quicker and easier by eliminating the repetitive process of pasting, undoing and trying again.

The Paste Options gallery shows up in three places– in the Ribbon, on the right-click context menu and in the Paste Recovery on-object UI (OOUI) that appears near content you have pasted in your document:

The contents of the Paste Options gallery are contextual.  They change based on what the user has copied and where the content is being pasted.  For example, copying some data from Excel will yield a different set of Paste choices than if the user had copied some text from Word: 

Keep Text Only is a useful Paste format that works in many scenarios.  Whenever it is included in the Paste Options gallery, it shows up as the last item in the gallery to make it easy to spot and select.  Similarly, the first option in the gallery is almost always the default Paste option, the format that would have appeared when pasting with CTRL+V in previous versions.

When the user right clicks and hovers over an option in the Paste Options gallery, two things happen in addition to the Live Preview:

-          The rest of the UI “gets out of the way” by becoming transparent.  This effectively increases the size of the visible Live Preview area, helping the user preview the results and select the right Paste option.

-          A tooltip is displayed, showing the label and keyboard accelerator information.  The tooltip is intended to complement the Live Preview in helping the user chose the right option from the gallery, and as importantly, educate him/her during the transitional period of getting used to the new graphical presentation of the functionality.

Many of our users paste using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+V.  We are making the Paste Options gallery useful for them as well.  The Paste Recovery OOUI is now much easier to access using the keyboard than in previous versions (most users did not know they could drop the Paste Recovery OOUI via Alt+Shift+F10).  In Office 2010, after using the Ctrl+V shortcut, just press the Ctrl key one more time to drop the new Paste Options gallery and change to a different Paste option.   Similarly to what happens on mouse hover, extra label and accelerator info is displayed in the tooltip as soon as keyboard focus is moved to an option in the gallery.

By exposing Paste options at a higher level in the UI, we are aiming to improve the task of pasting content into a document and we are making that task more efficient for keyboard and mouse users alike.  Paste tasks that previously required long keyboard sequences (from the Paste Special or the Paste Recovery OOUI) can now be completed by two keyboard presses – a press on the context menu key to launch the context menu, followed by a press on an accelerator key for the desired Paste option.  When it comes to mouse usage, several mouse clicks (and a lot of mouse movement) have been replaced by just two quick clicks – the right-click to bring up the context menu and a press on the desired option in the Paste Options gallery.

We hope that the Paste Options gallery in the Technical Preview of Office 2010 is already making it easier for you to create great looking content with less clicks and in less time than before, and we are looking forward to continue hearing your feedback on it!

“For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence.  Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing…”

Data bars and icon sets have been enhance to address important customer feedback.  One of the biggest requests for data bars was negative data bars, which is now in Excel 2010:

“In Excel 2010, we have introduced negative value data bars which can help analyze trends when negative values are involved. By default, we smartly position the axis in the cell so that a small negative value will not occupy half the cell lengths when bigger positives values are also in the range. If you prefer, we let you position the axis in the center of the cell.”

Also, there are improvements to charting, especially around the performance and rendering of charts:

“In today’s article I will outline some of the significant new chart improvements that impact performance. In Office 2007 the graphics engine used by Office Charts was replaced with one that could support more complex rendering. A downside of this change was slower performance in certain scenarios relative to Office 2003. For example, supporting anti-aliasing in Office 2007 allows the chart to render smooth lines; however, the computation for smoothing takes multiple rendering passes which take additional time. One of the top priorities for Office 2010 was increasing chart performance.”

Here’s the full list of Excel blogs posts around sparklines, conditional formatting, and charting:

In Office 2007, information about your product, product licenses, and product support is buried several levels deep, and discovering this information can be challenging.  For example, suppose that you wish to check for the latest Office product updates.  In Office 2007, you would open the Office Options screen:

If you wish to find out about the license state of your Office product, you would visit this screen and click the About button to bring up a very familiar dialog box:

Making the Customer Connection

The Resources tab is a good first step towards putting all the product support information in one place.  Still, product support options are located together with a number of Word-specific options, making it hard to pick out the information or options you're looking for.  This does not quite fit Office's WYSIWYG user interface at all.  Admittedly, product updates, product license activation, and product support don't necessarily align with the WYSIWYG paradigm in the first place.  After all, how often do you really need to update Office? 

In Office 2010, we set out to evolve the Resource Tab of the Office Options dialog into a dashboard-like interface: a dynamic, data-driven view that consolidates and surfaces application- and product-specific information such as versioning, updates, and license state in one convenient location.  The Resources tab with its matter-of-fact presentation is enhanced in order to...

• Bring product support features, product licensing information, and various tools into one location.
• Align with the WYSIWYG UI paradigm.
• Provide value that gives you a reason to return to this place.

The Backstage Help tab makes it easier for you to get support, help, and product information.

• If you want to get the latest updates for your Office 2010 products, or find out which products you have purchased and which products you are trialing, all of this information is laid out in a simple, intuitive format.
• If you are using Office for the first time, the Backstage View offers a variety of options to get training and ramp-up on the features of Office.
• Or imagine you are talking on the telephone with a representative of Microsoft Customer Service and Support and you need to provide your Product ID in order for the representative to assist you further. Explaining where to find the PID while on the telephone was a serious inconvenience in Office 2007. Now, you just open the Backstage Help tab. The PID is clearly presented along with other critical product information.

One Consolidated View

The Help place has three key components:

• Support options in the left column, providing various ways to get more out of your Office products, troubleshoot issues, and get Help with your Office applications.
• Product licensing that shows the Office 2010 products you are licensed to use on this computer, along with the applications included in each.
• About My Application information that assists Microsoft Customer Service and Support in diagnosing any issues you are having with Office.

A typical user will install one Microsoft Office 2010 product at a time.  However, you may choose to purchase some products and trial others on a time-limited basis.  This view dynamically adjusts to your specific installation:

Thus, as you work with and try out various flavors of Office 2010, you can return here to see everything you've got in one spot.  Well, that's nice, but why should you care? 

Good point!  In general, you shouldn't have to care about product activation and licensing.  However, issues related to product activation are a source of considerable customer pain.  Activation status used to be buried in the Resources tab.  Now, product licensing is a first-class citizen of the Backstage View.

Product activation verifies that your product license was legitimately issued by Microsoft.  Across the spectrum of Office 2010 products, we have merged Office 2010 product activation with installation in order to automate the process.  However, it is not always convenient or possible to activate the product right away.  If you have not activated your Office 2010 product license, you may see the following notification when you launch an application such as Word:

However, you may be on the road, or you may not have Internet connectivity at your present location, so you simply close this dialog.  If you ever want to get back to this information, you can just open the Backstage view and go to the Help tab to activate your product:

In addition, if you are running a trial version of Office, you can purchase the full product from here. 

Let's revisit our scenario from above:

This illustrates a typical Office 2010 installation:  you have purchased Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010.  However, you also have a trial license Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, which provides some additional applications.  From here, you can see which applications are covered by which licenses.

To anticipate a question:  why not "subtract" the applications that you actually bought and show only the trial applications for Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010?  After all, that would be a shorter, neater list. 

We settled on this list-every-application approach since we cannot anticipate every Microsoft Office 2010 installation.  Multiple Microsoft Office 2010 products can be installed side-by-side on your computer.  If we try to be creative with the application list, we risk making bad assumptions about your Office installation, possibly confusing more than enlightening.

More Help than Help Itself

In most contexts, you can click the handy Help "question mark" to get specific information on tasks you wish to perform on your documents.  However, the Microsoft Office website offers a large selection of additional materials, training, support options, and handy online solutions to common questions.  One of the most valuable is Getting Started, which solves the tabula rasa problem:  launching Word or Excel for the first time, starting at a blank document window, unsure what to do next.  The other options from the old Resources tab are present here as well.

About The Help Tab

We hope that the Help tab succeeds in its mission to bring disparate product information into one convenient setting that is more attractive, more informative, and easier to use than ever before.  And, for those of you who like the familiar "About" dialog, don't worry - it's still there.  Just click "Additional Version and Copyright Information" and see it for yourself!

Business Contact Manager is a powerful contact and customer information management feature of Outlook.

The new version of Business Contact Manager (BCM) for Outlook 2010 is far more powerful and flexible than BCM for Outlook 2007. Manage your business contacts, track opportunities through the sales cycle, send personalized marketing campaigns, and organize your business projects.

With this introductory post, the BCM team has started to write about the top features in their upcoming release for Office 2010:

• A new user experience makes BCM very flexible and easy to use, and it offers effective visualization of your business data through charts and a customizable dashboard.
• BCM also enhances the effectiveness of your sales management process. For example, the automatic lead scoring functionality will help you identify the most important leads and shrink the sales cycle.
• Best of all, you can modify BCM to fit your business needs. Completely customize BCM forms using a new visual designer, create new record types, define custom relationships, and create custom reports.

There are many new and exciting features in BCM. Visit BCM Team Blog regularly to learn how BCM for Office 2010 can help grow your business.

When you try Office 2010 you can download BCM from the Microsoft Connect site.  Please try it out and send us your feedback!

The PowerPoint team has made several posts to their team blog about new media features coming in Office 2010.  Here is an excerpt from Allen Huang on the PowerPoint team:

One of our pillars for PowerPoint 2010 has been crafting a multimedia experience that allows users to effectively harness the storytelling power of audio and video content. With improvements in bandwidth, computing power, and media devices, we’re seeing media – particularly video – used in all walks of life to enrich communication. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on PowerPoint’s video capabilities over the years, and we’re very excited about the features we’re rolling out in 2010 to make this experience not only dependable, but pleasurable too.

You can find more details (and a video overview) in Allen’s post here.  In addition, there’s a post on trimming your media right from within PowerPoint, and another on brand new multimedia features which allow you to easily share and present media-rich presentations on other computers.

Enjoy.

For those of you who are dogfooding the Technical Preview build, thanks for all of the great feedback you’ve sent us so far on the new Backstage view! We’ve been getting a lot of requests for a sneak peak at the design changes that we’ve been making to the Backstage view since the Technical Preview builds have been released. I’ll talk through some of these changes in this post. Please note that these screenshots are still subject to change - they are from an interim build on the way to our Beta later this fall. We continue to tweak the designs based on what we learn in our usability labs and appreciate continued feedback from those of you that are dogfooding the Technical Preview.

File Button
From the early days of this release, we have been working on making the common commands like Print, Save, and Open more discoverable than in Office 2007. When we created the Office Menu in Office 2007, we optimized for Fitt’s Law – making it super easy to put your mouse in the upper left corner and get to these commands. For those folks who discovered the Office Button right away, this was a great little feature that made Office easier to use. Unfortunately, because this design was unconventional and different from the rest of the Ribbon UI we added, it was hard for some customers to find the Office Button the first time. Many who saw the Office Button believed it to be a branding decoration, rather than a functional button.

In the Technical Preview build, we took steps towards addressing this feedback. First off, we put the Office Button within the same row as the other Ribbon tabs. The location of the Office Button contributed most to people confusing it with a decorative logo. Another thing that we changed was the shape – instead of a fancy round button, we turned it into a button that looked much more like a tab. Lastly, we added an arrow to the button to try to encourage people to click on it.

With these changes, we started seeing some significant improvements in the usability tests in terms of people finding this button quickly the first time. But we still thought the initial discoverability needed to be better - we want to be sure people have no trouble finding the functionality under this button. Over and over in the usability lab, customers told us the word “File” was something they were looking for in the UI – all the years of using the File menu to use commands like “Save As” and “Print” is a hard habit to break. So we’ve listened to our customers and in our Beta release you’ll see we’ve added the “File” label to the tab. This has been a tremendous success in the usability labs and we’ve seen an incredible surge in initial discoverability of the Backstage view.

Technical Preview:	Beta (coming later this fall):

No More Back Button
One of the things we’ve been working on has been improving the navigation to and from the Backstage. Because the Backstage view covers up the document, we created the Back button mechanism to allow you to navigate back to your document. Unfortunately, this design had some issues that we’ve been working through – it led to some confusion around what the “X” (close) button in the top right corner should do, set incorrect expectations around what “Back” actually implies (does it work like in the browser?), and was not an easy target to hit.

An important change has been to keep the Ribbon tabs visible and usable while you’re in the Backstage view. This makes the Backstage work much more like any other Ribbon tab – a metaphor people are already familiar with. In addition to clicking on the document thumbnail or pressing ESC, you can simply click on any one of the other Ribbon tabs to get back to your document and use those commands, just as you would switch between other Ribbon tabs.

Technical Preview:

Beta:

Updated Visuals
We’ve also worked to implement our nearly final set of visuals for the Backstage view. Our designers have worked to develop a set of visuals that help make the Backstage easier to browse and make the transition between your document and the Backstage feel smoother:

Organization of Navigation Commands
We have also added a little bit more efficiency to the “Quick Commands” in the left side of the Backstage view. Commands like “Save”, “Save As”, “Open”, and “Close” are no longer located beneath the “Info” tab and are actually closer to the File button than they have been in previous versions. Options and Exit are also no longer associated with the last tab, which has been renamed to “Help” to better reflect the commands located on this tab (you can think of the Help tab as the replacement for the commands that used to be located on the Office 2003 Help menu.)

Technical Preview:	Beta:

Most Recently Used Documents
For some of our customers, having very efficient access to their most recently used documents is super important. There are several ways to do this. First, you can add the “Open Recent File” command to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT). Just drop down the Quick Customize menu at the right of the QAT.

Clicking on the “Open Recent File Button” from the QAT will open the Backstage view directly to the Recent tab.

You could also choose to add a number of recently used documents directly to the navigation pane – the left hand side of the Backstage view. At the bottom of the Recent tab is a new feature that will allow you to choose the number of recent documents to show in the pane.

If you turn on this feature by clicking on the checkbox…

The number of documents you choose will be shown along with the other “Quick Commands” at the top of the Backstage navigation pane.

Turning this feature on also means that you’ll be able to use the keyboard sequence Alt+F+1 (or 2 or 3, etc) to open the most (or 2^nd most, etc) recent document. And for those of you who use the pinning feature of the Recent Documents list (which keeps your favorite documents at the top of the list), you will be able to use the Alt+F+1 (or 2, or 3, etc) keyboard sequence to get to your favorite document, regardless of when it was last opened!

You can now use the keyboard to open your pinned and most recently viewed documents:

Thanks for all of the great feedback that you’ve been giving us so far and we hope that these changes help you become even more productive with the new Backstage view. Let us know what you think of these changes and we look forward to continue hearing your feedback on all of the work that we’ve put into Office 2010. We are listening closely and looking forward to the release of the beta version later this fall.

Marina, Program Manager on the Office User Experience team

Hello, my name is Vikas and I work in the Office Trustworthy Computing security team. Today I will be telling you more about a feature I have been working on called Protected View. Protected View is one of the new security defense-in-depth features added in Office 2010. If you have not seen Brad’s post yet on this and the other new security improvements, it’s definitely worth taking a few minutes to look it over.

Why would opening Office documents be scary?

With any piece of complex software, over time new file parsing exploits against it may be found. The older Office binary file formats had been susceptible to these types of attacks. Over the past years hackers have discovered ways to manipulate Office binary files so that when they are opened and parsed, they cause their own code embedded within the file to run. To address these binary file parsing attacks in Office 2007, several new XML based file formats were introduced. These XML file formats are much easier to parse and provide a significant security benefit over the older binary formats. We do understand that there are still several billion binary files being used today and migrating to the new XML formats will take some time but if possible, the sooner you can migrate over, the sooner you can start leveraging the security benefits these new formats provide.

To address these attacks in the past, the Office team had released the MOICE (Microsoft Office Isolated Converter Environment). MOICE would take a potentially risky binary file type and convert it within a sandboxed process to the new XML format and then back to the binary format and open it. The hope of doing this conversion was to remove any exploit code that was hidden away within the file. Some downsides to MOICE were files that required a long time to convert would seem to take a long time to open and users would get frustrated. In addition, the conversion process did not always maintain 100% of the documents layout so there certainly was room to improve when it came to the overall user experience of the feature.

What have we done in Office 2010 to raise the bar?

In Office 2010 when a file appears to be from a potentially risky location, such as the Internet, it is now opened in Protected View. Protected View will appear like any other read-only view. Under the covers however, when a file is opened in Protected View, it is being opened in the new Office 2010 sandbox. The Office 2010 sandbox is the “next version” of the MOICE sandbox described earlier. Unlike with MOICE, no file conversation is happening. In fact what is occurring is the file is being opened within a sandboxed instance of the application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and if there was malicious code present in the file the goal is that code would not be able to find a way to tamper with your documents; change your profile or other user settings. I will describe this in more detail a bit later in this post.

When is Protected View used?

Since Protected View is a read only view, we understand it is not something that should be used for every file you interact with. Our goal when designing this feature was to only use it in high risk scenarios:

· Files opened from the Internet. When a file is downloaded from the Internet the Windows Attachment Execution Service places a marker in the file’s alternate data stream to indicate it came from the Internet zone. When a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file is opened and has this marker it will open in Protected View until the user decides to trust and edit it. That is done by pressing the “Enable Editing” button shown below:

In some cases when a file is opened from a network share that you believe is part of your Intranet zone it will open in Protected View and indicate on the trust bar that it originated from an Internet location. This could occur because of how your proxy is setup or because you have not indicated in your Internet Options – Local intranet setting to “automatically detect intranet network” as shown below:

· Attachments opened from Outlook 2010. When an attachment is opened from Outlook 2010 it will open in Protected View. Administrators will be able to configure if they want all attachments to open in Protected View or just those sent from senders outside their Exchange environment.

· Files opened from unsafe locations. An example of an unsafe location is files that are opened from your Temporary Internet Files folder. As an administrator you can extend this list to include directories you feel are also unsafe.

· Files that are blocked by File Block Policy. In Office 2007 we introduced a feature called File Block. This allowed administrators to define file types that should not be opened. When a type was blocked it simply could not be opened. From your feedback we heard that this was overly limiting from a usability aspect since your users still wanted to “read” those files. In Office 2010 these blocked files can now be opened in Protected View and as an administrator you can set policy to indicate if the user should be allowed to leave Protected View (by editing the file) or force them to stay in it. We hope this design will make all the issues and pains you felt go away!

· Office File Validation failures. Office File Validation is a new feature that scans an Office file when it is being opened and validates it against a well-known schema. When there are inconsistences between the file and the schema, the file will fail validation and will open in Protected View. Similar to File Block, policy will be available to determine if the user should be allowed to edit the file or not when a failure occurs.

· File Open Dialog. You can open files in Protected View explicitly by using the Open button:

How does Protected View provide me with a better user experience?

The biggest gain is it lets us remove “are you sure” security prompts while giving you greater protection than you had in the past. For example, if you are an Outlook user like me you may have noticed that each time you open an attachment you are asked a question:

For me it is extremely hard to answer this question without seeing the contents of the file first. In Office 2010 we have removed this dialog and instead we now just open the file directly in Protected View! This allows you to look over the contents and make an informed decision if you really trust the file or not. If you do not, or if you only wanted to read it, you can get your job done and then close it. The reason we are comfortable opening the file directly is because of the many defense in depth checks we now have in place.

In addition to the open prompt, we also removed the Outlook Preview pane prompt shown below:

Now when you read Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Visio files in the Outlook preview pane you will no longer be prompted asking if you really trust the file first when Protected View is enabled.

What does the Protected View design look like?

Protected View had changed how Word, Excel and PowerPoint are architected. When a file is opened in Protected View there are two instances of the application that are running. To illustrate I will use Word. We have one instance of winword.exe that runs in the context of the account you are logged in as (we call this the “host” process) and we have another instance of winword.exe running in a very isolated process (we call this the “client” process). We also call the isolated process the Office sandbox and you will see these two terms intermixed.

What is the host process?

The best way to describe it is with a picture. The client process is the part of the UI that is highlighted black and everything else is part of the host process as shown below:

When the user clicks on any part in the Host processes UI, because of UIPI, we have a high assurance the action came from the user and do not need to prompt with additional ‘are you sure you did this?’ dialogs. The host process owns the top level application frame window as shown above which includes the window caption, the ribbon, the trust bar, status bar, etc. The host process manages the Protected View and non-Protected View windows and acts as a “broker” for the client process. There is only one instance of the client/sandbox running at a given time and all files opened in Protected View share the same sandbox instance within an application. When all Protected View windows are closed the client process is terminated. When the client needs to perform a privileged task (such as accessing the file system, registry or other system resources) it makes a request to the host process and the host then will broker and perform the action if it deems appropriate.

What is the client process?

As alluded to earlier, the client process is another Windows process that is running in the context of the user account however the token being used is a restricted token. By using a restricted token we were able to remove several rights and privileges this process has. To further lock down the client process we are also running it as a low integrity process. Together the restricted token and low integrity (UIPI) provide the foundations for our Office 2010 sandbox.

As discussed, Protected View is one of the many security defenses in Office 2010. For a malware to actually be able to run in Protected View it will first need to find a way around DEP, ASLR, GS and our new 2010 Office File validation checks. After all that, the malware would need to find a way to break out of the sandbox.

Hopefully now when you think you received a ‘scary’ Word, Excel or PowerPoint file you will be able to open it in Protected View and read it without having to worry that something bad could happen to your computer.

I appreciate you reading this far and stay tuned for more security posts coming soon!

Thanks.
Vikas Malhotra
Security Program Manager
Office Trustworthy Computing

Hi, my name is Marina and I am a Program Manager on the Office User Experience team. In previous blog posts, you’ve read about the new Backstage view and how it has helped to improve the Printing experience. Now I’d like to tell you about the Info tab - the default tab you see when you enter the Backstage view.

Whenever you are working on a document, there is a ton of information available about its current state. Unfortunately, it is not very easy to actually view all of this information. And when it is displayed, it is spread out across many different parts of the application - in dialogs, the title bar, the status bar, the properties dialog, or even in Windows explorer.
Some information is always visible (the word count that is shown on the status bar); while other information isn’t shown unless you know to look for it (is there any personal information hidden in the properties of the file?) And some information isn’t even accessible from within the Office application (what is the full path to my file?)

Information about your document can be found in many different places in the product:

In Office 2010, we are providing a way for you to see all the information that is available about your document in one convenient place.  And not only that, but we are making this information readily available, so you don't have to dig around for it yourself.  You no longer have to remember to run several features before sending your file to a potential employer.  And if your document is in a state that you didn't know about, you will be able to notice this on your way to saving it to a public share.

The Info tab of the Backstage view is the place that assembles all this information:

While there are many features exposed in the Info tab which can help make working with documents easier, I'll highlight a few of my favorites.

Simple Features Made Useful

Sometimes, knowing some of the most basic document properties can help you make a decision.  With the Info tab, it's now easy to see (at one glance) when your document was last modified and who did it.  You can also find out the file size of your document without having to leave the application and search through the Windows explorer:

One other task that has always been difficult to do from within Office applications has been to get the full path of where a document you're working on lives.  We now show you this path in the Info tab, and you can easily copy and paste this path wherever you need it:

If you ever wanted to protect a document from accidentally being edited, but didn't want to prevent someone from editing it if they really wanted to, you can use the Mark as Final feature.  Just select the radio button to indicate that you think this document is final in the Info tab: 

Your document will now be made read-only, and anyone can see that it has been marked as final.  They can also easily understand how to change this state if they wanted to go ahead and change something in the file.

The Value in Knowing the State of Your World

When we were designing the Backstage, one thing that we realized is that it is much more interesting to read about the current state of your document, rather than reading the description of the feature that will provide you that state. 

Instead of telling you that you can "Increase the security of the document by adding encryption" and making you guess whether you want to use this feature (or if it has already been applied), we can just say "Anyone can open, copy, and change any part of this document".  Seeing the current state of the document makes it much easier for you to decide if you want to use one of the available features to change this state.

The Office Menu in Office 2007 shows you a list of features you can use to "Prepare the document for distribution":

In the Office 2010 Backstage view, instead of just giving you a list of features you can use, we tell you the current state of your document, without requiring you to first run the features yourself:

And of course, if the state of the document is anything but the default, we update the information to give you the most up-to-date status of your document, and highlight it to indicate that something special is going on:

Another example where showing you the status of the document is much more effective is the Document Inspector feature.  It can scan through your document and find personal information (such as the author's name) or content that is hidden (such as hidden sheets or comments) - content that you may not want other people to see. 

Unfortunately in the past, you had to actively remember to run this feature in order to find out if this content exists in your document.  In Office 2010, we provide this information without waiting for you to run the feature yourself:

By glancing at this section in the Info tab of the Backstage view, you can quickly tell that your document contains some comments and hidden worksheets that you've forgotten about and may want to remove.

Contextual Information

In addition to the information that every document contains (such as document properties, permission information, presence of hidden information, etc), if your document is ever in a special state, we make sure to tell you.  This contextual information is not interesting to know about at all times - otherwise you'd be bombarded with all the possible states that your document could be in.  So it only appears when your document is in this special state and there is an action that you may want to take as a result.

For example, your workbook may have some disabled macros in it, which are necessary for your file to work correctly, but are blocked to protect your computer from being attacked.  The Info tab will show you this contextual information and allow you to enable the macros:

Another example of contextual information that will be shown is if you are working with a file that was created in a previous version of Office.  In this case, your document may be in Compatibility mode - and some of the rich new features have been disabled.  This state is reflected in the Info tab, and you can convert your file to the latest version if you want to use those features:

And if your document lives on a SharePoint site and you use features like Co-authoring, Workflows, Check Out, or Policy, the Info tab will always show you what is going on with your document.  For example, if you have a workflow task assigned to you, you will be shown this information in the Info tab:

Thanks for reading.  We hope that working with documents is a bit easier now that you have this information at your fingertips!  Let us know what you think!

-Marina

With posts about the Sections slide organization feature and the ability to open Unlimited Windows, the PowerPoint team has started to unveil many of the great new features included in PowerPoint 2010.  As mentioned in their Introduction, many of your presentations will look better simply because you're presenting with the new version of the software.  Most recently, they've been announcing the first-class video support features that are now built directly into the product.

Visit the PowerPoint Team Blog to learn about the new advancements that are included in PowerPoint 2010 and the story behind the development of these features. 

The current reality of collaboration pushes language, cultural and local requirements to new levels. In this new environment, for Office 2010, we are increasing our investments on World-Readiness and Global Experience to enable our customers to be successful. GXP contributes to this strategy by providing a platform that enables the Office organization to deliver an optimal Global User Experience across the Office System. Our team executes this mission in three ways:   

• Develop standard components that are used by the Office applications, servers, and services to provide language and/or culture-appropriate features.
• Enhance and unify the user experience for language and/or culture-dependent components (Language Settings/Workflow, Calendars, Text processing, Font technologies, Machine Translation, etc.).
• Provide internal engineering tools and processes to ensure that Office is World-Ready, i.e. that the features can be used in any culture and can be localized for any locale/language in a simple and cost-effective way without modifying the underlying code.

So how is this accomplished in an organization the size of Office? Well, you need a great team that is well plugged in to the Office organization and that can see Office as one system. You need people that live their jobs as the global customer's advocates and really want to make a difference for all customers throughout the world. This is exactly what the GXP team is about; a team of developers, testers and program managers that came from all over the world to create a product that any information worker or consumer can use regardless of their language, culture or location. We have people from Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Jordan, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Romania, Russia, Spain, Thailand, Ukraine, etc. And of course, since we are all about diversity we also have some people from the United States (8-).

On behalf of the GXP team, I want to thank you for your interest in Office and its Global support. We look forward to your comments and to sharing more about the release in the coming weeks.

To learn more about our Global features in Office 2010, please visit http://blogs.technet.com/office_global_experience

Javier Larrinaga, Group Program Manager, GXP.

On this blog we've already started discussing many of the new features (like the Microsoft Office Backstage) which span across all of the Office 2010 applications.  In addition to many continuing posts about these features, we'll also frequently highlight other product features or team blog posts you might be interested in. 

We're really excited about the new improvements coming in Word 2010. From providing the familiarity of Word in new contexts such as the server, the mobile phone, and the browser, to providing cutting edge co-authoring, document navigation, graphics, and typographical effects, Word 2010 will enable you to create rich documents, alone or collaboratively, easier than ever before.

To learn more about Word 2010 check-out Scott and Jonathan's intro posts on the Word Team Blog.

I'm Jon Gordner, a PM on the User Experience team. As Clay wrote in his post, we created the Backstage View for the opportunity to take Office's OUT features - those that you use to do things to the whole file (rather than the content within it) - and make them a little more WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get.

Though not available for the public to try (yet), there has been quite a bit of recent buzz around the Office Web Apps we will be shipping with Office 2010 (here links to articles from PCWorld and from ZDNet).  

Mike Morton (Group Program Manager of the Web Apps team) just wrote a great post on the Office Web Apps Blog that provides some insights into how we are creating these lightweight, web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. 

If you’re interested in reading more, read his post here.

Next week we’ll discuss more detail about the new Office 2010 Technical Preview features.  Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Hello, my name is Brad and I work on the Office security team; we focus on a couple of key areas: building security features that improve the Office product line and driving the security engineering process across the division as part of the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL).

I would like to start with a high-level introduction of several of the new security features in Office 2010, what our goals are, and how we think about them. Because shipping Office isn’t about how we think about it, but instead how you think about it, feel free to ‘send a smile’ with the Technical Preview and let me know if we hit the mark.

Staying ahead of hackers

To start things off, ‘Why?’ is always a good question. Why did we spend time doing anything in this space, and to what end? Well, as the security landscape has been changing, Office has had the misfortune of becoming one of the next big targets for hackers to attack. They have been going after many of our file-format parsers and how we read Office files. They’re looking for ways to exploit bugs and to get their code running on your machine. We have done a lot of work to find and fix bugs, but we can’t find everything. We have to take a more proactive approach and build Office to be more resilient to attack.

To do that, we have designed what we have been referring to as a new security workflow, a layered defense that Office documents have to go through as part of the File Open process. We strive to make this process as invisible as possible. This means no noticeable delay in open times, as well as no dialogs asking you how you feel about security.

File Block improved

The security workflow we designed has several key features that we believe achieves the goals. First, we have improved our File Block feature that was introduced in Office 2007. We now have a way to configure it in the application and have a finer level of granularity to manage how Word, Excel, and PowerPoint open their file types.

Office File Validation: integral and non-intrusive

Another feature is our new binary file-validation system, which call Office File Validation. Since the vast majority of the exploits have focused on our older file formats, pre-dating our XML versions, we built a system that can validate those files to make sure they conform to the documented format, before they are opened by Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. This is something we did in Publisher 2007, which worked out pretty well. Office File Validation is an integral part of Office that on most days, you would never know exists.

The next question is ‘What do you do with those blocked or invalid files?’. Well, if we just blocked a file and said it was invalid, you would probably be pretty curious why it was invalid, or if maybe we made a mistake. Or, you may be sure you know what it is, and still need to read it. Denying you access to these files doesn’t really meet our goals, so we also built another system we call the Protected View.

Protected View: more security, less annoyance

Protected View is a way for us to show Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files to you, but without all of the worry about those files being dangerous. We build up a read-only view of the document in an isolated sandbox, which has minimal access to the system, and no access to your other files and information. Even if the file is malicious, it can’t get out of the sandbox and do harm to your computer or data.

By tying all of these features together into a layered defense, any file that reaches your machine will get inspected for the file format being blocked, tested for validity, and maybe shown in a read-only protected state. All this happens in real time, with an indistinguishable performance impact on your load time, and you can open these Office files without worry.

The other goal to make these features and workflow successful is that they don’t get in the way and instead have a positive impact on your experience. That means fewer dialog boxes and less information that is not actionable. We need to make security smart enough to get out of the way when its job is done. To do that, we have made files that open in Protected View remember when you chose to trust them, so you don’t have to re-trust them next time. You are not less secure; you’re just less annoyed (hopefully!).

In future posts, my team and I will be digging into these and other features to explain how they work and give some insight into how to get the most out of them for system administrators. Stay tuned, and give feedback if you want to hear more about a specific security feature. We hope you enjoy using Office 2010, as much as we have enjoyed working with you toward its creation.

Thanks,

Brad Albrecht

Senior Security PM
Office Trustworthy Computing

Hi, I'm Clay Satterfield and I'm a Senior Program Manager on the Office User Experience team.  Within the first few hours or so of using the Office 2010 Technical Preview, it’s pretty likely that you’ll eventually need to “Save As” or “Print” or do something else with your file.  When you finally do click on the Office Button, you’ll see something that you probably didn’t expect.  Instead of a menu, or even a Ribbon tab, you’ll see the new Microsoft Office Backstage View.

Using Office 2010, have something you want to tell Office?  Maybe you're having trouble finding something in the UI or have a specific suggestion on how we can improve a feature.  Or, maybe there's something you love and you want to make sure we know about it so that we keep it in the product. The best tool to use to give us feedback on the Office 2010 (Technical Preview) is called Send-a-Smile.

Hello and welcome to Office 2010!  My name is Amanda and I am a Program Manager in Office, on my team we build Feedback tools, including Send-a-Smile.  My job is to ensure the Office user has the opportunity to provide feedback (likes and dislikes) about their Office 2010 experience and then route this information to the right people on the Office teams.  The teams use this information to make decisions regarding feature designs and to help prioritize bug fixes.

Where can I get Send-a-Smile?  Send-a-Smile automatically installs with Office 2010, you’ll see two icons added to the notifications area of the taskbar over by the clock: a Smile to click when you want to give us positive feedback and a Frown to click when there's something you don’t like.  On Win7, you may need to go specifically add them to the list of icons you want to see in the taskbar.

Do we actually read the comments?  Absolutely!  In fact we’ve already taken fixes to the product, which future downloaders of the Office 2010 (Technical Preview) will benefit from.  Let me walk you through the process from sending a comment to someone on the Office team reviewing the comment.

How does one submit a comment?  As previously noted, the Send-a-Smile tool installs along with the Office 2010 (Technical Preview).  After the installation is complete, you will see the Smile and Frown icons in the taskbar.

Clicking on the Smile or Frown will launch the Send-a-Smile tool.

This week, we announced the availability of the Office2010 Technical Preview for limited testing. Over the coming months, we hope to learn a lot from our Technical Preview customers about Office2010 and at the same time, we will use this blog to highlight some of the new capabilities that we have added to Office. In addition to this blog, you can find lots of content on the existing Office team blogs, plus the http://www.office2010themovie.com web site, which hosts a set of 'behind the scenes' videos describing the people and the ideas behind Office2010.

This blog will cover a wide range of topics, but will center on the experience of using Office. We will cover topics that are generally of interest to a broad set of Office users and multiple Office applications. We will rely heavily on the existing well-known Office application team blogs to provide in-depth product discussions for specific Office applications.

First up will be a post about how we use customer feedback to improve the product and some new feedback mechanisms in the Technical Preview. We will follow this with a post on the new Office Backstage UI. Please post comments. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

PJ Hough

On behalf of the Office team

First, thanks to everyone for the support and excitement.  I promise there is a lot more on the way.  With that being said, I did want to acknowledge two things that you may have read about:

1. Groove becomes SharePoint Workspace.  This is true. Please read the Groove SharePoint Workspace team blog here for the scoop. 

2. OneNote and SharePoint Workspace going into the ProPlus SKU.  Also true.  This matters more for our VL customers but we want to make this public today.  Read this and our other OneNote blog for more information on the changes. 

For those that may not be familiar with OneNote or haven’t used it as much at this point, head over to www.iheartonenote.com to see what real people are doing with it today.  This site is run by real OneNote users but has some incredible content.

Thanks again,

Reed

PS

For those that haven’t heard, the official twitter tag is office2010movie.  Also, there's backlog of comments to look through after the traffic today but we will try and answer them all tonight or tomorrow morning.

Today, at our annual TechEd event held in the US we are announcing that attendees will make up the first segment of our limited Technical Preview program that will kick off in July.  We have some additional content we will be releasing going into this milestone so keep checking back (check out www.office2010themovie.com as well).  

So while we aren't ready to start demoing and sharing all of the features quite yet, we have heard the feedback loud and clear that requirements for running our software needs to be available ASAP (you will see if you look here  that our server products have released similar information).  To that end, this post will cover the preliminary system requirements for Office 2010. 

1. Office 2010 will be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. 

2. Office 2010 will run on Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

3. You don't need to replace hardware that is capable of running 2007, it will support Office 2010.  Like Windows 7 has demonstrated, we realize that taking advantage of the hardware you already own is just as important as supporting all the new technology coming out.

Below, we have tried to cover some of the common questions that we are anticipating on this topic.  If we missed something please let us know in the comments.  Anything that we can share at this point, we will. 

Q:  What is technical preview?

A: Technical preview is an engineering milestone leading towards RTM that Office 2010 and related products will reach in July 2009.

Q:  Will customers or partners be given access to the products at the technical preview milestone?

A: Beginning at the technical preview milestone, we will conduct an invitation only technical preview program where participants will able to experience Office Professional Plus 2010 and Visio 2010.   You can sign up to be on the list for entry at office2010themovie.com.

Q: Will I need to upgrade hardware to install Office 2010 and related products?

A:  Office 2010 Suite products are offered in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions so customers will not be required to upgrade 32-bit PC’s and Laptops to 64-bit hardware to run Office 2010 Suite Products.   Certain hardware configurations and operating system versions customers currently have deployed may require an upgrade to run server and client products. 

Check back frequently as we will be sharing more information as we march closer to July.  If there are things you want to know about, topics you want discussed, etc. then please let us hear it.

Reed Shaffner

Office TPM

This blog is being created by the Office team to help our IT professionals and enthusiasts get a better idea of what we are building with Office 2010 and discuss the key issues that matter to you.  We are all incredibly excited to start talking about the new version of Office and hope you will participate here.