Over on the The Microsoft Office Blog there is a post that links to some migration guides for Microsoft Office 2010:
“Whether you're coming from an older version of Office and just want to find the most frequently used commands in a program, or you're entirely new to Office and want a quick overview of how the ribbon works and how to get to the most important things, each guide provides helpful information that we've based on direct feedback from you — our customers.”
Read more and download the guides from here.
Have you been looking for a tool to help you assess compatibility of your existing Office files and macros as you prepare to deploy Microsoft Office 2010? We have recently released the tool to help you identify potential concerns before you migrate. The Office Migration Planning Manager 2010, referred to as OMPM, has been released to help you assess and migrate documents for Office 2010.
Download OMPM 2010 from the Microsoft download center, and yes it’s free.
The OMPM tool has been created to assist IT Professionals looking after Office deployments. This tool can help you discover and assess compatibility of existing Office documents for migration from the binary document formats (Office 97-2003: .doc, .xls, etc.) to Open XML formats (Office 2007 and beyond: .docx, .xlsx, etc.). Additionally OMPM 2010 adds features to assess macro compatibility with Office 2010 and 64 bit Office compatibility. The toolkit also contains the Office File Converter (OFC) which enables bulk document conversions from binary to Open XML formats.
The OMPM tool was first released with Microsoft Office 2007, so some of you might be aware of its prior features. The following highlights the improvements the team focused on delivering with OMPM 2010:
The core new feature was incorporating the macro VBA code scanning function you have seen featured in the OCCI tool in a bulk scanning approach. A new view has been added to the OMPM 2010 reporting database providing a quick view of the files containing macros which have potential macro compatibility issues resulting either from changes in the object model or compatibility with 64-bit Office 2010. You have ability to configure which of the macro scan types you want the OMPM scanner to execute when you configure the scanner. The following figure shows the new Macro Summary view available in the OMPM 2010 Office 2010 Compatibility Report.
The last couple of weeks have brought the release of tools (4 tools in 2 weeks!) to help IT Professionals expedite Office 2010 deployment. This posts highlights those four newly released tools and provides links to get started learning about using them. Respectively, these tools help you assess and plan for an Office 2010 deployment, assess potential Office application compatibility issues, and customize your Office 2010 deployment.
1. Microsoft Assessment & Planning Toolkit 5.0 (MAP)
MAP 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. You can explore all of the capabilities of MAP on the MAP website.
We previously posted about the beta availability of the MAP 5.0 toolkit here. Thanks to community feedback we were able to improve the tool to provide an improved assessment proposal and report. You can have a quick view of the sample Office 2010 readiness reports here: Office 2010 Summary Proposal Sample, Office 2010 Assessment Report Sample
2. Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT)
OEAT scans client computers for add-ins and applications that interact with Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, the 2007 Office system, and Office 2010. The tool is designed to be used by IT Pros who are assessing application compatibility as part of their Office 2010 migration planning. The tool now incorporates functionality to compare the discovered add-ins and applications against the list of add-ins that are pledged to be compatible by ISVs who submit them to the Microsoft Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Application Compatibility Visibility Program. OEAT compares the vendor name, product name, and version name and reports the results as partial or exact matches in the summary report spreadsheet. For more information, see the Microsoft Office Environment Assessment Tool user's guide in the technical library.
3. Office 2010 Code Compatibility Inspector (OCCI)
OCCI is an add-in developers can use in Microsoft Excel 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, Microsoft Word 2010, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to troubleshoot and resolve potential issues with Microsoft Visual Basic for Application (VBA) Macros and add-ins. The tool helps guide a developer in remediating issues in VBA code to expedite migration to Office 2010. The tool scans code in a project for known compatibility issues, and then notifies you if it finds items in the code from the object model that have changed in some way or have been removed. For more information, see the Microsoft Office Code Compatibility Inspector user's guide in the technical library.
4. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Update 1
MDT 2010 offers a great way to package Office 2010 and expose the Office Customization Tool and Office config.xml settings for easy manipulation. IT Pros can use this tool to build a complete desktop deployment package including Office 2010. You can see a complete example of how to utilize MDT 2010 to deploy Office 2010 in this blog post on the Springboard Series Blog. Get MDT 2010 Update 1 now and get started using MDT 2010 to build a complete deployment package. See the full description of the MDT 2010 update 1 here.
If you are looking for a way to see the tools in action we have a proof of concept kit to help you get started. The PoC Jumpstart is designed to help demystify the process of desktop deployment that delivers Office 2010, Windows 7 Enterprise, Internet Explorer 8, & Application Virtualization (App-V) in a controlled environment. The tools above, and others, are featured in the Microsoft Proof of Concept Jumpstart kit to help you quickly experience a complete desktop deployment. Explore the PoC Jumpstart kit here on the Springboard Series site.
Project execution is important no matter who you work for or what department you are in. You have to know who is accountable for what, where information can be found, and keep everyone up to date when things change.
Jennifer Kensok writing again—I’m a product manager for Office (see my last post about a customer using Excel and PowerPivot). Project execution is something I learned a lot about when I first started working here at Microsoft – mostly through rough stints on projects that didn’t execute so well. Since then, I’ve learned a few things about what works, and one of those things is storing team documents on SharePoint, and taking them offline in a SharePoint Workspace. My team today has a OneNote 2010 shared notebook in a library on our SharePoint team site, where we keep meeting notes and bounce ideas off one another or get feedback on plans. With our SharePoint Workspace to take our documents offline, I can work on documents and spreadsheets through SharePoint Workspace 2010 even if I’m offline or away from the network. The next time I’m online, SharePoint automatically syncs the changes I made. So if I’m travelling, say to a glamorous launch of Office 2010, I can make changes to team docs on the plane, sign on to the network at the hotel, and head to dinner as SharePoint Workspace uploads my changes to SharePoint.
People sometimes wonder about SharePoint Workspace’s syncing feature causing versioning issues if multiple people work on a doc at the same time. We’re very cognizant of these types of issues and routinely monitor blog comments to help out (so let us know if you’re having problems). We also hear from customers about how SharePoint Workspace is working for them. Here’s one: hhpberlin, a fire safety consultancy based in Berlin, Germany who my team wrote a case study on for the Office 2010 launch. The company provides services during all phases of construction projects for anything from office buildings to stadiums and airports. As a professional services firm, hhpberlin’s people and their knowledge are its primary assets. With a growing business and a lot of large projects, its employees are constantly looking for ways to work better together and share expertise. Its CIO, Stefan Truthän, told us, “The organization has changed in recent years from a business model that used to be one local engineer on one local project producing one final output. Now we work in global teams, requiring us to leverage expertise across the organization to deliver projects.”
During inspections, hhpberlin inspectors must be physically at a construction site, where they frequently have low-bandwidth Internet connections—or nothing at all. As they perform inspections, they have to enter fire-safety data into documents such as Microsoft InfoPath 2010 inspection forms, SharePoint lists, or other Word documents. They also take pictures to add to the documentation, which they store in OneNote.
When they complete an inspection, they can store all of the information they collected in a SharePoint Workspace. When they connect to the network again, all their data is securely and automatically synched to a Project Center they created in SharePoint. This even works if they have a lower-bandwidth connection, because SharePoint Workspace 2010 only transmits update packets instead of whole files or documents. Stefan explains, “Our Project Center will help us streamline the process of organizing and uploading project data. With SharePoint Workspace 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, hhpberlin will significantly reduce the amount of time inspectors spend on post-inspection activities back in the office.” This time savings means inspectors can increase their on-site inspection days by 10 to 25 percent, which helps increase revenue.
Like my team, hhpberlin also uses OneNote 2010 to keep project content stored on SharePoint organized. Team members have seen a real productivity boost with the improved search capabilities and new author indicators because they can find what they need quickly and see who has added or changed content. Andreas Dahlitz, a Senior Engineer and Project Manager at hhpberlin, explained, “OneNote, SharePoint Server, and SharePoint Workspace help us share all meeting notes and updated documentation with the entire team. This improves our productivity and allows us to take on more projects.” Using the integration between Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, hhpberlin employees can actually expand their business – meaning more fire safe buildings for the rest of us!
Read more about Office 2010 customers, and look for more “Why Office” posts from me soon.
Office 2010 is publically available today! Everyone on the Office engineering team is very excited about this milestone. We’ve had more of you download and try our Beta than ever before (more than 9,000,000 downloads), and business users have been starting to use Office 2010 since our Business Launch.
Now it’s your turn to use Office 2010. You can download a trial from from www.office.com, or buy it right from the site. Also, as Nick Simons mentions on the Office Web Apps blog, the Office Web Apps are also available for you try on Windows Live by going to http://office.live.com.
Finally, continuing our theme of giving you opportunities to learn how other Office customers are taking advantage of Office 2010, we’ve also posted an interview Takeshi Numoto (Corporate VP for Microsoft Office) did with Roxanne Rucowicz, about how and why her small company relies on Office 2010. Check that out here.
Any questions about how to get Office 2010? Let us know in the comments!
As the excitement about the 2010 world cup in South Africa intensified, Barath Balasubramanian (an Access Engineer) set out to build an application to gather predictions on the results of the tournament from his team mates. Since they all have access to a SharePoint server, he decided to build the application using Access 2010 and Access Services on SharePoint 2010. In less than two hours he was able to create a cool looking application that can not only track the 2010 FIFA world cup predictions, but can also be customized to fit any tournament format and run in IE, Firefox and Safari so it can be shared with anyone that has access to the SharePoint site.
Surf on over to his post on the Access blog to read more about how he created his solution.
I am Jennifer Kensok and I am a product manager in the Office Enterprise business. I work with a lot of customers, and sometimes I wonder if customers could use Excel alone to run a business. From what I have heard from customers, Excel 2010 with PowerPivot is the best bet yet for any frugal companies out there hoping to get the most out of their data while minimizing their costs. Excel 2010 does most of the work for you – from slicing a PivotTable to help filter analysis to spotting new trends with Sparklines, and so much more. And with Excel 2010 with PowerPivot, people can process millions of rows of data and combine data from multiple sources like SQL Server 2008 data sets. Customers are saying that they don’t need IT to do it – they can pull and analyze data themselves.
As part of my work in marketing, I spend a fair amount of time with customers working on case studies of how they use Office 2010, so I get to see Office 2010 impacting a lot of different businesses. In this and future blog posts I wanted to give everyone a sense of the various ways customers are taking advantage of Office. The Mediterranean Shipping Company is a great example of how one customer is already accomplishing a lot with Excel 2010 and PowerPivot.
Mediterranean Shipping is the second largest shipper in the world with 270 ports worldwide on six continents. Mediterranean Shipping’s business is simple in theory: pack lots of cargo onto as few ships as possible, and send them to their destinations quickly and safely. But getting into the details of scheduling 400 vessels and 1.5 million cargo units to get them to the right place at the right time means things get complicated. Mediterranean Shipping uses Microsoft Excel to track all of this, generating hundreds of thousands of documents and spreadsheets. The Chief Technology Officer, Fabio Catassi, has said, “We joke that our business runs on Excel.”
With previous versions of Excel, however, employees at Mediterranean Shipping were frustrated when software performance took a hit from large data sets, and when it took IT too long to pull a report for analysts and decision makers.
Mediterranean Shipping deployed Excel 2010 with PowerPivot as part of the Office TAP, and the new product has already solved their problems with data size limits and performance. Fabio also says “PowerPivot in Excel 2010 helped us combine internal and external data sources in a way that is very consumable for users, in a matter of days. In the previous environment, this would have taken weeks,” says Fabio. “But most importantly for us, projects can be accomplished with very little involvement from the IT department. Excel 2010 puts more power and capability in the hands of the business user, while still enabling us to control access to our valuable stores of years and years of data.”
Read about more Office 2010 customers, and look for more “Why Office?” posts from me in the future! In the meantime if you have any comments, questions, or specific information (pros, cons, etc…) you would like about the customer solutions we showcase, let us know in the comments. Thanks!
Sparklines and a Slicer in Excel 2010
Regardless of where you are in your software lifecycle, Software Assurance provides benefits to help you upgrade to new software, get more productivity out of existing software, and support your current environment. When you are ready to upgrade to a new version of software, SA provides new version rights at no additional cost, deployment planning services and end-user readiness benefits such as online training and home use licenses. To keep your IT department up to date and to help your end-users be more productive on existing software, SA provides classroom, technical training and online training for end-users. And to help you maintain your environment, SA also includes a 24x7 support benefit.
There are over a dozen SA benefits and the amount of benefits your organization has depends on the licensing agreement. The list below highlights the most popular benefits associated with Office.
Click here for a complete list of SA benefits.
Software Assurance is part of a volume licensing agreement. Volume licensing of software makes it easier and more affordable to run software on multiple computers within an organization. There are many types of licensing agreements and with some of them you can also purchase Software Assurance.
Learn more about licensing with the Microsoft Volume Licensing Guide
The amount of SA benefits your organization has depends on the type of licensing agreement. To give you an idea of the benefits you might have, the table below shows eligibility by Volume Licensing agreement for Office:
Open License
Select License / Select Plus
Open Value
Open Value Company-wide / Subscription
Select License SAM*/Select Plus SAM, Enterprise Agreement/Subscription
Planning Services
X
Home Use Program
Training Vouchers
TechNet Benefit
24x7 Problem Resolution
* SAM = Software Assurance Membership, which is a organization-wide commitment to license software
Click here for more even more detail on benefits eligibility by license type.
What now?
In order to find out what benefits your organization has and to start using them, you will need to contact your SA benefits manager. Your organization’s SA benefits manager is likely in the IT department and will have access to the online Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) where the exact benefits your organization has can be looked up. If you know who manages your Microsoft licenses, then that person can likely look up your SA benefits manager. The benefits manager activates the benefits in order to make them available for you to use.
Hopefully this gives you an introduction to Software Assurance benefits and the resources you need to learn more about what they are and how to use them.
A few weeks ago we talked about Mobility in Office 2010 where we introduced you to Microsoft® Office Mobile 2010 for Windows® phones, and briefly described the Office applications that are designed to keep you productive on the move. In this post, we take a detailed look at PowerPoint Mobile which now features the ability to review and edit slides, and even acts as a companion to assist you as you deliver that big presentation!
Imagine you’re a sales rep on your way to meet a potential client who you hope to wow with the amazing presentation that your team has helped put together. As you travel to the client’s office in a cab, you pull out your Windows phone and check your email to review the latest draft of the presentation that your colleague has sent.
As always, PowerPoint Mobile provides a rich, high-fidelity view of the presentation. SmartArt Graphics, Images, Animations and Transitions are rendered in pixel perfect detail.
The brand new Outline view enables you navigate the presentation efficiently, and jump to a specific slide whenever you need to.
You browse through the presenter notes that have the talking points for each slide. As you read, you get a few more ideas which you feel you should talk about. No problem! PowerPoint Mobile now enables you to edit presenter notes, so you will always be prepared to deliver your best.
Next, you feel that the presentation needs some restructuring for it to make a better impact. Guess what? PowerPoint Mobile now lets you reorder the slides in your presentation, and even hide specific slides so they do not appear in the slideshow.
Finally, as you review the presentation one last time, you catch an error that has inadvertently crept in. No sweat! With PowerPoint Mobile, editing the slide is a breeze.
You thank your lucky stars (and PowerPoint Mobile) and send the edited presentation to your team to update them of the changes that you made.
When you arrive at the client office, you find that your colleague, who has arrived earlier, has been working on getting you set up for the presentation. The presentation that you had sent is up and running in PowerPoint 2010 on a laptop, which is already connected to a projection system.
That leaves just one thing for you to do. You use PowerPoint Mobile to turn your phone into a meeting aid in 3 simple steps. That’s right!
(* note that this needs Microsoft Bluetooth stack on the phone)
Presto! Your phone has been transformed into a meeting aid. Use it to control the presentation that is running on the laptop. As a bonus, you can view the presenter notes for each slide on your phone, even as the slideshow is projected for your audience from the laptop. This gives you the freedom to connect better with your audience, and provide that extra spark which helps you clinch the deal!
Happy presenting!!
Hello blog readers! Next week the TechNet blog servers will be upgraded to support new features such as invisible captcha (you won’t need to enter numbers before commenting), a new excerpt view for easier browsing of blog posts, and easier sharing of posts on your favorite social sites like Facebook, Windows Live, or Twitter. As part of the upgrade process we will be disabling comments from Sunday, May 16 at 8:30pm PST to Monday, May 24th, at 12pm PST. We apologize for the inconvenience but are excited to introduce new functionality to the blog. Our blog will remain online during the upgrade process and existing comments will be preserved.
We’re excited to announce that Office 2010 is available to business customers starting today! In addition to our virtual launch events, you can find more information below from a conversation that Takeshi Numoto had with Antoine Leblond, the engineering leader behind Office 2010. In it, he shares some of his insights into Office 2010 from an engineering perspective.
T: We’ve been talking about Office 2010 for over a year. Why are businesses going to tune into our “launch” on May 12?
A: Candidly, we all know that businesses have more productivity options now more than any other time in history. However, despite the hype, more than 90 million businesses rely on the Office applications to get work done. According to the 2010 CIO survey, 63% of respondents predict that IT department efforts will focus on improving end-user productivity, and 58% will focus on lowering operating costs. Office 2010 was built to help IT folks achieve these ends. The “launch” day, in my mind, is really a way to demonstrate that we’re delivering a solution that truly meets the needs of today’s businesses and into the future.
T: So it’s a day to showcase that we’ve listened to customers and built a product around their needs, that’s great. What do businesses really get with the Office 2010?
A: The proper answer would be to say that businesses get a reliable, secure and familiar suite that will help them innovate and grow. However, I’ll leave that marketing speak to you. :) I’ve spoken with numerous customers and they consistently say, ‘I need to save money, but not at the expense of worker productivity.’ We’ve been listening to customers and enhancing the tools they use every day to get work done for more than 20 years. We know that people today are working differently than a few years ago and expect their software to work the way they do. Think about the increased scenarios around collaboration, social networks, mobility, or use of multimedia in documents, just to name a few. So what businesses are getting are productivity tools that allow them to adapt to these various market trends including things like the move to the cloud on their own terms and with a consistent user experience they have trusted for decades.
T: How do you feel we’re addressing real business pain points with the new iteration of Office?
A: At the heart of Office 2010 is the idea that people need a productivity solution that allows them to work – in whatever capacity – from wherever they are. So when I hear you guys in marketing position Office 2010 as the “best experience across the PC, phone and browser,” I smile because that was exactly the underpinning assumption we used to build the product. With features like configurable Ribbon UI across apps, conversation view and “ignore” feature in Outlook, and improved interoperability for document formats, we put our customers in control of their productivity experience. So I feel comfortable saying that Office 2010 addresses the increasingly diverse workforce, gives businesses a means to improve productivity while controlling costs, and helps companies large and small better manage information overload.
T: In closing, tell me something I didn’t know.
A: Did you know that every month for 7 straight months one million people have downloaded Office 2010 beta? This, as you’ve said in the past, is the best software beta in our history, and showcases the demand for the enhanced value of Office 2010.
We hope you’ll tune in today to the virtual event to hear first-hand from some of our customers why they are investing in Office 2010 and the new 2010 series of products.
Hello, my name is Didier and I am a Security Program Manager in the Microsoft Security Engineering Center. We focus on helping teams like Office go beyond the minimum requirements of the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). For Office 2010, I worked closely with members of the Office TWC team. The Microsoft SDL is a security assurance process that is focused on software development. As a company-wide initiative and a mandatory policy since 2004, the SDL has played a critical role in embedding security and privacy in software and culture at Microsoft. Combining a holistic and practical approach, the SDL aims to reduce the number and severity of vulnerabilities in software. The SDL introduces security and privacy throughout all phases of the development process.
I would like to highlight some achievements that were completed during Office 2010 development that will help keep our customers secure.
There are more than 50 requirements in the SDL that apply to the phases in the development process: training, requirements, design, implementation, verification, release, and response (post-release). The requirements and recommendations of SDL are not static; they are changed on a regular basis in the light of emerging threats and improvements to supporting infrastructure, tools, and processes. The following image shows the phases in the SDL process:
Some of the tools and techniques that are used to support the SDL process have been released externally. It is possible to download these tools and others from the Microsoft SDL Tools Repository (http://www.microsoft.com/security/sdl/getstarted/tools.aspx).
In addition to passing the Final Security Review mandated by the SDL process, the Office 2010 team also met additional emerging SDL requirements such as integrating the improved integer overflow libraries, compiling with the enhanced GS flag, and executing a number of fuzzing iterations far beyond the SDL requirement. These were the most impactful of the additional SDL requirements met by Office 2010.
The Office TWC team developed customized training on integer overflow mitigations, file fuzzing and Web security (mostly Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF)). These trainings were mandatory across the entire Office Division. In addition, more specific training was designed and delivered to bring FAST, a newly acquired product, up to speed with the various tools and activities required by the SDL.
Office TWC and MSEC worked on redefining the security bug bar and the security bug triage process to include newer attacks. Part of the process was to leverage expertise in both the Office and TWC divisions to review security bugs.
During the design phase, several work items were identified to strengthen the trustworthiness of Office documents. These work items brought improvement to the Trust Center by adding Trusted Documents, File Block improvement that allows users to choose which files they want to open or save on their network, Office File Validation and Protected View. These improvements were done so customers can trust Office documents without fear of being attacked. In addition, another goal was to provide this additional security while avoiding unnecessary prompts that would lead to prompt fatigue, decreasing the security value of these features. You can read more on those features at http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2009/07/21/office-2010-application-security.aspx.
Office TWC did a large scale threat model exercise across the division, creating and reviewing over 500 threat models. Through the threat model activity, the team identified and fixed over 1000 potential security issues.
Another area of improvement was the Cryptography support in Office 2010. These improvements included support for XAdES digital signature, making the Office client applications cryptographically agile by allowing them to use any cryptographic algorithm made available by the operating system (Windows Vista and above only), and a new feature for Enterprises enabling domain password policy for password encryption.
Office TWC implemented an automated solution to improve the reporting of Office Automated Code Review (OACR) results allowing MSEC and Office TWC to identify Office product teams with code quality issues prior to the verification phase or before any penetration testing was performed. This allowed teams to direct their effort at areas where it was more valuable.
Based on the analysis done on incoming reported vulnerabilities in previous versions of Office, an improved version of safeInt was developed and used in Office 2010
An improved version of GS (enhanced GS which is available in Visual Studio 2010) was introduced during the Office 2010 development cycle and was piloted with 3 large components of Office 2010, no major regression issues were found and this feature will be integrated in the next version of Office. Office 2010 enables Data Execution Prevention (DEP) for the first time and if you are using Office 2010 on Windows 7, it will use SEHOP, preventing the exploitation of structured exception handlers (http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/02/02/preventing-the-exploitation-of-seh-overwrites-with-sehop.aspx).
Additional mitigations have been put in place in SharePoint 2010 to improve multi-tenant hosting and Cross Site Scripting mitigations. The most important security improvements were sandboxing SharePoint solutions using a mix of Code Access Security and a custom developed sandbox. An additional mitigation for Cross Site Scripting was to use browser headers to force potentially unsafe content to download and we raised permissions required to author scripts.
Distributed fuzzing was run from the beginning of the development cycle with constant refinement on the fuzzers used. This persistent effort has been one of the greatest investments made by Office to improve the security of the parsers in Office. The use of Distributed Fuzzing Framework is now expanded across the company and will be one of the key elements of the next SDL version. The number of fuzzing iterations for Office 2010 was over 800 million iterations across over 400 file formats resulting in over 1800 bugs fixed. In addition to file format fuzzing, the Distributed Fuzzing Framework was used to fuzz all ActiveX controls shipping with Office 2010 extensively.
An automated infrastructure was setup during Office 2010 to run most of the verification tools required by the SDL (like BinScope) as part of the build process. This allowed the Office Team to run those tools more frequently allowing for timely identification and faster remediation of issues.
Both internal and external penetration testing was conducted during the Office 2010 development cycle. This testing targeted the high risk features identified during the design phase and covered several products both in the client and server SKUs
Hopefully all of these efforts combined will make Office 2010 much more robust and will bring back some peace of mind for customers when the receive documents from untrusted sources.
In addition to this post, Microsoft published a whitepaper couple of months ago on how SDL helped improved the 2007 Microsoft Office System. You can find this whitepaper at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9714223
Thanks,
Didier Vandenbroeck
Lead Security Program Manager
Microsoft Security Engineering Center
In Office 2007 we introduced SmartArt diagrams, a tool designed to simplify the process of creating quality graphical layouts. The goal of every SmartArt diagram is to enhance the aesthetic appeal of your document and to use a graphic to convey a message. SmartArt diagrams adjust the size of all of your shapes and text for you as you add or remove content. You may also resize your entire graphic and all of the contents will be resized accordingly.
In the Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word 2010 desktop applications we have added a series of improvements for SmartArt diagrams. First we looked at the editing experience and did work to simplify the process of creating a diagram that looks just the way you want it to. The second thing that we did was to increase your options when choosing a diagram by adding additional diagrams to our current types and by investing in a few new types as well.
One of the first things that we wanted to do was make it easier to see and organize your content. To this end, we added the ability to reorder your content and you can now insert or change your pictures via the text pane. I’ve called out the text pane in the screenshot below. Please note that in Office 2010 the SmartArt Text Pane will not have a bright red outline around it.
The images in the text pane represent images that appear in your SmartArt diagram. You may insert an image by clicking on the image icon either in the Text Pane or in your diagram directly. In the next screenshot you will notice that I have inserted four images with text for each image.
Another great improvement worth pointing out here is that my images did not get squished or stretched when I inserted them into my diagram. In Office 2010 we apply a crop to your image in order to preserve the aspect ratio of the image. After inserting your image, you may select the image, then go to the Picture Tools tab and enter crop mode to adjust your image. For our example, let’s adjust the image of the lighthouse so that we can actually see the lighthouse. I’ll select the image, then go to the Picture Tools tab and click Crop.
Here you can see that while in crop mode I can see the extra portions of the image that are not displayed in my diagram. I’ve clicked and dragged on the image itself to move it around so I can see more of the lighthouse. I’ve also enlarged the image for a zoomed in effect on the lighthouse.
The change is subtle but now we’re not staring at the rocky side of a cliff.
These pictures are nice but I would rather use pictures that are all connected in some way. Let’s create a picture layout with an image for each of the four seasons. I will click on each of the images in turn, and go to the Picture Tools tab. From the Picture Tools tab I will click Change Picture and select a new image for each spot. On a side note, each of the four images that you see below was pulled from the ClipArt gallery. Yep, those are ClipArt images.
Now that I have changed my images and the text associated with each I want the Fall image to be the large one. First, I’ll select the Fall image and go to the SmartArt Tools: Design tab.
With the Fall image selected, I will click Move Up until the Fall image is the largest on the screen. You will also notice in the above screenshot that in my Text Pane the Fall image is highlighted orange to show that it is selected.
Here is a close up of the left side of the SmartArt Tools: Design tab
Here is my diagram after clicking Move Up 3 times.
My text has moved with my image and you will notice that none of my images have become squished or stretched. Every image has an appropriate crop by default that I can customize if I wish.
It is important to know that Move Up and Move Down refer to the layout in the Text Pane. So for a SmartArt diagram that lays out its text and shape from bottom to top, Move Up will move your text up in the content pane but down on your slide. Here’s an example:
Here is a diagram that illustrates what I was attempting to explain. Notice that in my diagram the penguins are on the bottom while the chrysanthemum is on top. But in the text pane, the penguins are on top and the chrysanthemum is on bottom. With the chrysanthemum selected, I click Move Up and my diagram is reordered as such:
The flower moved down a slot in my diagram, but up one in my text pane.
For Office 2010 we have added almost 50 new diagrams bringing our total number of SmartArt diagrams to over 130. We had a couple of goals in mind when making this investment. First, we wanted to round out our offering by addressing additional scenarios that we had not previously addressed. In the Insert SmartArt diagram dialog you will notice the addition of the Picture category.
Office 2010 will ship with over 30 diagrams built specifically to incorporate images into your documents. Some of these Picture Layouts were built to fit into a wide variety of situations while others were built with slightly more specific scenarios in mind. In a later post, I’ll talk about some of the reasoning behind our choices.
Our second goal in adding more SmartArt diagrams is to give additional choices for our most popular scenarios. One example of this is the Organization Chart, our most popular diagram. In Office 2007 we only shipped one Org Chart. An org chart is a hierarchy diagram that supports assistants. For Office 2010 we have added an additional 3 org charts including one that lays out horizontally.
We hope that by adding to our offering of diagrams that it will be easier for you to find a graphic that does what you need it to. So whether that means telling a story with imagery or creating yet another org chart for the boss, there are lots of diagrams to choose from. And if you need to customize your graphic there’s an option for that too.
While we have done our best to provide you with a wide variety of diagrams sometimes it can be tough to find exactly what you need. In Excel and PowerPoint 2010 we have added Convert to Shapes for SmartArt diagrams.
Here I have included a screenshot from PowerPoint 2010. The Convert to Shapes feature turns your SmartArt diagram into a grouped set of shapes that you can now customize. This allows you to move and size your shapes with all the freedom of our current drawing tools. This also makes it easier to apply custom animations to your graphics. It is also worth noting that Convert to Shapes is included with Office 2007 SP2. You can access this by right clicking on the bounding box of your SmartArt diagram and clicking Ungroup.
In the screenshot above you’ll also notice the Convert to Text option. This exists only in PowerPoint 2010 and, as the name implies, will convert your graphic from a SmartArt diagram to a bulleted list of text with just a single click.
With these changes and additions we hope you’ll find SmartArt diagrams easier to use and incorporate into your documents. If you have any questions or want to share your experience using the features mentioned in the post, please let us know. Thanks!
Our friends over at blogs.office.com just started a series of “Did You Know?” posts that are aimed at starting conversations with you about trends that affect us all. Cloud computing, mobile/remote work styles, and social networking - and how Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 help users embrace them in new and powerful ways. The first introductory post from Takeshi Numoto (Corporate VP, Office) is available now.
Enjoy.
With the launch of Office 2010, we are producing another wave of great help and training content. The new Office 2010 website (office2010.microsoft.com) delivers articles and demos that will quickly get you up to speed on the new features and functionality in Office.
There are two key ways to get access to this great help and training content from right within Office 2010. When working on your document (or spreadsheet, etc.), you can click the icon in the upper right hand corner of the application and go straight to in-app help browser. In addition, the Backstage view in Office 2010 has a section called help that gives you direct links to Microsoft Office Help and Getting Started information. The Getting Started link launches a web site full of excellent tools for users new to Office 2010. Some of the tools include command maps and interactive guides that show you where commands from Office 2003 are in Office 2010. Additional articles highlight the some of the new features in Office 2010 and provide tips on basic tasks.
For those of you who are still using Office 2007 and are looking for direct access to help and training, we also created an add-in that surfaces great resources and tools for you by adding a Help Tab to the Ribbon. The Microsoft Office 2007 Help Tab, which can be added to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, is tailored to users who are transitioning from Office 2003 to Office 2007.
The key features of this add-in are direct help database search from the Ribbon, Command finders to help you find commands from Office 2003 in the new Office 2007 UI and Online Tips which provides links to key articles and training that users found useful as they began to take advantage of Office’s broad variety of features. To learn more and download this add-in click here.
We hope these new resources for Office 2010 and Office 2007 help you get your work done faster and more easily. Let us know what you’d like to see in the future by using the comments below.
On the heels of our recent announcement that Office 2010 has released to manufacturing, many of the individual Office team blogs have posted similar announcements and deep summaries about their specific aspects of Office. Over the next few weeks we’ll link to many of these posts to give you an overview of all the great features Office 2010 has to offer. Or, if you can’t wait, you can use the links to the right to go directly to the team blogs.
First up is the PowerPoint team blog. They recently posted discussing the Top 10 benefits of PowerPoint 2010.
If you’re interested in more detail and screenshots, click through and see the detailed, illustrated list.
Enjoy!
I am very excited to share some great news with you. Earlier today we reached the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) milestone for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010!
RTM is the final engineering milestone of a product release and our engineering team has poured their heart and soul into reaching this milestone. It is also an appropriate time to re-emphasize our sincere gratitude to the more than 5,000 organizations and partners who have worked with us on rapid deployment and testing of the products. Since the start of our public beta in November 2009, we’ve had more than 7.5 million people download the beta version – that’s more than 3 times the number of 2007 beta downloads! The feedback that we’ve received from all these programs has shaped the set of products we’re excited about, and that I’m sure will delight our customers.
Our Volume License customers with active Software Assurance (SA) on these products will be one of the first to receive the 2010 set of products. They will be able to download the products in English via the Volume Licensing Service Center starting April 27. Customers without SA will be able to purchase the new products through Volume Licensing from Microsoft partners starting May 1.
Earlier this year we announced that we will officially launch Office 2010 to our business customers on May 12 with Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division, delivering a keynote as part of our virtual launch. Our virtual launch will allow people from around the globe to participate in our launch by going to http://www.the2010event.com. The virtual launch site will showcase product demos, customer and partner testimonials, and interviews with product managers and executives, and we hope this will give you another great way to explore, learn, and get excited about the 2010 releases.
Office 2010 will first become available in retail stores in June in the US, and customers can pre-order these retail versions of Office 2010 at http://store.microsoft.com/OfficePreorder today to receive Office when it becomes available.
On behalf of the Office team, I want to thank all of the customers and partners who have helped us reach this milestone. We look forward to continue learning from you and all the great things you will do with our products!
-- Takeshi Numoto
Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office
As we gear up to launch the next version of Office, I want to share a bit of what's in store. Each new version of Microsoft Office is developed through a fundamental approach that includes extensive research, planning, and most importantly, lots of listening to our customers to discover what they really need from their software to be more productive. The goal of this approach (what some might call stoic ☺) is to deliver a product that reflects how essential our products are in the professional and personal lives of over half a billion customers around the world, and one that is designed to help these many customers be more productive in real ways.
Our customers are helping us do this with their feedback. We reached more than 6 million downloads of Office 2010 in the 17 weeks since the start of beta last November. This has been our most successful beta in the history of Office. Over 80% of beta users have encouraged others to download the beta, and 9 out of 10 beta users feel that the Office 2010 beta is an improvement over their current productivity suite
Of course, we are aware of others taking a different approach. Some believe that businesses and consumers will settle for software and services that deliver rudimentary capabilities, or what some call 'just the basics'; however, our customers tell us that they want to accomplish something great (not just mediocre). They really care about the quality of their work. They want to collaborate and pull from the collective wisdom of their teams to deliver their work the way it is meant to be seen (without compromising fidelity). With Microsoft Office 2010, we want to help them do just that, and I believe the new capabilities deliver on what our customers are asking for.
Here are some additional elements of the upcoming release that I am excited about:
We're making it easier than ever for people to try and buy Office 2010 when they purchase a new PC. We're partnering with the top PC makers around the world to pre-load the Office 2010 "image" on new PCs, so you can just buy a Product Key Card to activate the version of Office you want to use. Thanks to these partnerships, I expect to see 80% of consumer and small business PCs shipping with an image of Office 2010 pre-loaded. The pre-loaded Office 2010 image (that can be activated to become any of the retail versions of Office 2010) also comes with Office Starter, which is reduced functionality versions of Word and Excel that include advertising. Office Starter will help people get acquainted with Office 2010, and we are excited that it will help us reach new customers. Once customers are ready to step up to a full version, upgrading is just a few clicks away.
Most people are on the go today and need to access their information from wherever they are. We created Office Web Apps with this in mind. People will be able to view, access, share and work with their Office documents from virtually anywhere using Office Web Apps. The web-based apps will be available to consumers via Windows Live and business customers can integrate them as part of their IT infrastructure. Nearly 500M users will have access to the Office Web Apps when Office 2010 is available. We are really excited about how this makes Office more useful in more places within people's lives, but also about how this helps us reach customers we may have not reached before. Customers who may have never experienced Office will be able to see why over 500 million people worldwide already use Office. I see this as a great way to expand our customer base, further connect with students, small businesses and consumers across the globe.
With Office 2010, we will help people harness the phenomena of social networking and help customers manage their lives by bringing their professional, social and personal networks together through Outlook. Staying connected can help consumers become more productive. Recently we announced the Outlook Social Connectors for Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. These partnerships will deliver capabilities that empower people to integrate their social networks into Outlook 2010, making it simple to update contacts, change status and bring their various networks together in a familiar and consolidated user experience. It is one of my favorite new capabilities in Office!
These are just a few examples of the ways we plan to make Office 2010 impactful and accessible for our customers. The cloud represents an expansion of opportunity for us, and opens up huge new opportunities for us to provide our solutions to more people. We are evolving our business to seize these opportunities, and are really excited about reaching more customers to help them in deeper and broader ways. You should check it out for yourself at www.office.com/beta.
Corporate Vice President, Office
Hello, my name is Kate Kelly; I am a Program Manager in the Office Global Experience Platform (GXP). In Office 2010, GXP focused on features designed for customers working in multiple languages, such as updating Language Preferences and adding translation tools to Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and OneNote.
In Office 2010, one of our new features is an on-the-fly translation feature called Mini Translator . The Mini Translator allows you to translate single words or many paragraphs simply by hovering over the text that you want to translate. Mini Translator also includes the ability to Speak that text using Microsoft’s Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine.
We have also enabled Speak for the Quick Access Toolbar and the Customize Ribbon Options. Customers who rely on TTS can add the Speak button to either of these and have quick access to Speak at any time (via the mouse or a keyboard shortcut).
One of the key pieces of feedback we received from customers was that you wanted more languages for Speak. We teamed up with the Microsoft Speech Technologies team to make this possible. With the RTM version of Office 2010, expected sometime in June, you will be able to download and use the Speech Platform and additional TTS engines from the Microsoft Download Center.
Speak will recognize the language of the text you select and checks if you have that Text-to-Speech language, either from a built-in Windows TTS engine, 3rd party engine, or a TTS engine from the Download Center.
For example, I have the English TTS engine installed, but not the Chinese TTS engine. When I hover over the Chinese text, the Speak button is not available; however when I hover over the English text the Speak button is enabled.
In addition to the improved user experience for international users, we believe that the Speak feature is a great investment that reinforces Office’s commitment to accessibility as well. You can learn more about other accessibility investments we made in Office 2010 in Larry’s great post.
And you can learn more about how to use Speak in the “Using the Speak feature with Multilingual TTS” article on Office.com.
Note about duplicate TTS languages: if you have a 3rd party TTS engine already installed on your computer, Speak will use that TTS engine rather than the Microsoft TTS engines you can install from the Download Center. For example, if I have a German TTS engine from a 3rd party product and I also install the German Microsoft TTS engine from the Download Center, the 3rd party TTS engine will always be used. If I uninstall the 3rd party TTS engine, Speak will start using the TTS engine from the Download Center. This way, by downloading new TTS engines from the Download Center you will always be able to ensure maximum readability, while not sacrificing interoperability with built-in or 3rd party engines.
We hope you’re as excited about this new feature as we are – use the comments to let us know what you think and how you might use this feature for your work.
Kate Kelly, Program Manager, Microsoft Office
Last year we released Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 Beta, a suite of productivity applications for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones, on the Windows Marketplace for Mobile. First and foremost, we want to thank everyone who has tried Office Mobile 2010 Beta and has given us valuable feedback.
The Beta expired on April 5, 2010. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. While the expiration date was mentioned in the product terms of use, we realize that you may have questions and we decided to answer them in today’s blog post.
If you installed Office Mobile 2010 Beta on your Windows Mobile 6.5 device, then this does impact you. As of April 5th, you are unable to launch the Office Mobile applications on your phone.
No, uninstalling Office Mobile 2010 Beta will not delete or alter any of the documents you have on your phone or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
Office Mobile 2010 will be available for download through Windows Marketplace for Mobile at the same time as the Office 2010 suite in June 2010.
Do you have any more questions? Feel free to post a comment below or e-mail us.
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.
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
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.
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.