Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering

Download our free Office 2010 migration guides

Office Team — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:05:45 GMT

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.

Microsoft Office 2010 File Compatibility

Office Team — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:40:00 GMT

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:

Bulk Macro Compatibility Scanning – incorporates logic from Office Code Compatibility Inspector (OCCI) tool to produce count of potential number of VBA issues due to changes in object model. A new option in the offscan.ini file enables activation of this scan.
Bulk 64-bit compatibility scanning - incorporates logic from OCCI tool to produce count of potential number of 64-bit (declare) VBA issues due use of 64-bit Office. A new option in the offscan.ini file enables activation of this scan.
Pre-defined date filtering for scans – new configuration options are available in the Offscan.ini file to allow exclusion of files based on last accessed or last modified dates. Files which are skipped are logged.
SQL 2008/SQL 2008 R2 support – Support for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 has been enabled, remains compatible with SQL 2005.
Various bug fixes – several existing OMPM and OFC bugs have been included for correction in this release. A partial list includes: old create date files failing on import, OFC conversion does not complete, etc. Of course – you should expect it to work!

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.

Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Tools Availability

Office Team — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:03:00 GMT

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.

Why Office? “To keep projects on track.”

Office Team — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:30:00 GMT

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 Availability

Office Team — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:28:40 GMT

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!

Access 2010 FIFA Tournament Template

Office Team — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:30:25 GMT

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.

Why Office? “Our business runs on Excel.”

Office Team — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:27:56 GMT

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

Understanding Software Assurance

Office Team — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:40:00 GMT

Most large organizations have Software Assurance (SA) as part of their licensing agreement and there are many benefits that are included that go unused every agreement period. We have found that many of the people who would use the benefits don’t know that their organization has them. Those who do know about Software Assurance associate the program with getting the next version of software at no additional cost, however there are other benefits that can save you money from your budget on training, support and services. If you know your organization has an Enterprise Agreement, then you also have Software Assurance. If you are not sure what kind of licensing agreement you have, check with the person who works on Microsoft licenses to see you if you have Software Assurance. Some of the most popular benefits are technical training days, home use licenses, online training for users, and 24x7 support. In this post, I will highlight some of the benefits, talk about eligibility, and let you know who to contact to find more information or to start using the benefits.

What is Software Assurance?

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.

Software Assurance Benefits:

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.

New software versions when they are released within the time of your agreement.
Planning services where you get onsite consulting services to create a deployment plan when you are getting ready to deploy new software. This service is available for desktop products (Office & Windows), SharePoint, Exchange and OCS. You can also use Business Planning services to help you get more efficiency out of your software solution.
Training vouchers for technical, classroom training to help you keep your IT staff up to date.
E-Learning is online training to get your users trained on new software to prepare for a new software implementation, or to help them be more productive on current software.
Home Use Program (HUP) provides a license of Office, at a minimal cost, to employees for their home computers allowing them to become more proficient with the software they use at work, when they are using it at home. Microsoft takes the support calls for the home use licenses so it can also help reduce the support calls going to your IT staff.
24x7 phone and web support to help you keep your IT infrastructure up and running.
TechNet for Software Assurance subscription to provide a community of information for all of your IT issues and questions.
Microsoft Office Multi Language Pack, which enables you to deploy a single image of Office with support for 37 languages.

Click here for a complete list of SA benefits.

Software Assurance and your Volume Licensing agreement:

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	X	X
Home Use Program			X	X	X
Training Vouchers	X	X	X	X	X
TechNet Benefit		X	X	X	X
24x7 Problem Resolution	X	X	X	X	X

* 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.

Review and deliver dynamic presentations with PowerPoint Mobile 2010

Office Team — Tue, 25 May 2010 22:43:00 GMT

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!

Review and Edit presentations

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.

Presentation Companion

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!

Make sure that the Presentation Companion add-in is running in PowerPoint on the laptop
Simply open the same presentation on your phone using PowerPoint Mobile
With a few clicks, securely pair your phone with the laptop using Bluetooth*

(* 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!!

Next Week: TechNet Updates & Disabled Comments

Office Team — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:16:38 GMT

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 24^th, 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.