Our Support Engineer Eric E. on the Deployment Team, provided a great response to customers dealing with the enterprise deployment of the KB2543241 hotfix. His post describes how to programmatically install the PowerPoint 2003 hotfix related to KB2543241 and KB2464588.
If you have installed the KB2464588 update for Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, which is related to Microsoft Security Bulletin MS11-022, you may be aware of/experiencing the following known issues:
When you open presentations that contain layouts with background images in PowerPoint 2003, an error may occur. When the error occurs, you receive a message that states that some contents (text, images, or objects) have corrupted. You can determine what content has been lost by viewing the layout, but not by viewing the slide content. Items that were removed will display a blank box or a box that contains "cleansed."
The KB2543241 hotfix was created to alleviate these issues.
See his post Office Deployment Support Team Blog: How to programmatically install the PowerPoint 2003 hotfix related to KB2543241 and KB2464588
Ribbon Hero is an Office add-in that offers a fun way to improve your users’ Office skills by using the ribbon. For those of you that are not familiar with the ribbon, the ribbon interface was introduced in Office 2007. The ribbon replaced the menu bar in Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint. It was added to all Office applications in Office 2010. The ribbon is an area across the top of the screen that is divided into tabs, and the commands are organized within each tab. Here is an example of what the ribbon looks like in Word:
Ribbon Hero is an Office add-in that offers a fun way to improve your users’ Office skills by using the ribbon.
For those of you that are not familiar with the ribbon, the ribbon interface was introduced in Office 2007. The ribbon replaced the menu bar in Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint. It was added to all Office applications in Office 2010.
The ribbon is an area across the top of the screen that is divided into tabs, and the commands are organized within each tab. Here is an example of what the ribbon looks like in Word:
The ribbon is fun to explore. But you can help your users transition to the ribbon with the Interactive Guides and Workbooks. For those users that want a little more fun in the day – the cool game called Ribbon Hero is designed to help them learn Office.
The first version of Ribbon Hero was released last year. Ribbon Hero 2 released this month and is available for download from www.ribbonhero.com.
Ribbon Hero requires Windows 7, Vista, or XP, and it only works with Office 2007 or 2010.
Click here to download Ribbon Hero
Enjoy!
My name is Alistair Speirs and I'm a Senior Product Manager in the Office team. My personal philosophy is that there are two powerful prerequisites to help people do their best work - A. a ready supply of espresso coffee and B. a well-managed desktop with a modern Office suite. Organizational productivity suffers when either A or B are lacking (at least in my case). While beverages remain the realm of facilities management, ensuring users have a modern and secure Office suite is a core competency of ours, as IT Professionals. Here are two common questions I hear from IT Pros:
Q: I want to deploy Office 2010 in my organization... where do I start?
A: Seek first to understand your environment!
Make sure you have a good understanding of your environment - hardware, application and file compatibility. Office 2010 was built to work with the hardware you already own, but under the hood changes have made Office 2010 run significantly faster. As one example, check out the recalculation speed from one of our test spreadsheets - a Monte Carlo simulation with over a million rows of data:
And it would not be fair to talk about performance without mentioning the Office application that probably runs longer than your staff spend awake, Outlook. Office 2010 shows dramatic improvements to startup, synchronization and shutdown speeds:
Outlook 2010 RTM
Outlook 2007 SP2
% Improvement
Boot (cold)
7.6 s
10.3 s
26%
Boot (warm)
0.53 s
0.77 s
31%
Synchronize Complete Mailbox: 1GB
12.7 min
18.6 min
32%
Synchronize Complete Mailbox: 2GB
26.8 min
28.3 min
5%
Responsiveness Workflow (number of pauses)
27
41
34%
Shutdown
0.64 s
1.17 s
45%
The Office 2010 system requirements are largely unchanged from Office 2007, so any computer purchased in the last 4 years should run Office 2010 without issue (even Atom powered netbooks and slates). On the software side it is important to get a sense of what other desktop apps rely on Office. Many CRM systems plug into Outlook, analytics tools into Excel and records management systems into Word. Perhaps most challenging is getting an idea of your document inventory. Where are they stored? Who owns them? Do they contain macros? Understanding your document inventory allows you to make better decisions around whether to convert to the new XML file formats, identify which users are the macro-making troublemakers, and choose which settings to configure, such as default saves formats and locations.
The good news is that there are tools to help understand your environment. The Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT) scans client computers for add-ins and applications that interact with Office 97 through 2010. The Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) helps you scan files for conversion issues, create reports and even convert documents to the new Open XML file formats. Here the feedback has been don't try to scan every file in your company. Instead, scan a subset or scan only files modified in the last 12 months. The Office Code Compatibility Inspector (OCCI) scans your VBA macro or VSTO code for known compatibility issues, such as object model changes or 64 bit compatibility issues.
Q: I'm deploying Windows 7 64-bit, so should I deploy Office 2010 64-bit?
A: Use Windows 7 64-bit with Office 2010 32-bit.
Even though the system requirements are in line with Office 2007, Office 2010 takes advantage of fancy new hardware with advanced graphics cards, multi-core processors and alternative form factor devices. Most of these things are automatic improvements, but whether to deploy 64-bit or 32-bit Office is a choice IT Pros need to decide up front. Our strong recommendation is to deploy 32-bit Office. While 64-bit is useful if a spreadsheet instance is using more than 2GB of memory, this is not a common scenario. The downside of 64-bit is that all VBA macros will need to be updated (unless your developers had the foresight to declare pointer safe variables... No, I didn't think so either) and non VSTO add-ins need to be rewritten. This is a lot of work for very little benefit. Office 2010 32-bit benefits from running on a 64-bit operating system though, as the larger maximum memory allow you to run more applications.
So there you have it - you can make your life easier by understanding your Office environment using the tools we provide, deploying Office 2010 32-bit with Windows 7 64-bit and drinking espresso coffee. More detail on these topics (sans coffee) and other Office IT Pro considerations are available on our Office Technet site, www.officeitpro.com or our Windows Phone 7 app. Happy Deploying!
To ensure that your Office 2010 installation works smoothly and efficiently, we recommend that before installing Office 2010, you uninstall any earlier versions of Office that may still reside on your computer. If you find that uninstalling these versions cannot be done effectively from the Control Panel, then use the Fix it tool. Be sure to use the Fix it Tool version that is designed for the particular Office suite (Office 2010 released/beta/trial versions, Office 2007, Office 2003) that you are uninstalling.
To uninstall the 2003 Microsoft Office suite automatically, click the Fix this problem button or link. Click Run in the File Download dialog box, and then follow the steps in the Fix it wizard.
Fix this problem Microsoft Fix it 50416
To uninstall the 2007 Microsoft Office suite automatically, click the Fix this problem button or link. Click Run in the File Download dialog box, and then follow the steps in the Fix it wizard.
Fix this problem Microsoft Fix it 50154
To uninstall the 2010 Microsoft Office suite automatically, click the Fix this problem button or link. Click Run in the File Download dialog box, and then follow the steps in the Fix it wizard.
Fix this problem Microsoft Fix it 50450
For more information, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301.
Hi there, We've heard that there has been some questions on which versions of Microsoft Office Communicator are supported with Outlook 2010. The supported versions are Office Communicator 2007 and later versions (including OC 2007 R2 and Lync 2010). Office Communicator 2005 is not supported with Outlook 2010. This means that there is no integration between Office Communicator 2005 and Outlook 2010. You can run them on the same computer as stand-alone applications but you won’t get any of the integration benefits…like presence awareness on contacts, the ability to start an instant message from Outlook, and so on. If you have Office Communicator 2005 in your environment and are planning to deploy Outlook 2010, then consider migrating to Lync 2010. What is Office Communicator? Office Communicator is the Microsoft Office Communications Server client application for real-time communication. It provides rich presence awareness, software-powered voice capabilities, instant messaging (IM), multi-party audio, video and desktop sharing, and integration with Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2010 (with OCS 2007 and later versions). For more information about OCS 2007, see Microsoft Office Communications Server on TechNet. What is Lync 2010? Lync 2010 is the next generation of Office Communicator. If you haven't already, check out the product info and see it in action: The Next Generational of Unified Communications - Microsoft Lync Server 2010. Hope that helps!
Today, Microsoft announced availability of the Office 365 Public Beta. Office 365 combines the Microsoft Office Professional Plus client suite with cloud versions of the following products and services: Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Lync Online. The Office Professional Plus offering provides the complete Office client suite as a monthly subscription service. The combination of the Office Professional Plus suite plus the Office 365 services provides the best way for users to collaborate on documents; enables them to work online or offline; and provides access to documents, email, and calendars from almost any device.
The Office Professional Plus subscription allows you to purchase monthly licenses for each user in your organization, and each user license allows five concurrent installations. Both 32- and 64-bit versions of Office Professional Plus are available in Office 365. However, we recommend that you install the 32-bit version. You download and manage Office Professional Plus for Office 365 from the Office 365 portal (at https://portal.microsoftonline.com/download/default.aspx). After downloading Office Professional Plus for Office 365, you can make the Office suite available to users in your organization, based on the number of user licenses that you sign up for. For information about deployment considerations for Office 2010 64-bit, see 64-bit editions of Office 2010 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=213871).
Office Professional Plus for Office 365 includes all the same applications that are available in the Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 client suite:
Depending on the plan that you purchase, the subscription license also includes access to Microsoft SharePoint Online (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=214030) Office Web Apps (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=213875) for viewing and editing documents on the web. Office Web Apps are online companions to Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word applications that enable users to access and edit documents, regardless of their location.
To learn about Office Professional Plus for Office 365, see the following resources:
Sign up for the Office 365 Beta (http://office365.microsoft.com/en-US/office365-beta.aspx)
Looking for more information about how to deploy OEAT using SCCM? Rob York, a Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft Premier Field Engineering, UK, has written a blog post that provides step-by-step procedures for creating the settings.xml file to be distributed with OEAT.exe and for creating the package in SCCM.
Deploying Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT) with ConfigMgr
Office 2010 SP1, along with SharePoint 2010 SP1, will be available mid-summer 2011. For the latest details and how you can stay connected with the release updates, see Office 2010 Service Pack 1 is Almost Here.
Office File Validation, a Microsoft Office 2010 security feature, is now available for both Office 2003 and Office 2007. We strongly recommend that Office File Validation be applied to all computers that use Office 2003 and Office 2007. However, Office File Validation, in combination with Protected View, offers an even better security experience. Protected View is a new security feature that is available only in Office 2010.
For more information regarding Office File Validation for Office 2003 and Office 2007 see the following article on Microsoft TechNet: Office File Validation for Office 2003 and Office 2007.
The Office File Validation Add-in (KB2501584) for Office 2003 and Office 2007 is available on the Microsoft Download Center here.
Ross Carter, CISSP (Office 2010 Security Resource Center on TechNet)