I have been working for Microsoft now for about 13 years and even before that my career was highly focused on Microsoft products and services. My first job was as a trainer for a Microsoft certified training partner. One of the courses I taught during that time was "Developing in Microsoft Access". Little did I know at the time, while I was happily training power users, that I was likely being quietly cursed by the folks running the IT environment for those users.
The trouble with Access has always been part of the core reasoning for it's success... It is an amazingly powerful tool that is really easy to build solutions in. The problem with that is that in the hands of end users, they can create very compelling data repositories that no one in IT knows about. This results in an island of business critical data that isn't being leveraged to it's fullest potential and can become a management nightmare for IT when users create lots and lots these little islands.
Well IT admins can rejoice because Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 mean to address that tug of war between empowering end users and ensuring administrative governance of enterprise data. With the introduction of Web Databases in Access 2010 together with Access Services in SharePoint 2010, you can give users the agility to address create adhoc data solutions and publish them to a centralized repository that is managed by IT.
Instead of users creating their data solutions in an isolated MDB file that sits on a network share or in their personal files, they create a Web Database using all the data capabilities of Access (tables, queries, forms, reports and so on) and then they publish the solution to SharePoint. The result is a web based version of the Access solution that can be shared with others while providing IT with the means to control and maintain the solution in a centralized way.
The Following WhitePaper is a really good primer on this new level of integration between Access and SharePoint and should server to enable IT Admins to breathe a little easier while still empowering end users to create adhoc solutions to address their business needs.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=54e6aa02-c500-46ba-a930-bfd5c9f43edd&displaylang=en
Normally when I blog about a solution to a problem, it is because a customer has called me a let me know they are having an issue with a Microsoft product or service. Today I received a very frustrated call from my significant other letting me know she wanted to hurl the lovely HP netbook I gave her into traffic. As you can imagine, my need to fix the problem was enhanced by the fact that I gave her this little machine so she would more productive on the go because she could easily tote around such a purse friendly machine and wanting to launch it into incoming vehicles led me to believe the “productivity” she was supposed to be experiencing was a touch less than optimal.
My other half is a journalist that works for a local radio station and also does some freelance work including blogging from her remote office (Starbucks). You would think that a netbook running Windows 7 and the latest version of Microsoft Office would be the perfect mobile tool to help her keep up with her blogging. As it turns out… a laptop that simply will not connect to a public WiFi hotspot makes it pretty hard to access your blog (she runs ShopHalifax which is a cool little fashion and shopping blog for folks interested in the goings-on in Halifax Nova Scotia) and an afternoon of getting caught up quickly turns into an afternoon of plotting the many satisfying ways one could traumatize that poor little PC.
The call started off with “How come the wireless network at Starbucks hates my laptop?”. I had heard this complaint before but wrote it off to finicky wireless access points that need to be rebooted from time to time because the machine works fine when is at home where I have enough WiFi signal to transfer files from 3 blocks away. Combine that with the fact that I have yet to discover a wireless router that doesn’t start becoming problematic over time requiring the odd reboot and you have a recipe for a very unhappy blogger. The comment that got me thinking was when she did manage to get connected, web pages took an exceedingly long time to load. That’s interesting… if other people are connected and not complaining about the speed of the network, then simple troubleshooting would say one of these things is not like the other and is most likely the root of the problem.
A quick jaunt to the Microsoft Support Knowledge Base revealed a fun little article (KB Article 928152) that pretty much outlines the exact problem she was having along with the likely cause. Power Management is a wonderful thing, it helps ensure we get the most time out of our battery when on the road and away from a power source. Accomplishing the goal of longer battery life is not without its little sacrifices though. You give up a little screen brightness, some speed and (unknown to a typical end user) some wireless signal. For the most part, that is not such a big deal because many WiFi routers support 802.11 Power Saver Mode where the PC basically puts the wireless card to sleep until it is requesting some data and the router caches data meant for that PC until such time as the network card is brought to life and requests the aforementioned data. If the router doesn’t support 802.11 Power Saver Mode, it continues to fire data at the PC’s wireless card even when it’s asleep and depending on what the connection state of the PC is, that can manifest itself in connectivity problems, network drops and poor performance.
With Windows Vista and Windows 7, the Power Management capabilities of the operating system allow you some fairly granular control over the devices in the system based on the existing power state (battery vs. plugged in). The operating system also provides Power Plans that allow you to preset the way you want the PC to perform in certain situations. By default in Windows 7 there are three Power Plans provided including High Performance, Balanced (default) and Power Saver (you can edit existing plans or create new ones to suit your needs… you can even set these by Group Policy in large corporate environments). It just so happens that in Power Saver and Balanced, the default behavior is to turn on 802.11 Power Saver Mode on the wireless card whereas the High Performance Plan actually turns that setting off. Soooo… if you are sitting in a coffee shop without your power adapter and the laptop defaults to Balanced or your set it to Power Saver to ensure you get lots of time to update blogs and consume pricey coffee… you could run into difficulties on some wireless networks that are using a “cost effective” wireless router that doesn’t support 802.11 Power Saver Mode. The router will be blasting data to your PC and your wireless card will be happily snoozing away.
The fix for this issue is outlined in the KB Article I mentioned above and breaks down like this (for Windows 7… Vista instructions can be found in the KB Article) :
This should resolve the connectivity issues in Public Hotspots (power related ones anyway) as it basically assumes that you are never connected to a router that support 802.11 Power Saver Mode. One caveat is that it does have a 2-9% impact on battery life depending on the manufacturer and the state of the battery in your laptop. Small price to pay though if the most important thing you need to do is get online. Long battery life won’t make inability to connect to a wireless network any less frustrating.
In closing… I should apologize to my better half for the assumption that the problem had nothing to do with her PC. Sorry honey…
Microsoft Office OneNote is one of the most invaluable tools in my productivity toolbox. Outside of Outlook, it is the app I use most often on my PC to collect thoughts, research topics, store reference information and take notes during meetings.
One of the challenges I have though is that I have multiple PC’s that I carry depending on the goal of the meeting I will be attending.
The issue this introduces is keeping my Notes synchronized across those various PC’s since I use OneNote so religiously. Previous to OneNote 2010, I have tried various file synchronization tools to address this issue such as Groove, Windows Live Mesh and Windows Live Sync.
All of these tools provided a way to ensure Notes taken on one device would appear on another device and each provided various benefits. OneNote 2010 improves the story by providing a very elegant solution that is a great showcase of leveraging Software + Services to provide an enhanced productivity experience by integrating with Windows Live SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps (described below).
One of the great new enhancements to Microsoft Office 2010 is the introduction of the Office Web Apps. These are lightweight extensions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote delivered via the browser. The Web Apps allow you to accurately render an Office document on the Web and even provides lightweight editing capabilities so you can make changes to a document even when you don’t have access to the rich client applications.
In the case of OneNote, not only can you render a OneNote Notebook on the Web and make edits to it, you can also synchronize the Notebook offline into the OneNote rich client. Coupled that with the Co-Authoring capabilities that were introduced in Office 2010 and you have a very rich canvas that can be shared in the client application or on the web by multiple users to view/edit simultaneously.
To get started, open OneNote 2010 and open the file menu. Under “New” you will see the option the store the notebook on either the web, the network or your computer. If you choose to store the notebook on the web, you will get the option to sign into Windows Live SkyDrive (25GB of free online storage – everyone should have this) and choose the folder you want to store your shared notebook in.
Once OneNote is done creating the notebook, it will be available via the Web on SkyDrive and will be synchronized offline into the OneNote client.
Now that you have the Notebook stored online and cached locally, you can visit SkyDrive to witness the very cool Co-Authoring capabilities of Office 2010. If you drill down on the two images below, you will see that I was able to make a change to the notebook in the Web App and that it automatically synchronized into OneNote 2010. This makes it possible to share your Notebooks with your colleagues even if they don’t use OneNote and they can add their thoughts and ideas to yours.
You can also store an existing notebook on SkyDrive by by going to the File Menu and choosing Info where you will see a listing of all of your existing notebooks. You can then choose to either share a Notebook on the web or invite other users to a workbook you have already shared.
Now that you have a OneNote notebook stored on the web, you can make it available on any other PC you want to have your notebooks available on. Simply go to SkyDrive, open the folder containing the Notebook you want to make available offline. You will see a listing of the files that are available including your notebook. When you hover over the name you can click the option to “Edit in Browser”. When the OneNote Web App pops up on the screen, click the button on the very top right of the ribbon that says “Open in OneNote” and voila, you are now synchronizing your online notebook to another PC. Any changes you make online or in the client on any of your PC’s will automagically be sync’d to the others.
As you can see, together with the Office Web Apps, Microsoft Office OneNote 2010 embraces the cloud to give you the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser (the topic of Office Mobile to be covered in a future post ).
In Microsoft® Office 2010, the enhanced FluentUI (previously known as the Ribbon) is available across all the applications, including OneNote® 2010, SharePoint® Workspace 2010 (formerly known as Microsoft Office Groove), Publisher 2010, InfoPath 2010 and even the new Office Web Apps.
In Office 2010 we have now made it possible to customize the Ribbon allowing you get the commands you use most in one personalized tab. Set it up for each application and all the features you need will be right at your fingertips (or mouse cursor as the case may be).
Step by Step:
1. Click the Office Button to enter the Backstage view. There, select Options from the lowest tab on the left.
2. In the Options dialog box that appears, select Customize Ribbon and then click New Tab.
3. In the Choose command from list, select your commands from the default list of Popular Commands or use the down arrow to select from amongst all commands. Pick out the commands you use most to add to your new tab, and click Add.
4. Position your tab anywhere you like on the Ribbon—it can be the first tab you see, or the last.
5. Click on the Rename button and in the Display name box, assign a name to the tab and click ok.
6. Click OK to update all your changes and check out the new efficient set of commands you’ve assembled in one convenient location.
No doubt you have heard of the so-called “GodMode” trick found on CNET as follows:
“By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard drive partition.”
God Mode??? That is certainly an interesting name for it, but you could have called it anything. The name is defined renaming a Windows folder to “name.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” so you could have called it “NewFolder” or, as noted on BrandonLive,… “ILikePuppies”.
Wow, you have discovered the “Headline Maker” trick in Windows… imagine the mayhem that can now ensue.
Please be assured that there are no security implications with this so called “trick”. It’s simply a documented feature of the Windows shell whereby file system folders can be easily made into namespace junctions or Control Panel items. The item in question is actually the All Tasks folder which simply provides a comprehensive list of possible Windows settings.
Beginning in Windows Vista, each Control Panel item was given a canonical name for use in programmatically launching that item to make it easier for developers to access core functionality in Windows. When you create a folder and give it the canonical name, the icon is transformed into the Control Panel item for the named task.
These canonical names are well documented on MSDN for Windows Vista and Windows 7 so feel free to have fun creating control panels all over your file system. There is no real magic here, but rather, a way for Developers to access the settings in Windows in an easy, centralized way.
For the rest of us… it’s just kind of cool to have an icon that gives you searchable access to every possible setting and have people ask about that nefarious “God Mode” icon on your desktop! :)
Outlook Conversation View: Make it Work for You
The new Conversation View in Outlook 2010 is one of my favorite new capabilities; but how can you get the most out of it? Conversation View is designed to connect relevant information on a topic, allowing you to track email threads without diving into your inbox or other folders to find that elusive first message.
Use Conversation View to cut down on the volume of emails you view in your inbox.
Instead of seeing 5 emails stacked on top of one another, and more piling in from different senders on the same topic, Conversation view groups all of those emails together under one heading.
Click to read each email, or simply read through the entire chain from the most recent email using the Reading Pane.
Still not feeling it? To turn off Conversation View:
1. Go up to the Ribbon and choose “View”
2. Click on a different icon to change the view
Outlook 2010 defaults to Conversation view for every folder you create, but the click path to change the setting is the same in each folder.
View by Conversation
View by Date
Another really great capability of conversation view is the ability to streamline and focus the content in your inbox. You can leverage the new Ignore and Clean Up capabilities to reduce the amount of clutter in your inbox.
Ignore a Conversation
Clean up Conversation
If you have a Treo Pro Windows Phone, you may experience an issue where the phone does not ring when you receive an incoming call.
Apparently this is a known issue with the Palm Treo Pro (850) and after some research, I found a patch on Palm’s web site that seems to have resolved the problem. It appears that a section of the Registry can get corrupted resulting in your phone becoming overly shy and refusing to make a noise.
If you are experiencing the issue, a quick trip here will provide you with an explanation of the issue and how to resolve it.
The folks over in the Office Communications Server Team certainly don’t sit around resting on their laurels very long.
Not only have they managed to get OCS 2007 R2 out the door and get to work on the Wave 14 release, but they have recently released an update to Communicator Mobile. The update adds a number of very cool features that benefit both users of Windows Mobile 6.1 and the upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5.
My favorite feature is the integration with OCS Audio Conferencing that makes it really easy to jump into a conference call without having to fumble around for dial in numbers and Conference ID’s. Now that I am voice enabled on OCS, scheduling Conference Calls from my PC is as easy as booking an appointment in Outlook. Joining the call from my PC was really easy as well because I could simply click the “Join using Communicator” link and I am dropped right into the call.
Up until now however, joining that same call from my mobile phone meant looking up 800 numbers and meeting ID’s… not an easy feat when you are driving in between meetings.
With the update client, I pull out my Windows Phone, navigate to the calendar item, open the Menu and choose “Join Conference”. A screen screen pops up letting me know I am joining the conference, my phone rings, is automatically answered and I am dropped right into the call. All I have to know is that I have a call to attend and OCS/Communicator takes care of the rest.
To get your hands on the new release and the other cool new capabilities, you can either go to www.getcomo.com or visit the Microsoft Downloads site. For more information on this release and other updates from the Office Communicator team, you can visit the Office Communicator Team Blog.
I thought I would take a moment to address the licensing changes that were recently announced for SharePoint Designer 2007.
As of April 1, 2009 SharePoint Designer became a free download for SharePoint customers. The reasoning behind this change is outlined in an Open Letter to Customers that you can view here.
Microsoft realizes that customers who have Software Assurance on SharePoint Designer will question the value of their investment and to that end, those customer gain upgrade rights to Microsoft Expression Web for the period of their SA coverage.
Expression Web is Microsoft’s tool for empowering Web Designers to deliver modern, dynamic and interactive web sites. In future versions, it will be deliver that same value for SharePoint Sites.
For more in depth information on these changes you should take a look at the following resources:
My personal feeling is that this is a very positive direction that has the potential to bring together the great capabilities delivered by SharePoint and the entire Expression suite of tools.
First of all, I want to take a moment to personally thank everyone who attended the Spring ‘09 installment of the Microsoft Atlantic Architect Forum. We are excited about the potential of this event and hope that you found the session to be worthy of your valuable time.
Through your continued support and feedback, it is our hope to create a forum for you to meet and network with your local colleagues and share your experiences while creating opportunity for collaboration.
Below you will find a link to the Windows Live SkyDrive Folder that contains all of the presentations from the various presenters that took part in the day.
Again, on behalf of Microsoft and myself, thank you for taking the time out to attend the session and please send any feedback or suggestions for future sessions to myself or George.
Updated: As a number of folks have requested it, I have placed the SharePoint Buzz Kit and accompanying video mentioned during the Governance Session in the SkyDrive Folder. You can download them by visiting the SkyDrive folder above or by clicking the direct links below.
As I have said before in other posts, I love the work the guys/gals in Office Labs are doing. They envision future Information Worker scenarios and prototype experiences that enhance the way we interact with information.
One of my previous posts related to the Search Command add in for Office 2007 and how it made the FluentUI more approachable for those who found it challenging to move from the Office 2003 toolbar/menu approach.
This time, I want to talk a bit about a fantastic add in for Office PowerPoint known as PPTPlex (PowerPoint Plex). Traditional presentations are delivered in a very linear approach where you advance from one slide to the next and each builds towards the message you are trying to leave your audience with.
This is great when you are delivering one to many sessions but what if the meeting is more interactive? What if the content is really just supporting material for the interactive discussion you are having? What if you are presenting in a one to many situation but want to have the flexibility of being able to change up the order of your delivery based on your read of the audience and what you think will be the most impactful way to deliver your message? In PowerPoint, you can do some stuff like hiding slides, using the Slide Navigation menu while in the presentation but it still comes off as a very linear approach.
Enter PPTPlex which provides you with a rich presentation canvas that you can navigate any way you want. You can create sections of content that appear on the screen as galleries of slides. You can then bounce into any section or individual slide and bounce right back out so you can focus on the next important point or supporting material.
Plex adds a tab to the Ribbon in PowerPoint that gives you the ability to insert sections into your presentation that will group your slides on a single overview slide when you are in presenter mode. You can even customize the overview slide to brand your presentation and provide visual impact to your message.
To the right you see the overview slide I did for a customer presentation on OCS and how it is broken down into galleries of slides that I can bounce back and forth to while presenting.
You can move in and out with your left and right mouse buttons by gallery or individual slide and can even zoom right in on any section of a slide for a better look. Great way to handle eye chart slides… though the best way to handle those is to delete them from your deck altogether.
The only downside that comes up is that you cannot have slide animations on the slides themselves, though you do have some control over the transitions between slides. The reason for this is due to what happens behind the scenes when you start a presentation with Plex. It actually outputs and XML Paper Specification (XPS) doc that you are panning through when you deliver your presentation. That means you need to download the XPS/PDF add in for Office to use Plex but the install points you in the right direction, so no worries.
All in all PPTPlex provides a unique way to deliver a PowerPoint presentation that, it used properly, can enhance and add plexibility (nice huh???) to your next meeting.
Download PPTPlex here.
So here we are in the final home of Patrickr Live. My blog started off in Windows Live Spaces, moved to my personal URL hosted on SharePoint and now joins the ranks on TechNet as an official Microsoft employee blog.
I am just getting things moved over so it will be a little while longer before things are back in full swing. My primary goal in this blog is to share my experiences in helping customers empower their Information Workers by taking advantage of the rich capabilities delivered by Microsoft Office System.