Chris Bortlik's Blog : Exchange

Office 2010: Register for the Technical Preview Program and Get More Info …

cbortlik — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:48:35 GMT

Earlier this week Microsoft made some important Office 2010 announcements during our annual TechEd conference. One of the announcements was that Microsoft will have an invitation only Technical Preview Program for Office 2010.

This program is scheduled to launch in July 2009 and will offer selected customers the opportunity to experience early, pre-release versions of Office 2010 which will include the following applications: Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010, Access 2010, InfoPath 2010 and Publisher 2010.

As we count down to the start of the Technical Preview Program for Office 2010, more information and resources on Office 2010 are becoming publicly available for our customers and partners. These include:

Office 2010 Technical Preview Registration: Register to be considered for the Technical Preview Program, which is scheduled to begin in July 2009.
Office 2010 IT Blog: The official Office 2010 blog of the Microsoft Office product group. This includes information on the preliminary system requirements for Office 2010.
Office 2010 Forum: A place to discuss the Office 2010 Technical Preview Program and other information and questions around the new version Office
Office 2010 the Movie: A fun trailer and preview of things to come.
Office 2010 Press Release: Some high level details on Office, SharePoint and Exchange 2010.

Office, SharePoint and Exchange 2007 – Better Together

cbortlik — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:48:00 GMT

One of the topics that I frequently present on at conferences is the Office system and why it is “better” to use the Office 2007 client with the 2007 versions of the SharePoint and Exchange server products.

The presentation that I use for most of these sessions is a summary of many of the key items discussed in the Office/SharePoint “better together” whitepaper. It also touches upon some of the areas discussed in this Exchange 2007 feature comparison for the Exchange server with different Outlook and Outlook Web Access clients.

Here are some of the highlights:

Enterprise Content Management: Content Management process integrated into the Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 clients. This helps increase the adoption and usage of your SharePoint site and integrates critical functionality such as workflow and document properties, including metadata that is used to drive SharePoint views and improve search results.
PowerPoint Slide Libraries: Publish slides for central storage, reuse and change notification. Slide libraries add a great amount of business value by making sure that key corporate messages, content and branding are being reused and kept in sync.
Excel Services: Publish spreadsheets for server hosting, web viewing and component access control. The Excel Services whitepaper and my recent Excel for Business Intelligence (BI) blog post have additional details.
Outlook / SharePoint Integration: Bi-directional sync of calendars, tasks, contacts, and discussion boards. Offline access to document libraries. The Outlook Exchange website has a great article that walks thru all of the details.
Outlook / Exchange 2007 Utilization: Unified communications, Managed folders, Scheduling enhancements and more. This article reviews these and other new Outlook 2007 capabilities in greater detail.
Electronic Forms: Publish e-forms for e-mail and browser based form completion. My InfoPath blog post provides more information on this and other ways to leverage InfoPath.
OneNote / SharePoint Integration: You can have OneNote automatically synchronize shared notebooks with SharePoint, which can then be searched and viewed by people with the appropriate permissions. More information on OneNote can be found in this blog post.
Groove / SharePoint Integration: Direct synchronization between Groove workspaces and SharePoint document libraries. This whitepaper demonstrates how you can use Groove to securely collaborate and extend SharePoint to customers and partners that are outside of your organization and those with the need for off-line functionality or access to content in low network bandwidth scenarios.
Access / SharePoint Integration: Host Access data on SharePoint sites, use either browser or Access client to work with data. This enables you to move Access data to SharePoint lists and also helps with querying and joining multiple SharePoint lists and other data sources. More details can be found here.

Office 2007 SP2 to Release on April 28, 2009

cbortlik — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:23:06 GMT

The Office Sustained Engineering team has just released the official date for shipping Office 2007 SP2. This will be released to the web for download on Tuesday, April 28, 2009.

More details on what is being addressed in SP2 can be found here on their blog post.

Also, just a reminder that mainstream support for Office 2003 ended earlier this week. More details on the Office 2003 support lifecycle, and reasons to consider upgrading to Office 2007, can be found on my earlier blog post here.

Exchange 2010 Public Beta Released

cbortlik — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:45:39 GMT

Today Microsoft announced Exchange 2010, and released the Public Beta for download.

The Exchange 2010 home page describes the new features, and links to business value information, video demonstrations, etc.:

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010

The Exchange 2010 page on TechNet has system requirements, product documentation, and links to the software download:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/2010/default.aspx