Chris Bortlik's Blog : OneNote

Office, SharePoint, Visio and Project 2010 News …

cbortlik — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:44:00 GMT

Today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, major announcements were made regarding Office, SharePoint, Project and Visio 2010.

Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone. Starting today, tens of thousands of people will be invited to test Office and Visio as part of the Technical Preview program. Full details can be found in this press release.

Here are some additional resources that were made available today:

Office 2010 site: Get all of the news and see demos of the next version of Office.
Office 2010 Press Pass: Additional press releases and information on Office 2010.
SharePoint 2010 preview site: See some of what is coming in SharePoint 2010.
Worldwide Partner Conference site: Watch the keynotes and read other announcements.

Want to get Office Enterprise 2007 for $9.95?

cbortlik — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:30:28 GMT

We recently rolled out changes to the Microsoft Home Use Program (HUP) that may enable you to download Office Enterprise 2007 for your home personal use for just $9.95!

Details can be found on the Home Use site.

Not familiar with the Home Use Program? Home Use is just one of the many Software Assurance (SA) benefits that many of our customers enjoy.

In addition to getting upgrade rights to newer versions of Microsoft software, SA benefits also help with training and deploying Microsoft software.

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 Released

cbortlik — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:43:00 GMT

Office 2007 service pack 2 has been released today and is available for download.

Some of the features being incorporated into SP2 are integrated support for saving to PDF, XPS and ODF file formats - all of which previously required separate free downloads. There are also some bug fixes and performance improvements included in this release. Outlook has one of the biggest set of updates. Specific details are provided at the links below:

PressPass Q&A - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Apr09/04-28Office2007SP2QA.mspx
Sustained Engineering blog – Technical details, converter API
Office Interoperability blog - Doug Mahugh – Discusses additional file formats in Office from a standards point of view
Microsoft on the Issues blog – Discusses what file format choice means for customers & partners
Gray Matter - Gray Knowlton – Tells the broader Office developer story

Another reminder that mainstream support for Office 2003 ended earlier this month. 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.

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.

Love OneNote? Prove it!

cbortlik — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:25:08 GMT

Many of my customers and partners comment about how much they love OneNote.

OneNote is a great tool for organizing notes; brainstorming; collaborating; and (most importantly) finding information.

For those of you that simply cannot live without OneNote (such as me!) you’ll be glad to know that we recently launched a new community site for OneNote users to connect. The site is simple to remember: IHeartOneNote

With the focus that many of us have on going green and saving money, OneNote plays a valuable role.

For example, many people now use OneNote for distributing and updating HR policies and training manuals. A great capability of OneNote is that multiple people can collaborate in the same notebook and OneNote can automatically synchronize changes between SharePoint, a network share and multiple computers.

Some people think that OneNote is only for people with tablet PCs. That is a common misconception. While tablet PCs add to the OneNote experience (for example you can write your notes on your tablet just like you would in a paper notebook) the majority of OneNote users do not use tablets.

Still want to take notes on paper, but see the value in having your notes stored electronically in OneNote so you can easily file and search them later? Check out a partner solution from Adapx that allows you to write notes in a notebook and then sync them with OneNote.

Don’t just take my word for it. If you’re not using OneNote yet, download the free 60 day trial version of OneNote and let me know what you think.