Chris Bortlik's Blog : Solutions

How Office 2007 Helps Protect Your Information

cbortlik — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:59:58 GMT

One of the primary business concerns that I hear from my customers is: “How do we keep our information and documents safe?”

Since so much of what we all do is collaborating and sharing information with others via Microsoft Office, today’s post summarizes some of the top ways that the Office 2007 system can help keep your business critical information safe and secure.

Below are my top 10. As always, your feedback and comments are encouraged and appreciated.

Information Rights Management (IRM) enables you to protect Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents so that you can restrict who can view, edit, copy and print documents and for how long. You can also protect e-mail messages in Outlook to prevent people from viewing, forwarding, printing, copying and replying to all on messages. These capabilities are especially useful in making sure that sensitive information does not leave your company.
Document inspection in Word, Excel and PowerPoint helps ensure that sensitive information is easily removed from documents. Examples are comments and revision history (e.g. if you were tracking changes); speaker notes; watermarks; document properties; and hidden data.
Digital signature capabilities integrated in Office 2007 enable you to electronically sign documents and confirm the identity of the person that signed the document. Many customers are using this capability to secure their documents and also eliminate paper based approval and signature processes.
Office 2007 integrates with SharePoint so people can publish documents securely to a SharePoint site which can be setup with proper access controls, versioning, work-flow, audit and archival policies.
Excel Services allows you to publish an Excel workbook to SharePoint while securing sensitive information, macros, data connections, charts and formulas. One of the benefits of this is that anyone with a browser, and the proper access rights, can view only the components of the spreadsheet that you allow.
Groove facilitates secure collaboration and sharing of documents and information internally and externally. Groove solves a common business problem where teams need to collaborate inside and outside of the firewall. Rather than having people email documents, or publish them to external public websites, Groove allows for secure and encrypted sharing of information. IT can also setup policies and audit the usage of Groove to manage the process.
The Open XML file format, which is the default for many programs in Office 2007, offers a number of security benefits and it also prevents most documents from being corrupted. Also, in the rare case that an Office 2007 document does become corrupted – you no longer lose the whole document. You can recover the document and remove the part of the document (e.g. image, video) that became corrupted.
Need to save an Office document to PDF or XPS but don’t want to spend extra money licensing 3rd party software? Great news. Office 2007 provides free integrated support for saving Office documents directly to PDF or XPS. Starting with Service Pack 2 (SP2) of Office 2007 these capabilities are directly integrated with Office.
Office 2007 is significantly more secure than prior versions of Office. In fact, the majority of Office security exploits and vulnerabilities do not affect Office 2007. By default, items that could possibly cause harm to your computer are disabled in Office 2007. The Trust Center in Office 2007 enables you to have much greater flexibility and control over add-ins; trusted publishers and locations; ActiveX Controls; and macros.
The Office Security Guide provides IT with more in depth details on security in Office 2007. If you are using Group Policy, solution accelerator templates exist to assist with applying security best practices.

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.

Excel 2007 – Your Business Intelligence Client Solution

cbortlik — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:50:00 GMT

Many of my customers are evaluating business intelligence (BI) solutions. There are often many business drivers behind this trend including the need for analysis, reporting, planning and forecasting.

Prior to the release of Excel 2007 many customers would purchase a variety of different BI tools each with their own user interface, licensing costs and set of functionality. With Excel 2007 we have sought to bring BI to the masses while eliminating the need for a number of different tools and lowering the overall total cost of ownership for BI solutions.

Here is a summary of my top 10 favorite aspects of Excel 2007 for BI solutions:

Excel has become the rich BI client front end for PerformancePoint, SharePoint, SQL Server and any external data source or system. This allows users to easily aggregate, slice and dice many disparate data sources and get a consolidated view of their business.
By supporting 1 million rows and 16,000 columns of data in the same workbook, Excel 2007 allows you to work with more data. This addresses a critical business need expressed by many Excel users and overcomes previous product limitations of 64,000 rows which often resulted in the creation of multiple workbooks and extensive macros and programming to link the data together.
Excel Services enables you to easily publish an Excel workbook to SharePoint and then allow other users to access that data with just a web browser. This is of tremendous value when you want to make sure that everyone is looking at the latest version of data (aka a “single version of the truth”) and cases where you want to suppress hidden formulas, data and secure other sensitive data.
Conditional formatting adds powerful data visualization capabilities to Excel. You can easily add data bars, color scales, key performance indicators (KPI), and other icon sets to spot trends.
Pivot tables can now be created and used by anyone to organize and report on data. You do not need to be the “Excel guru” to be able to work with and change pivot tables. The redesigned pivot table capability and wizards streamlines the process.
The graphics engine for Office has been significantly improved with Office 2007. Charting and SmartArt produce professional looking graphics in very little time. These graphics can be shared and reused across Excel, PowerPoint and Word and eliminate the need for many 3rd party services and tools.
Tables in Excel automatically add common tools for working with related sets of data. For example, the filter and sort features have been improved and are automatically enabled now for Excel tables. You can apply multiple selections and even filter and sort by color (e.g. rows highlighted in green) and conditional format (e.g. by KPI).
Advanced built in formulas automate the creation of even the most complex calculations. Using Excel tables you can now even refer to cells based on user defined column and row names (e.g. Northeast, Southwest, etc.) rather than having to figure out the cryptic cell/column numbering (e.g. A1).
Data tools for identifying and removing duplicates, consolidating data and performing what-if analysis improves how you work with large sets of data and obtain meaningful insight from it.
Custom Office Business Application by partners and customers for building solutions on top of Excel. These could range from advanced Visual Studio .NET applications to basic macros. Since Excel uses the Open XML industry standard file format, Excel documents can be programmatically built and accessed from various tools.

Want to learn more? Check out the Microsoft Business Intelligence site and review customer case studies.

InfoPath – Going Green, Saving Money and Accelerating Development

cbortlik — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:52:00 GMT

Prior to joining Microsoft last year, I worked for more than 14 years as a Microsoft customer primarily in IT architect, development and technical management roles for large companies. Most of my recent work was related to building custom applications and forms on top of ASP.NET

One area that I did not explore much before joining Microsoft was InfoPath – especially what is currently available in InfoPath 2007.

With so many of my customers looking for ways to save money, go green and accelerate the development and deployment of new solutions, I figured it was a good time to write about my top 10 list of favorite InfoPath 2007 capabilities and solutions.

Many InfoPath developers are not developers at all! InfoPath is a great tool for business analysts and “power users” to create forms with little or no code. InfoPath also enables the creation of reusable templates and the segregation of development tasks between traditional developers and InfoPath designers. Check out this article for more details.
InfoPath can easily import existing Word or Excel documents into rich forms, which then enables the forms to be used as data input tools rather than just things that people print and then fill out.
You can quickly use optical character recognition (OCR) software to scan existing paper based documents into InfoPath to accelerate the move to electronic forms.
InfoPath forms can be built to target a rich InfoPath client and/or a web based InfoPath form running in SharePoint so users only need a browser to complete the form. The great news is that the design process is the same and InfoPath has a compatibility and design checker to automate the deployment and allow you to use the same form on a rich client or browser. There are a great set of InfoPath FAQ and roadmap articles to help you determine the right solution.
InfoPath forms can be used standalone or easily integrated into Outlook, Access or Groove. For example, a person can complete an InfoPath form in the body of an Outlook email message and never know that they are using InfoPath.
Using a tablet PC, InfoPath forms support inking technology to allow a user to write directly on an InfoPath form – another way of eliminating the need for paper forms.
InfoPath forms can be designed to support offline usage which is ideal for using InfoPath forms in scenarios where a network connection is not available.
Using XML technologies, InfoPath enables you to separate the data from the presentation device (e.g. PC, browser, phone) and to integrate InfoPath forms with back end systems and processes via web services, BizTalk and other techniques.
Need to do more with InfoPath than is available from the InfoPath forms designer? Good news. InfoPath forms can also be designed and extended using Visual Studio and managed .NET code.
Many customers and partners have used InfoPath to develop some advanced systems and processes that have helped them go green, save money, improve data quality and create more effective processes. Check out the case studies available to read more about what InfoPath can do!

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.