Chris Bortlik's Blog : Word

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.

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.

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.