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Exchange in the cloud or on the ground?
18 November 09 10:02 AM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

Following the price cut on the desperately-in-need-of-renaming BPOS services recently, I’ve been talking with a few people about the where the tipping point might be for running Exchange in house vs using some form of hosted provision. There are plenty Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Office, Online

Outlook 2010 beta and E.164 number format updater
06 October 09 09:26 PM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

Well hello again; it’s been a while. Normal service should now infrequently resume. I thought I’d update the instructions of a previous post, after I was showing someone how to use my old “ Contacts updater ” application to make all their Outlook contact Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Office, Unified Comms, OCS

Office Web Apps complement, not replace, Office
04 August 09 11:54 AM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

The Office 2010 announcement a couple of weeks ago, (publicly) lifted the lid on the Office Web Applications, either as a set of web-based Office apps that a customer could host on their own metal (and expose to the outside world, perhaps), or as something Read More...

Filed under: Outlook, Office

Office 2007 SP2 now available
28 April 09 07:47 PM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

I’ve been beta testing Office 2007 SP2 since the beginning of the year, and it’s been great – the single biggest reason to use it is the myriad improvements made to Outlook, in terms of stability & performance (particularly relating to search and Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Office

Outlook Thread Compressor download now available
11 April 09 02:34 PM | Ewan | 7 Comments   

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Thread Compressor on here – it’s an add-in to Outlook which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Office, Unified Comms, Win7

Tip for finding when an appointment was created
21 April 08 01:52 PM | Ewan | 2 Comments   

Here's a tip for when you suspect someone has magicked up an appointment to coincidentally collide with an Outlook meeting request you sent them... In your own calendar (and other people's), you can see when a meeting was scheduled (ie request was sent Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Office

The lost art of the OOF
29 December 07 10:10 PM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

Some time ago, I posted about how the ".sig" has faded from grandeur. I'd like to add the somewhat terminal dryness of the OOF message to that list, and propose a solution. OOF is a Microsoft term for Out of Office. It should really be OOO, Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Humour, Outlook, Office

Bulk update Outlook Contacts' phone numbers to be E.164 compliant
30 November 07 09:10 AM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

Here's a quick & dirty tool I put together for Outlook to be able to update all the phone numbers of contacts to make them E.164 compliant. It relates back to a post a while back around the challenges of formatting numbers 'correctly', particularly Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Office, Unified Comms, OCS

Sometimes, you know you didn't pay enough
15 August 07 12:20 PM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

... (and sometimes you probably suspect you paid too much) A common trait in western cultures is the eye for a good deal - you know, getting two-for-the-price-of-one, or thinking that it's worth buying something because it's on sale and you'll save 25%, Read More...

Filed under: Office, Business

How to handle URLs with spaces in Outlook, Word etc
03 July 07 03:59 PM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

I was talking to a customer earlier today who was envisioning frustrations around using click-to-dial type functionality within OCS, where they'll be copying & pasting phone numbers around. Now if the number is nicely formatted (and E.164 compliant Read More...

Filed under: Outlook, Office

Outlook 2007 signatures location
25 June 07 03:51 PM | Ewan | 3 Comments   

Following my post about .sig files , I had cause to dig around looking for where Outlook actually puts the Signature files. I came across a post which Allister wrote a little while ago, but it's such a useful little tip that it's worth repeating... Basically, Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Office

More Office Grooviness
11 May 07 05:19 PM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

Whilst mucking about with Word the other day with my buddy Steve, he was talking about the improvements that Word has introduced (common with the other Office 2007 apps) in the way it handles pictures. Let's take a standard looking Word doc... and drag Read More...

Filed under: Office

The power of SmartArt
10 May 07 07:43 AM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

Careful you say it, " SmartArt ". It's a new capablity in Office 2007 which is designed to make manipulation of graphical representations more easy - you know, instead of a boring list of words, a presentation or document can have more impact if a diagram Read More...

Filed under: Office

Thread Compressor for Outlook - do you want it?
23 April 07 11:35 PM | Ewan | 8 Comments   

Here's an appeal - nearly 8 years ago, I wrote* a little COM addin for the-then new Outlook 2000, which "compressed threads". The idea was that it could take an email thread (eg a discussion over a period of time and a number of responses, from any number Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Office

Batch-convert Office files to 2007's Open XML format
30 March 07 08:27 AM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

A customer asked me the other day if Microsoft was ever going to build batch-conversion facilities to take old format files that live on a network fileshare, and convert them to the newer XML-based formats - his reasoning was the sometimes considerable Read More...

Filed under: Office