My Two Bits : Office 2007 general

A post I wish I had written

Kailash — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 12:19:04 GMT

Reading some through mails today I came across a link to this excellent article on OneNote. I’ve been working on OneNote as a GTD app with Outlook – similar to David. But it seems David’s done a lot more to get things done!

Here’s his post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/david_rasmussen/archive/2006/06/14/630885.aspx

I’m adding his blog to my Outlook feed reader.

Help Files

Kailash — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:40:33 GMT

Today was educational. One of my colleagues came to me with a question about customizing the help files in MS Office. I told him to look for CHM files. Turns out I was wrong. Help's a bit different these days J

Here's what I found:

More info on Microsoft Help 2.x – which is what is in use.

And more info on how to customize that here.

Role Change!

Kailash — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 21:36:38 GMT

Wow, my last post was on the 12^th of May! That's a reflection of year-end madness we get infected with at MS. So, now that that's done with, I can return to posting again.

Update. I've been reallocated as an SSP. So now I'm SSP Biz Productivity. Translation – I was a Techie and now I'm more into the Sales end of business, helping customers realize the benefits of Office & SharePoint. And that is sorely needed.

Since you're here to read about My Two Bits, I'll be glad to give them to you.

Last.FM rocks! I'm enjoying it and listening to dance music all day as I work. Michael Jackson's Thriller's playing for now.

Podcasts are wonderful! I've been plugged into BBC's Global News podcasts, WSJ Tech Briefings, Science Talk by SciAm and Guardian's Science Weekly.

So there. J

No? Well, since I'm such a great fan of Podcasts, the SharePoint team decided to help you create podcasts that I'd enjoy. Hence the launch of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS – for short… there we go with Acronyms again)

And how does this work for you? PKS is available as a free CodePlex project here. Combine that with Community Clips from OfficeLabs and you're ready to podcast. The community clips app will allow you to create screencasts with very little trouble and these you can upload to the Podcast site. At MS we have an public facing site for employees and while download speeds are annoyingly slow from Egypt, I do enjoy downloading some great podcasts from the site while in the office. Oh, and with Zune you can subscribe to the Podcasts on PKS (authenticated feeds work!) giving you a seamless solution. There go the days of driving without a podcast.

Oh, one favorite I have these days is Search Commands from OfficeLabs. With all the confusion some newbies (and some experts too) have with the fluent UI in Office 2007, Search Commands allows you to search for the command you're looking for. :D So where will we put search next?

Office Labs

Kailash — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:31:22 GMT

http://officelabs.com

Check out he website to find some interesting tools and ideas that we're trying out.

Concept testing is what this site is all about. The projects you find here are not products or beta versions. They don't even pretend to be complete product ideas. They are the equivalent of 'concept cars' for software. Automotive companies sometimes produce near and far-future test vehicles to test design concepts or features to see how effective they are. In most cases there is no intent to productize the vehicles as shown. They simply work for the purposes of getting feedback. We do the same for software. The difference is that you to get to test drive the concepts. Because of that, all these experiences are strictly 'use at your own risk', and we can't promise to fix every bug that is reported but we'll try to nip the worst ones.

We are often asked if any of the things seen here will become products or features of products in the future. It's possible that some of them will appear in some form. But what we are really after is feedback and information from you. We want to know how often people use these tools. What parts of them are used most? What are the patterns of usage? Do they work for you? You may see some of the concepts updated over time to improve them based on the feedback. Even with all that, most of these ideas just won't make the cut for a product. Even when something is pretty useful, there are usually many other things even more useful to more people that are selected for inclusion in our products.

You might be wondering why this site isn't located on microsoft.com. One reason is simple: we didn't want to give anyone the impression that these projects are full blown Microsoft products. This site itself is also a concept test. Over time we'll be modifying it to experiment with ways to engage with you, our community.

from: Welcome to Microsoft Office Labs

InfoPath fronting SharePoint

Kailash — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:25:23 GMT

So SharePoint was the front-end view for quite a few apps, but now, here's one step further. Why not build your application logic using InfoPath. So I recently read two articles about it and putting them together, you may see more solutions. Here goes:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc194406.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc162745.aspx

The techniques and CAML used may be useful to your future implementations.

Office 2007 Compatibility Pack

Kailash — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:21:32 GMT

From Brian Jones' blog:

The availability of the compatibility pack has been an interesting discussion. Today, the compatibility pack is only available as a manual download. In other words, Microsoft does not "push" the compatibility pack to users using its update tools. IT organizations or end users must manually download the tool, and deploy or install it themselves. Many organizations have (literally) demanded this be made available as an automatic update, while others would be dissatisfied with this, claiming that Microsoft is "forcing" Open XML onto its existing user community.

We decided to make it available as a manual download, and not as an automatic update, and during the first 12 months of its release, the compatibility pack has been successfully downloaded over 20 million times. This means that 20 million people have elected to manually download this 26.2MB software to their computer. This is a significant number of people adding Open XML to their environment

Building Groove Apps

Kailash — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:30:00 GMT

I recently got asked by a customer about Building Groove Apps, so I dug around and found some relevant resources. Here's the info for you:

Groove Databridge:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/office/grooveserver/2007/guide/GDBAG_01.mspx?mfr=true

Groove Developer Portal:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb308957.aspx

You'll find the SDK and other important info like the following resources on the Developer Portal:

Groove 2007 Forms Developer Reference Guide
Learn to develop forms-based applications in Groove 2007 using either the Groove Forms tool or InfoPath Forms tool.

Groove 2007 Web Services Developer Reference Guide
This reference describes how to use the Groove Web Services APIs. It provides samples using both the underlying SOAP XML messages and application program source code.

Groove 2007 SDK
Download the SDK, which contains samples and libraries to help you develop Web services applications for Groove 2007. The SDK includes C# samples and the WSDL definitions for the Groove Web Services APIs. In addition, it provides local copies of the Groove 2007 Web Services Developer Reference Guide and the Groove 2007 Forms Developer Reference Guide.

Web Helpers for Groove 2007
Groove Web Helpers are a C# .NET assembly that provides an abstraction layer for Groove 2007 and Groove 3.1 Web Services. The abstraction layer provides an easy to use API with an object and eventing model, so that custom applications that interface with Groove can be built more quickly. Please note that because the Groove Web Helpers are a community project, Microsoft can make no guarantees that future releases of Microsoft Office Groove products will continue to interoperate with any specific version of Groove Web Helpers.

Something for the weather

Kailash — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:44:01 GMT

I hope you guys are as tired of the weather these days as I am. In order to make the most of your time indoors, I'd like to introduce you to the Deployment Series! This is a gold-mine! Want to know about SharePoint sizing? What's Excel Services? What migration tools is Microsoft offering for Office 2007?

Here's the site that answers it all!

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/technetoffice.mspx

On a side note: I'd really appreciate your feedback on what you think of these webcasts. Are there other topics you'd like to learn about? What more could we be helping you with?

Open XML Development

Kailash — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:47:15 GMT

Hi I'm trying to catch up with the updates and the more I delve, the more I seem to find to write about! I'm currently developing an internal course for Office Client components and while doing some of the research for the course, I came across some excellent material that I wanted to share with you all.

A great webcast by Brian Jones on Open XML file formats – there's quite a few interesting tidbits that I didn't know: MS no longer owns the file formats! And there's a cool website where I've seen some really cool things like Office XML files using PHP!

Office 2007 – Arabic Articles!

Kailash — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:02:00 GMT

I'm frankly quite impressed by this. I figured that we'd be somewhat slower with the Arabic content, but I'm pleasantly surprised! Maged, from our Office Online team was kind enough to do some looking and pass me these links to Arabic articles:

إنشاء صفحات نشر وإدارته

رموز تبديل سطر الأوامر فيSharePoint Designer

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 أفضل عشر ميزات لبرنامج

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 نظرة عامة حول منتج

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 ملحق الخصوصية لـ

Office SharePoint Server 2007بنية موقع النشر في

السماح باستخدام طريقة عرض "التعليمات البرمجية" أو تقييد استخدامها من قِبل مجموعات "المساهمين"

مقدمة حول مهام سير العمل

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server موارد تعليمية لـ

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 مقدمة حول

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0ما الجديد في

Outlook باستخدام SharePoint عرض المهام وإنشائها على موقع

FAQs!?

Kailash — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 21:49:00 GMT

Well, they're not too frequent, but here's some questions customers and partners have asked me about SharePoint lately.

Q: Where's the Arabic Language Pack?
A: At this stage, we do have WSS 3.0 language packs for Arabic. Please download them from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=36EE1BF0-652C-4E38-B247-F29B3EEFA048&displaylang=en

Q: Where can I find out about the Content Deployment feature in SharePoint?
A: Here's the material on Content Deployment: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/edcdacca-8013-460e-95a0-d2b83b6cc7ef1033.mspx?mfr=true
And here's an easy to read blog entry on the feature: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/05/02/588140.aspx

Q: What's the difference between WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007, and other MOSS editions?
A: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/FX101758691033.aspx

Q: SharePoint 2003 lists had some limitations. Is there any guidance about MOSS lists?
A: Here's a great entry from Joel Oleson's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/06/09/2003-2007-performance-and-scalability-capacity-planning.aspx

Object	Scope	Guideline
Site collections	Database	50,000
Web sites	Site collection	250,000
(sub) Web sites	Web site	2,000
Lists	Web site	2,000
Items	List	10 M
Documents	Doc Library	2 M
Documents	Folder	2,000
Document size	File	2 GB
Indexed Documents (MOSS)	SSP	50 M
Search Scopes (MOSS)	Site Collection	1,000
# Profiles (MOSS)	SSP	5 M

Numbers based around B2. RTM may have better performance.

Q: How can upgrade from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007?
A: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/396c85d9-4b86-484e-9cc5-f6c4d725c5781033.mspx?mfr=true
You should find this sufficient. Also please do look at the blogs on http://www.sharepointblogs.com
Or http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint - you'll find some great links from there.

Q: Where can I find trainings on SharePoint 2007? (Europe & Middleeast)
A: http://www.u2u.be/Calendar.aspx
Scroll down to the bottom and you'll find the SharePoint 2007 trainings.

Q: How can I try out the Wave 12 products?
A: SharePoint Technologies download and installation resources – http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/11/16/announcing-the-rtw-of-wss-and-office-sharepoint-server-2007-standard-and-enterprise-evaluation.aspx

For Office 2007 Desktop Apps, we've got the Testdrive.

Do continue to send me your questions!

Open XML Specs Final Drafts are ready!

Kailash — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 14:35:00 GMT

The final draft of the Office Open XML file formats specs is ready. This is great news for our customers and partners! With the final draft, partners have now the chance to develop applications that could be ready before the launch, expected by the end of this year. You'll find more of this in Brain Jones' Open XML Formats blog.

Final Draft: http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/TC45-2006-50_final_draft.htm

For those of you interested, here is the list of all the organizations contributing to the standard:

Apple
Barclays Capital
BP
The British Library
Essilor
Intel
Microsoft
NextPage
Novell
Statoil
Toshiba
The United States Library of Congress

We posted the draft in three separate formats. There is a PDF version; a tagged PDF version (for accessibility); and a DOCX version.

Latest updates on the ecma site:

At the most recent face-to-face meeting this September in Trondheim, the committee created the Final Draft of the Office Open XML v1.0 format. The committee, with representation from all Ecma member organizations actively participating in TC45 (Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress) unanimously approved the Final Draft standard (as described in the status report: http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/TC45-2006-50_06Sept28.htm) and agreed to propose it to the General Assembly of Ecma International for publication as an Ecma standard. The final draft has now been submitted it to the Ecma Secretary General (October 6th, 2006) and the GA will vote on this proposal during the GA meeting December 7-8, 2006.

In keeping with TC45's desire to maintain as much public disclosure around the process as possible, the TC45 members have agreed to provide the final drafts of the reference schema and specification for public consumption. There is also a technical forum at http://www.openxmldeveloper.org for developers who are interested in using the Ecma Office Open XML file formats.

Blogging with Word

Kailash — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 16:29:35 GMT

I'm in the process of setting up a home office. The other day I and a friend decided to go shopping and I discovered that I was a gadget crazy person too! I started off with the idea of building a desktop from scratch, but after some thinking B and I decided to go for my old laptop and set it up as the home PC. The major faults there are RAM and HD space, so we decided to go for the HD first. I went & got myself a 160GB HD and an external drive case. Next I'm getting a cordless phone and redoing the wiring here. I've got myself a wireless keyboard and mouse so that's taken care of. Perhaps I'll need some cupboards and files – a bookshelf or filing cabinet?

It's amazing the ideas one can come up when collaborating. I was at an Iftar and I shared these issues that I'm working on and suddenly Maha, my boss' wife, suggested that I visit this shop downtown where I could find some really great furniture. I'm going to check them out this week – hopefully I will find something useful!

That's my first Word based blog – thanks to Word 2007 – here's how you can do it too!

Get the Office and Vista betas

Kailash — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:44:00 GMT

Office & Vista betas for Egyptain community is now available here. The rest of the world go here!

And while you're at it do check out the Office Developer Center

Happy Downloading!!

Visual Studio Tools for Office (beta) Available!!!

Kailash — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:34:00 GMT

NEW! Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System
The VSTO 2005 SE beta offers several new important new features to support Office programmability. Check out new portal page at Office Developer Center and keep coming back for more great content.

Cypress is a free add-on for Visual Studio 2005 that enables you to build VSTO solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office System. You can find details in KD's MSDN Forum posting at http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=459132&SiteID=1

Or see KD and Eric Carter talk about Cypress on Channel 9 at: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=201396

You can view some demos of the CTP at http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/In_the_Office