Random bits and announcements…

Office SharePoint Technologies

· Announcing the Fourth Release of the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit This is our last planned offering of new features and functionality for this toolkit that services both Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3.0.   That said we do plan to release a separate new toolkit for SharePoint 2010.

· 10 Essential Resources for SharePoint Developers

· SharePoint Community Portal This is an experiment. Yes, we are "eating our own dogfood" by using our product (Office SharePoint Server 2007) to power our new community portal, which shall be your starting point for the worldwide SharePoint community.

Microsoft Office System

· Volume Activation Starting in Office 2010, all volume editions of Office client software will require activation. What’s great for administrators is that Office has adopted the Windows Software Protection Platform (SPP), which means that most of what you have learned (or will learn) about Volume Activation for Windows applies to Office as well.

· Evolving the Backstage View For those of you who are dogfooding the Technical Preview build, thanks for all of the great feedback you’ve sent us so far on the new Backstage view! We’ve been getting a lot of requests for a sneak peak at the design changes that we’ve been making to the Backstage view since the Technical Preview builds have been released. I’ll talk through some of these changes in this post.

· OCS: Office Communications Server 2007 R2 - Web Scheduler Now Available for Download The Web Scheduler provides a basic scheduling experience. See the blog post for main features.

· Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Group Chat QFE and SDK Complete More than 8 months in the making, we're pleased to announce that Group Chat QFE1 is released as has the Group Chat SDK.  This is a strategically important release, as it provides key features and performance enhancements that elevate OCS Group Chat to an enterprise grade product.

· Access: Create flexible Excel exports with on-the-fly SQL I’ve been using SQL statements in temporary Access tables to extract data to Excel for some time now (simple data dump). This approach results in an easy-to-maintain, easy-to-use architecture that the client really appreciates.

· Write expressions faster with fewer errors The Expression Builder sports new features and simpler UI in Access 2010. You will spend less effort thinking about syntax and available functions/properties because IntelliSense features provide all the information you need as you type.

· Excel: Excel 2010 – Now With More Bits! For this post, I will focus on the work we did to make a 64-bit version of Excel. 64-bit Excel, simply put, is for building really really (really) big workbooks. 64-bit Excel is for those who want to work with large data sets and get past the 32-bit Windows address space constraint.

· Safety First: Office 2010 Protected View When you open workbooks downloaded from the Internet in Excel 2010, you’ll enter into the new Protected View. While in this mode, Excel runs in a “sandbox,” which means that you are now better isolated from any malicious code that could be contained within the file. In the past, you had to decide if you trusted the author/origin of the document before viewing the contents. Now, with Protected View, you can make a more informed decision before exposing your computer to potential vulnerabilities.

· Outlook: Multiple Exchange Accounts in Outlook 2010 For everyone using the Outlook 2010 Technical Preview, there are a number of improvements for working with multiple Exchange accounts.

· Meeting Requests with a Preview of your Calendar Handling meeting requests usually involves two important steps – reading the meeting request and checking your calendar to see if you’re available. To save you time, Outlook 2010 simplifies that process and combines those steps into a single experience with the Calendar Preview.

· PowerPoint: A Brand New Slide Show... For PowerPoint 2010, we are making the biggest visual update to Slide Show in nearly a decade. PowerPoint's graphics engine is completely rebuilt using DirectX. Everything in slide show (text, shapes, animations, and more) is rendered in full 3D using your machine’s graphics card.

· Optimizing Your Media for the World In PowerPoint 2010, media you insert from your hard-drive is embedded directly into your presentation unless you specifically choose to link.  From now on, you only need to worry about a single file - the presentation

· Project: Project Server 2007 Report Pack II – “The Top Reports” Passing along some great info…Report Pack II for Project Server 2007 has been released! This is great news because it addresses A) WHAT reports you should run in your Project Server 2007 environment, and B) WHY you should run them. It includes 40 Management and Governance reports, designed by top Microsoft consultants who deploy and enhance the Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution for customers regularly.

· Ask a Project PM: Resource Leveling Here’s the first video in our interview series, “Ask a Project PM.” In this interview, Bonny Lau, Program Manager for Microsoft Project, fields your questions on resource leveling.

· Tips and Tricks: Create Deadline Dates Deadline dates are handy way to alert you to problems in your schedule, but they are often overlooked.

· Visio: The Office Fluent UI in the Visio 2010 Technical Preview The Visio 2010 user interface has been completely revamped this release based on the Office Fluent or “Ribbon” UI. The Office Fluent UI represents a dramatic departure from the overloaded menu and toolbar design model of previous Visio releases. Visio’s extensive capabilities are now organized into logical, easy to find groups that help you accomplish tasks efficiently rather than choosing features.

· Word: Co-authoring – Where We are Coming From In this post, I'll focus on cutting-edge collaborative authoring, give a brief history of the types of collaborative authoring investments we've made in the past, and touch on some recent authoring trends that influenced our deep investment in cutting-edge collaborative authoring in Word 2010.