Office and SPS links and resources

Office SharePoint Technologies

· Support end-user productivity with the Productivity Hub The Productivity Hub is a downloadable SharePoint Server 2007 site collection that is pre-populated with over 300 pieces of content about Office programs (including SharePoint Server!). The content includes videos, documents, and PowerPoint slides. It’s a great solution for organizations that block Internet access—including access to Office Online — but want to support end-user technology needs.

· How we did it: Speeding up SharePoint.Microsoft.com SharePoint.Microsoft.com is a critical communications channel for SharePoint. We wanted to provide visitors with a rich and helpful experience and at the same time educate them on what SharePoint can do for their businesses. The site leverages our industry-leading web content management platform, and provides useful content and resources to the visitors. In addition, we also recognized that there were fundamental Internet challenges that needed to be overcome in order to improve page loading time, especially for our global visitors.

· Patching a mirrored farm with minimal downtime For administrators of large SharePoint server farms, a newly-published article describes how to update server farms that use database mirroring, while incurring minimal perceived downtime for users. This solution is for enterprise customers who have high-availability needs and infrastructure.

· Announcing the release of patterns and practices Developing SharePoint Applications guidance Patterns and practices has released a new version of guidance for building collaborative applications that extend your LOB systems.  The guidance helps customers accelerate constructing advanced applications through examples and documentation.

· Fast Tip: Add the Checked Out To column to your SharePoint library

Microsoft Office System

· Trusted Documents This post will give you some insight to the Trusted Documents feature, a simple enhancement that improves the user experience when interacting with security features.

· Office Web Apps Coming to Windows Live We are making available Excel, Word and PowerPoint Web Apps for a select group of Windows Live users as part of the Office Web Apps Technical Preview.

· OCS: Released: OCS 2007 R2 Deploying Certificates document We have released a document that we believe many of you have wanted to see for quite some time. One document that covers the certificate requirements for Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

· Access: Access 2007 hotfix package now available

· Jump start new Access databases with a custom blank database template There are certain features that virtually every Access database application includes. Certain tables like people’s names and addresses, certain forms for managing lookup lists and many to many relationships, custom splash screens, and on and on.

· Excel: Performance Improvements in Excel 2010 In this release of Excel we spent dedicated research and development resources on improving performance. In addition to the usual optimizations and tuning efforts we make post “code complete”, we spent time during the development milestones researching, designing, and implementing performance features beyond algorithmic tuning. Follow up article here.

· Easy (and Even Fun!) Data Exploration: Introducing Excel 2010 Slicers New to Excel 2010 are slicers, which are visual controls that allow you to quickly and easily filter your data in an interactive way. They float above the grid, like charts and shapes.

· New and Improved Solver In Excel 2010, we have made a number of improvements to Solver that make it easy for beginners to get started and more advanced ones to find solutions to all types of problems.  The purpose of this post is to review the improvements to Solver, and so assumes some familiarity with the tool.

· New Functions Bring New UI In this post I will describe the UI changes we have made to help users take advantage of these improvements in Excel 2010. In addition I will also talk about the backward compatibility experience for the new function library.

· Outlook: Multiple Exchange Accounts in Outlook 2010 Connect to more than one Microsoft Exchange account simultaneously. If you’ve worked with more than one Exchange account in Outlook 2007 or earlier, you may have resorted to using multiple Outlook profiles to access your additional accounts. No more, as Outlook 2010 supports connecting to as many as three Exchange accounts from a single profile.

· PowerPoint: Animation Painter In PowerPoint 2010 we’re introducing the Animation Painter. Just select an object with animations, select the “Animation Painter” button on the Animations tab, and with a single click you can transfer the all the animations and settings to another object. If you double-click the painter button, you’ll be in “Sticky Mode” so that you can paint multiple objects sequentially.

· Project: Tips and Tricks: Create a report instantly with Project 2007

· Project 2010: Introducing the Ribbon The Project 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 Project releases. Project’s extensive capabilities are now organized into logical, easy to find groups that help you accomplish actions efficiently rather than choosing features.

· Visio: Inserting and Deleting Shapes in Visio 2010 Diagram maintenance is a task that everyone performs, and many users spend much of their time in Visio maintaining existing diagrams.  We realize that a fair amount of the time you spend maintaining your diagrams is spent in the mechanics of the task, rather than achieving the goals of updating the concept the diagram represents.  There are some clear gains we can effect to make your life easier as you go about editing your diagrams.

· Word: Co-authoring (i.e. Simultaneous Editing) in Word 2010 In Word 2010, we're working to make co-authoring as natural as solo-authoring. Here's how…