Alistair's Office

Surviving inbox overload

Check out my guest opinion piece about Outlook 2010 on Australian IT.

Pretending to Work

TechFlash had an interesting post about an ex-softie that had not used non-microsoft technology while at microsoft. Wow… they must be talking about a totally different company. As a technology specialist, I make it my business to know all about as much technology as I can – not just the microsoft stuff. It’s my job – and more so, it’s my passion. 

Of course, the default MS-IT supportable corporate image for most PCs is largely Microsoft software, but in the specialist team I work in its a point of pride not to use a corporate image. If we aren’t capable of quickly and efficiently building and customising our own  setup, we wouldn’t be credible specialists! I think it is great that MS-IT has policies that allow us to do this – locking down the desktop is not the only way to have a highly secure and productive computing environment.

All this talk of monocultures reminds me that we have a little brother-from-another-mother in Office for Mac. We’re probably the largest third party software developer on the Mac platform because of it. This is an oldie, but a goodie!

Inbox Overload – help is on the way in 2010

2010 will mark the release of the next version of the world’s most popular productivity suite, Microsoft Office. It will incorporate the work of thousands of Microsoft developers, feedback from thousands of customers and over 2 million beta testers. It is the first version of Office to be truly cloud-services aware and virtualisation aware. Feedback from Early Adopters is showing that Office 2010 is living up to its mission of being the best productivity experience across the PC, Phone and Browser. But before we look to upgrade one of the most widely used technologies in our organisations, it is important to look at what is not working and what needs to change to meet new challenges.

Some people may argue that “Email is done”, that all the developments in email are already developed and that we should switch our focus on other communication mediums. But there is still room for improvement – ever larger volumes of e-mail saps time out of our day. For most office workers, email is still a considerable part of our day and since you probably spend more waking hours in Outlook than with your own family, it’s worth making that time as productive as possible. Perhaps email inefficiencies are caused by over-eager colleagues that are keen to share their pet/newborn/holiday photos, birthday wishes, emails with half the organisation on the CC line or projects that insist on collaboration-by-attachment. While I am sure there are times we have all done this, there are also serial offenders – You know who you are!

An ancient event enshrined in email lore is known as Bedlam DL3. A large distribution list brought the productivity of its members right down after a simple question “Why am I on this distribution list?” and 25,000 reply-all’s saying “Me too!” or “Please stop replying-all”. In fact, IT Administrators had to get involved to stop the avalanche of replies. Outlook 2010 includes a feature called “Ignore Conversation”. I like to think of it as a mute button for email threads that are lingering past their usefulness. One click and a positively Shakespearean dialog box appears - “the selected conversation and all future messages will be moved to the Deleted Items folder”. I smile a little every time I read that and think about all the time I have just saved.

Another common email scenario is going on holiday. Unfortunately this often means coming back from holiday to an overwhelming inbox. While, it is often tempting to just declare Email Bankruptcy and start with a clean inbox (Ctrl-A, DEL for anyone wondering) Outlook 2010 has some new capabilities that allow you to take less drastic measures. Conversation View sorts and consolidates all messages into a single, expandable inbox entry. This makes it easy to focus on what is important and to also use another feature – the Clean Up Conversation. This feature is similar to the Ignore Conversation except that it only removes the older messages in the thread, leaving you with only the most current email and any unique emails (like attachments, meeting requests or forked conversations).

Outlook 2010 also incorporates useful information from your social network by displaying relevant information about the sender or your recipients in the Outlook Social Connector. The social connector will show their picture, recent conversations, attachments and appointments you have had with that person. In addition, the Outlook Social Connector connects to SharePoint 2010’s social computing capabilities to display additional information such as blog entries, status updates. The Outlook Social Connector is entirely extensible – LinkedIn have announced that they will be building a provider to display information from your LinkedIn professional contacts in the Outlook Social Connector.

There are many more great features in Office 2010 such as mail tips, calendar previews, multiple exchange profiles, Outlook Mobile, Outlook Web App and voicemail, IM and text message integration. You can try these for yourself, download Office 2010 beta today

Outlook 2010 is a leap forward in managing inbox overload but still staying connected and informed. Staff and budget cuts we have seen through 2009 mean that everyone needs to be more productive and make the most of resources like Office to produce results.

Blast from the past…

One of the original advertisements for (The) Microsoft Office (For Windows), back in 1990. My favourite bit has to be “overheads that will captivate audiences”. The business world has changed a lot since the days of overheads – but then, so has Office!

Unleashing the Awesome… Office 2010 beta and my favourite features

Last weeks PDC brought a slew of product announcements, cool demos and new possibilities, but the standout for me was that Office 2010 has hit the beta milestone. As a pretty devoted Office guy, I have been talking, demonstrating, tweeting, watching, reading about Office 2010 and the reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. This is heart-warming for me – having been playing with various versions incarnations of Office for a while now, I think that we are on to a winner. It is great to see that feeling shared by many people trying out the beta.

While other people are caught up in the largely academic exercise of cramming more stuff into a browser (how much client-executing code and browser plugins do you need to add to a web page before it just becomes an inefficient smart client app that happens to have a URL?) it is great to be using a productivity app that supports the various ways that I want to work whether I’m at my PCs, phone or just a browser somewhere. There are a couple of time saving behaviours that Office 2010 has allowed me to adopt.

On boot confession: 2 Outlooks before breakfast

I have probably used Office 2010 in two different ways before I get out of bed. My phone alarm (the dulcet tones of the Touch Diamond 2) goes off at around 6.00am – I roll over to groan, check  my calendar to work out if I need to be at work early and to see how much email has arrived overnight. Outlook mobiles new conversation view is a lifesaver here – I previously had to scroll through a whole lot of reply-all (that’s “Big-R’s” in Office shorthand – or ctrl-shift-r) emails to get to the interesting topics. If emails announcing the end of the world < 1, I can usually grab another 15 minutes of shut-eye…

…before reaching for my laptop. Yes, I charge it on my bedside table. Yes, I know how obsessive that sounds. However, getting out of bed with a triaged inbox is a whole lot better than getting to work with 150 outstanding emails. It only takes me about 20 minutes to scan through my email on my laptop… this is one of those tasks that really needs to be done with good old .exe software. Why use Outlook when the Outlook Web App is all but comparable in functionality (and includes some extra capability that the client doesn’t have)? Well – Speed.

Nothing beats the speed and responsiveness of desktop software. I have set up my search folders and Quick Steps so that I can very quickly prioritise my mail by holding Ctrl-Shift and hitting a number. I have set up my quicksteps as follows:

• Big-1 (Ctrl-Shift-1) – Mark as complete. This flags the email as read, done and no other action required. This is by far the most commonly used command.
• Big-2 (Ctrl-Shift-2) – Mark for follow-up today. This is the important stuff that I should do when I start work proper.
• Big-3 (Ctrl-Shift-3) – Mark for follow-up this week. This is the everything else category. Even if something is due in a month, I will file it here, then come back to it to put it in my calendar for a months time.

Above: My Outlook 2010 Quick Steps, as they appear in the ribbon.

Email done and mind awake – time to start the day!

Presentations – anytime, anywhere.

A big part of my job is talking to our customers and partners about Office. One of the challenges of presenting is the inevitable VGA cord swap. With the PowerPoint Web App I can send around a URL, or queue up a slideshow on a PC already connected to the projector. One of the great things about the Office Web Apps is their high fidelity viewing experiences. Looking at a PowerPoint slideshow in the browser (whether that browser is IE, Safari or Firefox) is so good that most people can’t tell the difference (except close colleagues -  If they don’t see a hardware rendered 3d transition from me, they know that something is wrong).

The other great thing about the PowerPoint Web App is the ability to stay within the context of the browser when you are searching for something. I often find large presentations, stored on far away SharePoint sites. The ability to preview the document in the browser before committing to downloading the document is a great feature – I find that I am using it more and more.

Taking my data with me.

I try to centrally store all of my important documents (even unimportant ones end up on my MySite). One of the great things about Office 2010 is the integration between centrally managed servers and the local clients. For instance, in the save dialog box, I can see my favourite SharePoint sites and also local SharePoint Workspaces. In addition to visibility, the save experience is much faster thanks to a little workhorse called the Office Upload Center. The upload center turns a plain old synchronous save into an asynchronous one. This is fantastic because it means I don’t have to wait for delays due to the server, service or network, I can just carry on working. If I want to take a whole document library or site with me, I can do that easily by syncing the site to SharePoint Workspace. SPW is the new Groove, plus more. In addition to the state of the art hybrid-peer collaboration, SPW can also sync content back and forth between your desktop and your SharePoint site. This brings me all the benefits of local storage, without any of the trade-offs.

These are some of my favourite features in Office 2010. There is a lot to like in this release, from the client, phone apps and web servers and services, one blog post could hardly do it justice. Office is a lot of things to a lot of people, but everyone has their own favourite features – but the only way to find them is to explore Office 2010 for yourself at www.office.com/beta

User Group Madness!

Well, I thought that once Tech.Ed was out of the way I could sit back, relax and slack off until Office 2010 hit RTM. No. Such. Luck.  In addition to my day job, I’ve been talking about Office 2010 at a couple of my favourite user groups and community events.

Check out the presentations in webified high fidelity goodness below. (If you are not already on the Office Web Apps preview, click here to enable them on your skydrive account).

For those that are Victorian based, Hopefully I’ll see you at SharePoint Saturday Melbourne on November the 14th! (What makes SharePoint better… OK – I’ll stop that now).

The more important question is…

Who prints their slides in 2009?

Did you miss Tech.Ed Australia 2009? Watch the Keynote online

Using InfoPath to add twitter-like functionality to SharePoint

The philosophy of many technical folks that I talk to is “Lock it down and save the user from themselves”. While this may seem great from a helpdesk or risk perspective, in reality it means that your users will have to ask you to make the change everytime, or even worse – they don’t use the system at all. There is a lot of information written on how to disable sharepoint designer and the like, which may be useful for fairly restricted Web Content management sites, using this on a collaboration site seems a little heavy handed.It is one thing to have a recommended template, but another to make sure every site is the same boring layout with no room for differentiation. A good SharePoint philosophy will maintain some standard sites, provide some good starting points, but also allow high performing teams to customise their collaboration tools to meet their requirements (without having to call IT).

Your users don’t call the helpdesk when they want to change a font in Word – make sure you are managing the infrastructure, not playing the role of the Content Police.

So, assuming that you are one of those civilised, modern, sensible (and probably ruggedly handsome) IT guys, or you are lucky enough to work somewhere that employs them, you can start to have some fun with InfoPath and SharePoint.

While InfoPath is traditionally used for forms that are a little more complicated than this, you will be happy to know that it can scale down to a 1 field form as well. I have made this form multiline and added a button that will submit to a SharePoint forms library as well as change the view to display a “thanks for your submission” message. When publishing the form, we can also promote that lonely field into a list column.

Then, I show a webpart with a customised view, showing the field and some of the metadata that SharePoint will capture automatically. I have called my shameless twitter clone SharePoint Social Networking Innovation Crikey, a common Australian expression of amazement.

Finally, I use that veritable workhorse of the gluecoder – the <iframe> to display that form in a Content Editor Webpart on my collaboration page.

If I was doing this properly, I could use the XMLFormView ASP.Net control to frame in the infopath form properly. However, with a form this complicated it wouldn’t really be worthwhile – and probably quicker to hardcode it in ASP.Net proper.

Happy gluecoding!

Office Partners – time to shine!

I love July! For one, it brings a new financial year, but perhaps more importantly, it is the eye of the storm. A short period of reflection before the cyclonic winds kick up again. My inbox is back to a manageable size and I can catch up on reading, training and skilling up on all the new technology that is out since I last looked.

If you aren’t a microsoft partner or interested in becoming a microsoft partner, the rest of this post will be pretty boring.

Today, I have been catching up on the announcement that the Microsoft Partner Program will morph into the Microsoft Partner Network. It seems like quite a big change, with everything from more marketing campaigns, more access to technical resources and some new (and some improved) competencies.

One of the interesting things I found in reading about the IW competencies was a breakdown of which service opportunities had the biggest market, the results are quite surprising.

According to Microsoft Partner Capacity Research, partner service opportunities for SIs and VARs around consulting development, integration, and maintenance for each specialization are expected to reach:

Source: https://partner.microsoft.com/global/program/competencies/iwsolutions/iwbenefits

The sorts of partners I will predominately work with over the next 12 months are the ones with Office Deployment and Office Solutions Development specialisations (or are trying to achieve them).

So what does it take to become one of these partners? Apart from 3 customer references, it comes down to Microsoft certifications:

Office Deployment Specialisation

To qualify, your organization must employ or contract with two individuals, each of whom must have passed one of the following Microsoft exams:

• Exam 74-139 : Deploying Business Desktops with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003

• Exam 70-270 : Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft Windows XP Professional

• Exam 70-620 : TS: Microsoft Windows Vista, Configuring

• Exam 70-621 : Pro: Upgrading your MCDST Certification to MCITP Enterprise Support

• Exam 70-624 : TS: Deploying and Maintaining Windows Vista Client and Microsoft Office System Desktops

Office Solutions Development Specialisation

To qualify, your organization must employ or contract with two individuals, each of whom must have passed one of the following Microsoft exams:

• Exam 74-137 : Developing Microsoft Office Solutions using XML with Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003

• Exam 70-541 : TS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development

• Exam 70-542 : TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Application Development

• Exam 70-543 : TS: Visual Studio Tools for the 2007 Office System

Obviously these certifications continue to evolve as new products are released and old products are retired.

If you are a partner and have these specialisations, or are interested in attaining them, please let me know – we should be working together closely in 2009 and 2010!

Office 2010 tech preview roundup

What a week! At the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Stephen Elop demonstrated Office 2010 for the first time and the feedback I have heard from people I talk to is “GIMME NOW”.

Technical Preview is essentially a pre-beta engineering milestone – very interesting to developers and IT Professionals managing complex environments, but much like a house that is almost finished, it may not be a comfortable as a full release.

But, if you are reading this blog, you probably spend more time with Office than you do with your own loved ones – so the evolution of such an important product is kind of a Big Deal. Here is a fairly comprehensive list of information to get up to speed on 2010.

Proper published information:

• Office 2010 Technical Preview Official site – the first place to start for all official information about the TP.
• Office 2010 for business – all the business focused features.
• Backstage with Office 2010 – interviews from the Office team. You can also request videos on specific topics!
• SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek site – looks like there is a new flavour of pie!

Blogs, Blogs, Blogs:

• Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog – includes a really good post about the “Backstage” view, and how it is a continuation of the UX decisions of Office 2007.
• Daniel Escapa’s OneNote blog – perhaps the best place to go to find technical information on OneNote 2010
• Microsoft SharePoint Team blog – for some details on the SharePoint strategy. I’m sure there will be much more at this years SharePoint Conference.
• Excel Team blog – discusses some of the new performance investments and something that I am very excited by, “Project Gemini”
• Outlook Team blog – I am quite excited about the little things in Outlook – being able to see a calendar snapshot before I accept a meeting request, ignore a rambling reply-all storm and quicksteps will all save me a little bit of time every day, which will add up to a lot of my year.
• PowerPoint Team blog – good showcase of all the new transitions in PowerPoint and a hint of a new powerpoint viewer :).
• Word Team blog – multiediting – when I was at school, we called this cheating. Now, we call it collaboration!
• InfoPath Team blog – InfoPath 2010 is shaping up to be a very solid release for the little form engine that could. Picture Buttons, Quick Rules, Quick Publishing, Mashups and a First Class People Picker!!!

Documentation and Specifications:

For the alpha-developers out there, this documentation will be also very useful for you.

• SharePoint 2010 (Technical Preview) Developer Documentation
• Microsoft Office Protocol Documentation
• Microsoft Office File Formats Documentation

Office 2007 Deployment Series – the aftermath

Wow – is it really July already?

Last month we had about 150 people join (or watch later) our Office deployment webcasts. When we decided to run these, we were thinking that about 20 people would listen in – so the interest has still been quite high, even this far into the lifecycle of Office 2007 (and it still has legs!).

At the end of the month, we will be kicking off another round of these webcasts, and there are a couple of things we will aim to fix:

• We have had a few comments on the sound quality being inconsistent – we are looking into this
• Recordings of the sessions had only a 66% success rate (Alistair forgot to hit the big record button on the last session). You can access all of the presentations and the first two recordings through the original invitation links, or from my skydrive below. Please contact me through email or this blog if you’d like me to organise
a 1:1 session on these topics.

So, with all that done, and looking to the future – what would you like to see us cover in the next round of webcasts?

Mini Toolbar

The mini toolbar appears as you select and hover over text, or right click text in a document. This provides a handy font menu for changing the selected text. One of my favourite things about it is that it gets more or less transparent the further you move away from it, as if to say “you need me? oh, ok, I’ll get out of your way”.

Of course, you can banish it altogether - If you do not wish to use the mini toolbar, it can be disabled by:

STEP 1. Select Office Button | Word Options Button | Popular

STEP 2. Deselect the Show Mini Toolbar on selection option

STEP 3. Click OK to save

Note the mini toolbar will be disabled for hovering over selections, but will still appear if you right click.

What’s on the ‘tubes this June - Office 2007 Deployment Series

Oh, boy – here I was looking to hibernate this winter… but we will be kicking off a local deployment webcast series. 

woah.

So, it turns out that Wolfram Alpha has become aware… and dived straight into geek humour…