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January 2008 - Posts

Wednesday, January 30, 2008 11:47 AM

Fun with Group Policy!

Deploying or deployed Outlook 2007? Do you have a SharePoint 2007/WSS3.0 based intranet or team site? Using GPO you can configure Outlook 2007 to be hooked up to team calendars, lists or RSS feeds. This is very cool. Now, to complete the picture - dynamically
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
Wednesday, January 30, 2008 11:33 AM

Attending TechReady?

Looking forward into the refreshing, nurturing Seattle weather? Running low on Zunes? Make sure you catch my Groove session, with Mary Marks, on Monday Afternoon : OFC214. You won't even need to be a wise-psychedelic-monk-with-a-door-in-your-head-to-prove-it
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008 11:08 AM

Lotus Symphony to support Open XML?

Apparently IBM talked about this at their conference. CNET has the scoop - although technology journalism is about as reliable as technology blogs property lawyers. IBM favors ODF as a file format because it is “truly open” and technically
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008 11:38 AM

CSS 1 - Al 0

I finally caught lilian reading my blog on the weekend. The problem was, it was rendering horrible on her mac running firefox. Dark gray background and light gray text. Turns out it was my sloppy CSS. So with IE8's much touted standards compliance I thought
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008 10:55 AM

The Obfuscated Web

I don't even know which language this site is coded in - my guess would be the ghosts of CMS past. http://www.fiat.com/cgi-bin/pbrand.dll/FIAT_COM/home.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=no Do yourself a favour... don't view source. Just walk away. don't do it. you don't
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008 4:52 AM

Free MSI installers

We had a question regarding how to create MSI packages at the Sydney Linux User Group on Friday night. There are lots of free and commercial packages that can do the job: Macrovision: FLEXnet Adminstudio (formerly Installshield) Altiris: Wise Package
Posted by alspeirs | 2 Comments
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Sunday, January 27, 2008 6:28 AM

TANSTAAFL, it was dinner...

The Sydney Linux User Group was on Friday night and Sarah, Amit, Rosemary and myself were there to answer questions on OpenXML and interoperability with microsoft products  in general. Some general observations: The Linux community has matured from
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, January 23, 2008 10:01 AM

Frequently Answered Questions

Being a Technology Specialist at Microsoft generally means that you know some stuff about some of our products. And sometimes, that great power comes a great responsibility... answering technical questions. Most of the time, the trick is to be able to
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, January 23, 2008 8:21 AM

Stupid quote of the week...

An interesting article on whether Novell should acquire more application layer products to better compete with a "Sun-MySQL business combo". They had me until this line: But you’ve got to wonder if anyone running an open source company
Posted by alspeirs | 0 Comments
Thursday, January 17, 2008 10:18 AM

Email abuse

An actual conversation overheard on the local Exchange Server (only the names have been changed to protect the innocent):   From: Smart-a$$ Australian  Sent: Thursday, 17 January 2008 12:58 PM To: PIFEM Practitioners Subject: RE: STOP REPLY
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
Wednesday, January 16, 2008 12:11 PM

rumors, trumors and guerilla marketing

The shipping seven blog makes for interesting reading... is it true? is it another fake blog? is it a reverse-psychology IBM blog? Who knows. Anyways, I am really proud to be able to share with you an early build of "7". Okay, so it is DOS 7.
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008 10:25 AM

Outlook and Xobni

I started using Xobni (it's inbox backwards) today. While I am not so impressed with the sidebar or the search (and it feels like it has slowed down outlook, but that could be all the patching from rolling back an old build of Vista SP1 in preparation
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008 8:17 PM

Hot air?

This MacBook Air thing looks cool. It is nice to see somebody still interested in hardware. Obviously, Wall Street were not. What does it take to impress these guys? Intention to stream video straight to somebody's brain (with 30 year contract, paid quarterly
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Monday, January 14, 2008 1:06 PM

There is no end, but addition

Interesting post on Alex Brown's blog (who is the Convener of the OpenXML Ballot Resolution Meeting). There's been some talk in Kyoto of the benefits for all of uniting behind one existing ISO standard for office documents, rather than its confusingly-similarly-named
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Monday, January 14, 2008 12:47 PM

Al on Linux

That last post, was pretty lame, so I'll try to answer some more interesting questions this time. Obviously, the opinions expressed here are my own and in no way represent the official point-of-view of Microsoft or any other organisation blah blah blah.
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
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Monday, January 14, 2008 11:30 AM

A late Darwin Award entrant?

So, today I was asked by our Open XML guru to attend the next Sydney Linux User Group . I'll be there to answer questions on Open XML and Office. Anyway, like a good minion , I did some research to see how much trouble I will be in. All in all, not as
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
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Thursday, January 10, 2008 4:29 AM

how times have changed

A laptop gets bad points for the following: No subwoofer Dell XPS M1530 Review - Laptops
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Tuesday, January 08, 2008 10:29 PM

Fast Search to join Microsoft

In the words of Keanu Reeves, "whoa".  I am still digesting this - it is like having a "Reef and Beef" steak washed down with a pint of Guinness. The feeling is very satisfying... but just give me a moment here... Jan. 8 (Bloomberg)
Posted by alspeirs | 0 Comments
Sunday, January 06, 2008 6:57 AM

2008 Tech Predictions

It is that time of year to get out my ouji board and crystal ball and gaze into the future. 1. "Green IT" continued to be driven by silly metrics rather than total lifecycle costs. What can we expect to hear? "We are going green - We've
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
Friday, January 04, 2008 12:37 AM

Better Email Management with Outlook 2007

Losing to Information Overload? Thinking about declaring email bankruptcy? Ian Palangio, Business Productivity Specialist @ Microsoft Australia, has prepared a OneNote 2007 notebook about email management - Pay it Forward Email Management This book outlines
Posted by alspeirs | 2 Comments
Thursday, January 03, 2008 11:10 PM

MISaustralia.com - The strange case of the disappearing hat: BCP

Interesting article on Business Continuity Planning here: Our interviewees say these business continuity planning challenges affect New Zealand organisations across all industries. 1. Ongoing commitment to ensure BCP is up to date, operational and regularly
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, January 01, 2008 5:22 AM

5 second Tutorial: Customise the Word Ribbon with Visual Studio 2008

1. Open Visual Studio 2008 and create a Word 2007 addin 2. Add a New Item of type Ribbon (Visual Designer) to the project 3. Now you can drag and drop buttons and controls on to the Office Ribbon to your hearts content. This includes all of those funky
Posted by alspeirs | 1 Comments
 
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