Another day in the Office

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. 

 

Office 2007 Deployment Series - Session 1: Get Started with your Office Deployment Language(s):  English.  Product(s):  2007 Microsoft Office suites.  Audience(s):  IT Manager,IT Professional.  Duration:  90 Minutes  Start Date:  Tuesday, 9 June 2009 11:00 AM Australia (East)  Event Overview  With Service Pack 2 recently made available, it is a good time to update your desktop software to take advantage of the productivity improvements, server integration and collaboration capabilities. In this session, learn about the best approaches to  Office 2007 deployment. Understand how to get started on the deployment journey and the tools and resources available to you. Registration Details http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=FF-87-55-37-0D-FA-30-84-E7-2D-95-5C-D6-7A-70-9D&culture=en-AU

Office 2007 Deployment Series - Session 2: Office and Virtualisation Language(s):  English.  Product(s):  2007 Microsoft Office suites.  Audience(s):  IT Manager,IT Professional.  Duration:  90 Minutes  Start Date:  Tuesday, 16 June 2009 11:00 AM Australia (East)  Event Overview Application Virtualization solves many problems encountered in a traditional deployment. Mitigate application migration challenges by allowing users to run any version of Office without a maintenance overhead, reduce the amount of regression testing and stream Office to your users quickly through virtualization. Registration Details http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=BF-AA-F9-99-20-8B-3E-45-6F-5D-BB-3A-85-20-0D-1A&Culture=en-AU

Office 2007 Deployment Series - Session 3: Office Training and Readiness Language(s):  English.  Product(s):  2007 Microsoft Office suites.  Audience(s):  IT Manager,IT Professional.  Duration:  90 Minutes  Start Date:  Tuesday, 23 June 2009 11:00 AM Australia (East)  Event Overview  Office 2007 introduced a new user interface.  In this session you will travel back to the early planning stages of Office 2007 and get a look at how and why this happened.  But more importantly, learn the tools, techniques and approaches to accelerate adoption and reduce resistance to change and make your Office deployment successful.   Registration Details http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=BF-AA-F9-99-20-8B-3E-45-EA-7E-81-D9-BC-C6-D2-AD&culture=en-AU

woah.

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

 

 

Groove 14 = SharePoint Workspace 2010

My favourite Office app is getting a new name and some very cool new features. Groove, the Office collaboration tool for geographically, organisationally, confidentially collaboration has always been great at strategic collaboration, but SharePoint Workspace will truly take this to the masses:

• easier to deploy and manage
• easy access to SharePoint content (or content from any server that implements the publicly documented protocols…  MyCoolServer Workspace?)
• Along with OneNote, it will be available as part of Office Professional Plus 2010

So, if you haven’t become a Groove disciple yet, now is a great time to understand the architecture of Groove!

More information at the Groove Development Team blog.

Free Office 2007 Seminar in Brisbane

Andrew Lowson and I will be hosting a free seminar at the Microsoft Brisbane office this Wednesday. In this session we will dive into some of the technical advancements in Office 2007, Office Business Applications and extensions to improve the Office experience. Full blurb here:

Office 2007 represented some revolutionary changes to Office. File format support for open standards, managed code support for document customisations, enhanced server side integration and of course, that ribbony ribbon.  But is Office “done”? As business situations change, so should how we think of the primary business software suite.

In this session, see some of the research prototypes from the Office Labs and understand the key concepts underpinning them. Finally, understand what you can do now using out of the box functionality and Office Business Application services to help improve business processes and the productivity of your people.

Details:

Register here

Wednesday, 13 May 2009 3:00 PM - Wednesday, 13 May 2009 4:00 PM Australia (East)
Welcome Time: 2:45 PM

Microsoft Brisbane -

Theatre 1, L9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St
Brisbane Queensland 4001
Australia

Guidance for potential Office System track speakers at Tech.Ed Australia

Office Gurus,

Time to dust off the lab coat, it is Tech.Ed time again, and once again Ian and I are organising the Office System track. The Office System is our “umbrella term” that covers Microsoft’s business productivity software and services – Office, SharePoint, Visio, Project, PerformancePoint (and we even bend the rules to include Windows Mobile and Dynamics content sometimes).

Last year we had over 50 unsolicited nominations for sessions in the Office System Track. This year, we are expecting plenty more and have put in place a structured tool to help manage all of that and to help provide better transparency of the process.

How do I submit a nomination?

Go to the Call for Content tool and register with your email address and the RSVP code TechEdANZ. Fill in all the details and hit submit. You can come back to the site at any time to update or review the progress of your submission. This is the tool we will be taking nominations from. If you have contacted your favourite Microsoft employee, MVP or newsgroup great – but the Single Point of Truth for selecting community speakers is this Call for Content Tool.

Guidance

So, with that said, some guidance:

• The focus of the track is the 2007 Office System
• It is over 2 years since the 2007 wave was released, our target audience this year is the mainstream IT Pros/Developers, rather than early adopters and power users.
• This year, due to a smaller (but beach-ier) venue and a big focus on Windows 7 , we have about 12 sessions to play with.
• Office Track doesn't need to be super technical. It is about equipping attendees with tools to solve problems their users face every day.
• Treat these sessions as the "Primer" to the topic, and recommend related Instructor Led Labs, Hands on Labs and other resources to complete the learning.
• Educate attendees not only in the tools, but also in the context. While Tech.Ed is definitely focused on preparing attendees to develop on and administer the software, we’d also like to focus on how “you, the user” can benefit by using the software appropriately. Talking about document management? Perhaps talk about how you can use the Office System to make better technical specifications. Perhaps even go as far as to cover what makes a good technical specification.
• Customer References, real solutions and demonstrable examples are preferred. If you have a couple of different scenarios around the same topic – even better!
• We have already identified the high level session topics. In fact, we have already assigned session owners and started planning. What we are looking for is people to co-present with us, provide insight “from the trenches” and to demonstrate real world examples.
• The high level topics we are interested in are:
  • Business Intelligence
  • LOB integration
  • interpersonal communication
  • personal productivity
  • document management and authoring
  • SharePoint customisation
  • application compatibility
  • change management and adoption
  • SharePoint governance and planning
  • Project Management
  • Visio
• Is the Office System the best place for your nomination? Consider the Architecture, Web, SQL & BI or Developer tracks also.

What is in it for me?

Wow – that sure is a lot of guidance. But, being a speaker at Tech.Ed has its own rewards (in order of appearance):

1. The respect of your peers and

2. There are various awards for best speakers

3. A Tech.Ed speaker badge – which gets you into Tech.Ed (worth up to $1999, not redeemable for cash) and into the coveted speaker room*.

We won’t be paying for travel or accommodation expenses – so be aware that you’ll need to pay (and stay) your own way to the Gold Coast.

I really look forward to reading your nominations and seeing you at Tech.Ed this year. There is truly no other event like it in Australia and it is the best “week of geek” you’ll find.

* Okay, it isn’t that coveted.It is usually just a bunch of smelly people swearing at their virtual machines.

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 is in the wild

There are plenty of good posts on this:

Gray Knowlton’s post goes into a lot of interesting detail about some of the under the covers changes and the Office Sustained Engineering team blog is a font of knowledge.

What is most interesting to me in SP2?

• You can easily uninstall this service pack with a handy uninstall tool
• In addition to ODF and PDF support, the document format converter is extensible
• Outlook is now faster… making it easier to handle all that spam you get from facebook and twitter.
• Performance enhancements in SharePoint
• Caching client credentials when SharePoint is in Forms Based Authentication Mode
• SharePoint Support for IE 8, FF2.0 and 3.0

Sydney Business Technology User Group – This Wednesday night

Come and see me talk about some of the new developments in the world of Office!

This session will be a pretty high level walkthrough of some of the Office Labs research, the direction the Office team is going and what users and organisations can do now to be ready to take advantage of the technologies when they come down the line

After me will be Adam Cogan from SSW talking about how to take advantage of the integration opportunities between Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007.

Cost

$5 donation (to cover pizza)

Location

The group meets at Microsoft headquarters at North Ryde

1 Epping Road
North Ryde 2113 NSW

We start at 6pm.

For more information about the Sydney Business Technology User Group, check out http://sbtug.com/ or follow @sbtug

Working in a Blended World

I came across a really interesting whitepaper today, talking about the rapid changes taking place in the workforce. Read it for yourself here:

http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/en-us/default.aspx?ng=insights&ct=articles&id=1

Some of the trends are here already, albeit often in a much smaller form.

Home Work and Placeless Work

Rising gas prices and the need for work/life balance create a demand for home-based offices that complement or replace corporate offices. Many organizations will begin to downsize their real estate holdings and opt out of lease renewals as the Internet and related technologies blur the edges of the physical corporation. With mobile technology, people will also choose to be placeless, their user ID and presence information substituting for a cubical location.

Consumer Technology in Business

Just as the PC and instant messaging brought new capabilities to the workplace, so too will many emergent Web technologies. Consumer technology will impact business in many ways. Among them: building corporate brand on video sites; acquiring temporary virtual workforces through social networking to tackle individual problems; educating through mobile devices; and discovering relationships and patterns by combining data sets that drive innovation.

Corporate Language

Organizations will continue to choose a language for their business, but many will face the need to create a semantic layer that will bind their corporation together. Many companies have internal acronyms that define their corporate-speak. And the blurring of boundaries may accelerate this trend, to the point that institutional argots evolve into living linguistic constructs.

I wonder what the world will look like when these trends hit with full force, in 15 years time when the Baby Boomers are no longer the driving force in the workplace.

Windows washer

Interesting article from AP on the design process behind Windows 7, and how many of the ideas were pollinated from the Office 2007 development process. Much like the ribbon, development of the Windows 7 interface was informed through data gathered by a “Customer Experience Improvement Program” in Vista. 

“…Office 2007 won accolades from software critics and regular users. Larson-Green proved she had the stomach to challenge a Microsoft legacy. Her reward? The assignment to help fix Windows.”

IndyStar.com | AP National | The Indianapolis Star

Save as… mp3?

DAISY, the Digital Accessible Information SYstem, is the world's most widely used assistive technology for reading. The DAISY Standard (officially ANSI/NISO z39.86 Specifications for the Digital Talking Book) has improved the reading experience for people with print disabilities. The DAISY Consortium announced the release of the second version of the DAISY Translator for Word. Gray Knowlton sums it up best on his blog, Gray Matter:

“The big news with the 2.0 release is the addition of Full DAISY Text and Audio books. Instead of converting to a DAISY XML file, you can now effectively save your Word documents as MP3 files. DAISY XML files can be read natively by some DAISY players, and the DAISY Pipeline is still available for processing those XML files…

…But the change to the 2.0 release of the Translator for Word represents a monumental simplification of this process. This is a fantastic development.”

Bending the Ribbon to your will…

There are some great resources to help smooth over the transition to Office 2007 and a very popular tool is the Get Started add-ins for Office:

Word: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F587370C-FDAE-4EDE-B528-AC58031A5DFF&displaylang=en

Excel: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8A5AF9D7-08A7-41BA-8844-76BB94228957&displaylang=en

PowerPoint: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=831F0AE9-FC50-4074-96D3-D02FD98CB041&displaylang=en

 

However, if you are looking at a rollout in a large organisation, you may want to customise this ribbon to point to your own internal forums, help desk or training materials. Luckily, we thought of that – and this tutorial will guide you through the code to build your own.

The tutorial is based on Visual Studio 2005 but I was able to follow the same steps in Visual Studio 2008 . I have to admit that the environment I tried this on was non-standard (Windows 7 build 7000 64 bit, various beta bits and lots of other stuff that would make a development manager cringe). I did need to run VS2008 as an administrator to build the project, but I am not surprised with some of the DLLs that were referenced.

The article includes the standard XML for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You can customise the XML as much as you like, without having to change any of the code. However, the XML file gets sucked into the project as a resource file, so it will require that you open the solution in visual studio to rebuild.  Once you open the ribbon.xml, what to change is pretty self evident:

<group id="c4" label="Ask the Community">

<button id="b4" label="Discuss Word 2007" size="large" imageMso="MeetingsWorkspace"
  screentip="Discuss Word 2007"
  supertip="Questions? Ask someone for answers." onAction="openPage"
  tag="http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?
  AssetID=HA012061421033&amp;CTT=4&amp;Origin=EC102128421033" />

</group>

Happy coding!

The Myth of Simplicity

It is tempting to suggest that, on average we use perhaps 10% of the functionality in Office. If we use so little, can we get by on a simpler application set for our needs? To answer this question, we rely on the Customer Experience Improvement Program and other, less automated research to gather large amounts of data and understand how users interact with Office.

This research reveals interesting insights into the way people work – often at odds with what a developer or IT professional would expect. For example:

• Despite the ubiquity of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, many mouse clicks are for copy or paste.
• In Outlook, delete is used three times as often as send.
• In a sampling of 20,000 Office users each command is used at least once.
• If 10 of the least frequently-used commands were removed, it could impact 5% of the Office user base, over 30 million people.

Stats change over time, but I think you can see the pattern -If we were looking for a simpler application, which features would make the cut? Inevitably, some users would not have functionality that they use to do their business. More software may be required. As users embrace technology and start to consume large amounts of information from data warehouses, enter business data into CRM systems and collaborate with social networking sites, the requirement for yet more software may rise. Very quickly you may have over 30 different user interfaces, systems, web portals, green screen terminals and custom applications confronting the user. This creates a huge headache for the IT department, supporting, maintaining and enhancing a mess of systems.

Office simplifies the user experience and the IT maintenance workload by acting as the common user experience for not only analysing and authoring documents, but also communication, collaboration, social computing and interaction with other line of business systems. So, while Office may seem like a large suite of desktop applications, servers and web services, it’s value lies in the fact that it unifies so much of a users technology needs under a single, powerful user experience and a single manageable IT experience.

The Office Ribbon

Often simply known as “the ribbon” (although that represents just one component), the Fluent User Interface represents a revolution in the way that Office functionality is exposed to the user. Introduced in Office 2007, the approach quickly caught on, being adopted by many applications, from Microsoft and the wider software community. In 2008, renowned usability expert Jakob Nielsen noted the ribbon had strong early adoption and that:

“...it seems that the ribbon has legs and transfers beyond its document-editing origins.” (1)

Windows 7 also uses the ribbon to give a breath of fresh air to old Windows favourites such as Paint and WordPad. Windows 7 provides APIs known as the Windows Scenic Ribbon for application developers to use in their own applications. (2)

Ribbons in various applications – from top to bottom: Word 2007, AutoCAD 2009 and Paint in Windows 7

The Office Button

The Office Button supersedes the file menu, surfacing commands that do things “with” your document. The Office Button contains commands for not only saving, opening and printing documents, but also to manage the document through its lifecycle. The Office button is the central place to expose commands that prepare the document for distribution, manage metadata and document properties, workflow, integration with backend servers and web services.

 

Note that the ribbon still retains a legacy from the file menu – the Alt-F keyboard shortcut.

Further Reading

1. Year's 10 Best Application UIs. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-design.html .

2. Windows Scenic Ribbon: Developer Resources. Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ScenicRibbon .

The Ultimate Decision Support System?

I did some wiki-reading on advances in decision support systems (Cognitive Science is a personal interest of mine. It is like psychology or artificial intelligence with the hardware abstracted). It struck me that these systems are in use by another name… Consider this excerpt:

A properly-designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present would be:

• an inventory of all of your current information assets (including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts),
• comparative sales figures between one week and the next,
• projected revenue figures based on new product sales assumptions;
• the consequences of different decision alternatives, given past experience in a context that is described.

The last 3 points are things that I see and hear regularly in meetings and videoconferences. But it wasn’t until I read the common benefits of a DSS that I recognised the app.

1. Improves personal efficiency
2. Expedites problem solving
3. Facilitates interpersonal communication
4. Promotes learning or training
5. Increases organizational control
6. Generates new evidence in support of a decision
7. Creates a competitive advantage over competition
8. Encourages exploration and discovery on the part of the decision maker
9. Reveals new approaches to thinking about the problem space

If you added Create powerful, dynamic SmartArt diagrams to this list, you would almost have the top ten benefits of PowerPoint 2007! (well, sort of). This made me think about the decisions that PowerPoint helps make, in its own little way.

 

Digging into Microsoft’s own Master Slide Library (a cloud-based virtual hypothetical satirical data-mall of every powerpoint slide ever created, rumoured to be buried 20km under Mt. Rainier) I was able to dig up some really interesting examples of how PowerPoint slides have been used to help make some business critical decisions over the years, here is one of the oldest examples:

Alexander The Great was a renowned orator and looking at these slides I can see some of that genius coming through. A little bit of time spent on introducing yourself is well spent – it helps the audience connect with the speaker. The large photo is a nice touch – it makes it easier for the people in the back of the coliseum to recognise you out on the forum.

This is a classic example of good scene-setting. Alexander restates the mission and summarises the operating environment (I assume that he would have used a snazzy transition between slides 5 and 6).

Unfortunately the classical greek – modern english translation is not 100% accurate. Historians believe that Darius was referring to Alexander’s mother’s favourite hoplites, known to strike fear and uncertainty into his competitors.

Alexander was very widely read. Under the tutelage of Aristotle, Alexander developed a passion for business, marketing and management literature. The above slide seems to indicate Alexander’s go-to-market strategies were influenced by the very influential “Crossing the Hot Gates”, by Herodotus.

 

 

So, what did we learn from all of this?

• wikipedia can be a wonderful research tool, but it is quite easy to end up down a rabbit hole of unintended information.
• late night blogging does not yield very informative posts
• Used effectively, PowerPoint is a fantastic decision support system!

If you would like to see some more interesting business plan templates, check out Office Online.