David LeBlanc has a really good article on the evolution of cryptography in Office.
David LeBlanc's Web Log : Office Crypto Follies
There have been a lot of advancements to this through the various Office releases but if you absolutely, positively need to lock down a document, I recommend using RMS, which will appear into the Office button menu as Restrict Permission.
In addition to encrypting the documents, RMS will also:
- Control access to sensitive info
- Set access level - view, change, print...
- Determine length of access
- Log and audit who has accessed rights-protected information
PS: I’m in Houston at the World Partner Conference. Come along to the Office Enterprise booth and say hello!
Comic Strip : exCHANGE your Career
The comic is good… not sure it makes me want to work on the exchange team though. Toaster Printers - Really? Maybe if we renamed it Outlook Bread Access, but then we already have an OBA acronym.
I love this feature, but it is very easy to forget. Once you have added a document, you can expand the Attachments chunk to see the attachment options task pane.
So there is about 6 weeks to go to enter the Microsoft National {Community} Demo Competition. This is an opportunity to strut your funky stuff with Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008. To sweeten the deal there is some very serious prizeware attached:
State Finalists
1 x 1gb USB Flash Drive
1 x Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000
1 x Polo T-Shirt
State Winners
1 x Ticket to TechEd 08 in Sydney, including airfares (from the winners nearest capital city to Sydney) and accommodation
1 x Visual Studio Professional with MSDN professional 2008 OR TechNet direct subscription
1 x Media Centre Extender with DVD
National Winner grand Prize
1 x Ticket to U.S. Tech.Ed 2009, including airfares and accommodation
1 x Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 plus MSDN Premium subscription
1 x Media Centre PC
So, the National Winner is going to clean up all of that – awesome! Personally, I am hoping to see the VSTO demos come home for the win, or maybe something that also shows off the new Visual Studio 2008 Extensions to WSS.
Some other demo ideas that I would love to see:
- Using Hyper-V to stand up dev environments for different projects
- NAP for dummies (aka, me. I love the idea of NAP, but it seems a little like sysadmin voodoo)
- Generating Open XML Documents From SQL Server data
- anything IronPython or IronRuby
- Running PHP sites on Windows Server core
Rules! I like to have any case studies or blog posts that interest me on hand to fwd to other people. However, Some RSS feeds (and some bloggers) post way too frequently for me to follow everything.
The problem can be solved by rules!
…you are probably hanging out on the Hands On Labs too much. Previously I talked about what to expect at Tech.Ed and shed some infoporn on the Office System track. As we approach the pointy end, lets talk about speakers and sessions.
So the first international speaker to mention is Paul Cannon. Paul is one of our highest rated speakers at TechEds, SharePoint Conference and is the best Groove guy in the Asia Pacific, or so he leads me to believe.
So, what do we have lined up Groove-wise at TechEd this year?
Groove: Collaboration Mythbusters (Level 250ish)
“It’s too hard to collaborate across so many firewalls. I can’t have access to what I need unless I VPN in or use terminal services. I can’t collaborate without setting up a server”... Moan, bleat, whine... In this session see these myths well and truly busted, using Groove – the collaboration tool for high performing teams.
We Set up Groove Infrastructure in 75 minutes or you get a prize (Level 300ish)
Groove has a number of options for setting up a managed infrastructure – you will see how to manage Groove Client, Groove Enterprise Services and on-site Groove Server environments. In this session Paul and Alistair will attempt to build an onsite groove infrastructure setup in 75 minutes... And if we fail, YOU WIN.
I wanted to do 20 groove sessions, but I was eventually beaten down to 2 by everybody else. Stay tuned for more sessions.
Check out this new SharePoint development site (full of silverlighty goodness):
Do Less. Get More. Develop on SharePoint.
No man is an island, and an Office Technology Specialist like me never works alone. Allow me to introduce some of the team that makes up our BPIO (Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimisation) specialist team. (and their blogs):
Gayan Peiris - Our resident specialist for all things SharePoint (north of the Murray River). Gayan's blog covers:
Will Cornwill looks after SharePoint in the colder states and has been furiously blogging for quite some time.
If blogging is too oldschool for you, dial in to Will on Twitter
And no Business Productivity community would be complete without an Exchange/OCS guy - Johann Kruse:
Johann is also a prolific twitterer.
You will be seeing us all at Tech.Ed so follow these blogs to see how things develop!
Full story at the SMH ... If I were responsible for this, I'd not be happy for a number of reasons:
- If they were using Word 2007, they could have inspected the document and stripped out personally identifiable metadata and the like, before saving as a PDF (via Word)
- I think there is an ethical question of why this needed to be submitted anonymously.
- Was a certain web based document creation tool not up to the task of creating a formatting intensive document like this:
Clerical error exposes Google as anonymous eBay critic - BizTech - Technology
Having said that, mistakes make us human, and we learn from them. My heart goes out to whichever poor soul will have to face up to their Legal Department on monday morning.
For all you collabronauts out there, whether you are architecting, developing, maintaining or consuming information - it these three whitepapers should be a required text and on hand for any snappy business cases you need to put together.
Collaborative content creation with the 2007 Microsoft Office system
The 2007 Microsoft Office system goes far beyond mere content creation by managing the entire document creation process. From gathering information to revising documents in a group setting, its rich collaborative features help people stay connected no matter where they are. And the fully-integrated tools and services of Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, Windows SharePoint Services, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 make it simple to create workflows and publish content widely throughout the organization.
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Document: Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best This white paper describes how different versions of Office programs work together with the 2003 and 2007 versions of SharePoint technologies. Although an overview of the integration features of Microsoft Office 2000 versus Microsoft Office XP with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is provided, the paper’s focus is on the integration features of the Office 2003 Editions versions the 2007 Office Suites with the 2007 SharePoint Products and Technologies.
Microsoft Office Groove and SharePoint Integration This document discusses the you can integrate Groove and SharePoint to enhance and facilitate collaboration in your enterprise. I really believe that the organisations that do not have a use for tools like Groove are the organisations that will not be around in 5 years time. High Performing tools for High Performing teams are a competitive advantage today, but tomorrow? Poor tooling and poor teaming will be a very broken business model.
To those that think they don't need technology to differentiate themselves? Just ask Encyclopedia Britannica. Its fashionable to say that wikipedia killed big heavy EB. However, it was dead long before that - don't you remember Encarta?
Is it a macro? A sharepoint customisation? A mashup?
What is important, in my mind, is that the user is shielded from the complexity (or lack of it) in the process and the application can just stay out of their way so they can do their job and keep using the tools they are familiar with, whether that is browser based (I would recommend SharePoint) or rich client (Word, Excel Powerpoint...).
Technically, I think this conceptual architecture explains it well:
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From Office Business Applications: Pricing Exception Management Solution
OBAs are not just an Office Client thing, they are not the new flavour of macros (but they help us achieve things that we have tried to bend VBA to do for some time). It is all about linking in your backend line of business systems, to your organisations "squishy logic" that performs the bulk of the work (that means you, human!).
Many Office Applications are no-code solutions - All that needs to be done is to configure say, Word to talk to a SharePoint document library, define some metadata and create a workflow via a wizard in SharePoint Designer (or one of the out of the box SharePoint ones).
Or, it could be as complicated as writing .NET/Java code to generate a document on the server side, pulling fields from a number of databases and web services, Biztalk or the like.
Graphical Powershell. Mmmmmm. it almost makes the command line sexy again:
Want to try it out but can't even work out Pasta Shells? Check out the Office Script Repository here
Tech.Ed is inching closer and closer. The amount of unsolicited session nominations has been huge, and we have been wrestling with how best to condense the ecosystem of software that is the Office System into 3 days of technical education.
So, to feed your curiosity, here are some statistics:
Where is it?
Of the 20 Office System specific session slots , lets break down our thinking into some infoporn:
| IT Professional | Developer |
| 11 | 9 |
By Topic*, they look like this:
| OBA | Office | SharePoint | Deployment |
| 5 | 10 | 13 | 10 |
* Yes, we know this doesn't add up to 20, there is some overlap!
If you like Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimisation, it starts to look like this:
| Search | Collaboration | ECM | Business Intelligence* |
| 2 | 5 | 3 | 1 |
* Note that there is a whole separate BI track!
And finally, by depth:
| 200 (intermediate) | 300 (advanced) | 400 (expert)* |
| 4 | 13 | 3 |
* Expect this number to increase
We aren't planning on running introductory sessions - theses are often better covered by Hands On Labs, the products have been around for over a year and most importantly YOUR FEEDBACK tells us that you want more advanced content!
Comments? Suggestions? Let me know. We are hoping to confirm our all star cast from around the world very soon...
6 designs, 9 colours, 7 templates. 378 new options for creating documents that don't suck. Go get them tiger.
Microsoft Small Business Center | Free Office Templates
I mentioned in an earlier post, Beyond Bullet Points. Here is a recent presentation I delivered, using the BPP process. Originally I intended to replace these with nice glossy clip art images. However, I ended up sticking with the stick men, because it gave me more time to talk and listen rather than get bogged down in creating a high fidelity audio visual experience. Plus, it was the last presentation at the end of a long day of markitecture slides - ppt poisoning was taking it's toll.
The situation:
Why this is hard for you today:
The cost of not acting, the current situation:
The end goal, vision, ideal, utopia, nirvana:
The Key Point:
What do you think? Effective or immature?
