Alistair's Online Service

Words of Wisdom as a Service (WoWaaS) from Alistair Speirs, Technology Specialist for Online Services @ Microsoft Australia.
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    better developer productivity with InfoPath

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    Some things are just better said with stickmen: source: xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe The majority of the logic you'll need to add in an InfoPath form is declarative. :) Less time coding = less time testing...
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    "Email to" links generated by SharePoint

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    I got a question last week about the "Email To" functionality in SharePoint - and the fact that it was generating an email in Outlook that contained a URL that had all the punctuation characters escaped (aka . became %2E and spaces become %20, etc, etc...
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    MOSS 2007: Disable forms pages for anonymous users

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    I thought this article was important enough to highlight: If you're running an anonymously accessible MOSS website, especially an internet-facing one, you may have noticed that your SharePoint Forms pages are also accessible to anonymous users. For example...
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    SharePoint and Office versions... huh?

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    I hear a lot of questions about which applications are included in which versions of Office. So, rather than rehash what is elsewhere, I'll point you to the Microsoft Office 2007 Suites page on Office Online. Each suite has a different set of products...
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    Business Desktop Deployment (BDD)

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    What is it? "The Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) delivers end-to-end guidance for efficient planning, building and deploying Microsoft® Windows® Vista and the 2007 Office System." Al's take: "All the documentation...
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    Find out more about finding more

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    There aren't a lot of "Business 2.0" technologies that I use at least once every half an hour. But Enterprise Search is one of them. It flattens almost every information architecture to two clicks (if you're a good keyword cowboy like me). If you work...
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    TechEd, done and dusted!

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    Well, what a week! I spent most of my time on the BPIO booth. Here are some notes: I noticed quite a few questions and confusion about Office Deployment, so I will cover that on this blog in more detail Some of the UC stuff coming out with Office Communications...
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    Office Business Applications

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    A question came up today "Al, what ever happened to all that interesting (and complicated) Information Bridge Framework stuff?" . Like any good Office TSP, I knew the answer :) Office Business Applications (apart from having a much more descriptive name...
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    Obligatory technorati claim post

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    Technorati Profile
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    Feel I'm goin' back to Massachusetts,

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    (Apologies to the BeeGees) Yesterday, Massachusetts approved OpenXML on it's list of approved document standards. In my mind, OpenXML is a great choice for government departments, because of the compatibility packs for everything back to Office 2000,...
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    Interesting tools for OpenXML

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    Here are a couple of really interesting tools that came up in conversation yesterday: Wouter van Vugt's Package Explorer for trawling through the OpenXML in the cool new document formats OpenXML4J , an Office OpenXML file format java library PHPExcel...
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    Symposium for office document standards

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    As mentioned earlier, I went to Open Publish 2007 today. Standardised document standards are a pretty hot topic at the moment, but it is rare that you get to listen to people knowledgeable about the ISO process, ODF and OpenXML all in the same room at...
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    Random text in Word 2007

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    This tip is pretty basic, but it is something I use surprisingly often. Typing: =lorem() or =lorem(x) for any given x, where x is a positive integer* will give you the classic "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." text. Typing: =rand() or =rand(x) for any given...
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