This is my last post on my Microsoft blog. I've had a great 4.5 years here at Microsoft. Met some amazing people, and played with some cool technology. Now I'm moving on to do my own thing. I'll be blogging about Office 2.0, Web 2.0, and all kinds of...

I know this isn't related to the tech industry, but a few weeks ago I visited my sister in Maui for her graduation. This was my first time to Maui, and it was such a fantastic trip I had to write up a little travelogue about it. My sister lives there...

The entire Office Developer Portal on MSDN has been redesigned, including the Office Live section. The result is a nice clean look, with less navigation required to get were you're going. The excellent MSDN team is constantly coming up with improvements...

Here is a great post by Mike Gannotti - how to integrate Popfly mashups with SharePoint. He also published a screen cast . What I think is compelling about this - he was able to create a mashup with Popfly that can be published to any web page, SharePoint...

Microsoft disclosed Popfly today, as the "fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications." We will be showing it off at Maker Faire this weekend. Mary Jo Foley and TechCrunch have some nice coverage of Popfly as well. Popfly...

Do you know who employs 98% of the entire workforce worldwide? Do you know which market has 3 million businesses in the US alone which drives $14 Billion ? Did you also know that only 49% of these businesses had a web site in 2005, even though two-thirds...

Learn about the opportunity that Office Live represents for developers at one of our upcoming Office Live reviews. Do you build software solutions and/or provide services to small business? Do you want to create an additional stream of income with a low...

Check these out - Silverlight wallpapers and Dreamscene backgrounds for download.

On Wednesday May 9 at 4:00 my colleague Ben Riga and I will be doing a keynote presentation to the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce called Microsoft for Small Business: Ready to Grow When You Are . We will demo Windows Vista, the new Office 2007 user...

Well Mix07 was a blast. My colleague Rohit Puri and I did a session on Office Live for Designers and Developers. We had 70-80 people in the audience and got a lot of questions. We did our Northwind Inn demo, which shows many of the ways you can customize...

I'm working on an Office Live end-to-end demonstration called Northwind Inn for the Mix07 Conference with my colleague, Rohit Puri . During the demo I wanted to add some JavaScript code to pre-fill form field elements as part of the demo. You know, the...

Our SMBx Application Marketplace panel discussion went well today - despite the fact that it started at 8:30am and everyone was out late at the parties last night. We had probably 150+ people in the session and tons of great questions from the audience...

I'm looking forward to the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo - I'll be speaking on a panel called SMBx: The Revolution Of The SMB Application Marketplace with my friends from Etelos , Google , and Zoho . The moderator will be Joel Dreyfuss from Red Herring whom I...

There has been a lot of controversy about these formats recently, but the reality is both will be around for a long time. I don't think it is an either - or proposition. Michael Scherotter at Mindjet Labs just posted about the ability for MindManager...

What is Office Live? What does it mean for web-savvy developers? Here is my attempt to bring things together in one of my favorite ways - a mindmap . Simply put, Office Live is a set of web-based services for small businesses to manage their business...

This promises to be an interesting conference - Why Office 2.0 Matters . On March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View ( where I work ), it is attracting a lot of great start-up talent. I'll get to see many of my friends from the Office 2.0 Conference...

Here is a great article from Ed Bott , where he lists the types of actions that require "elevation" to administrator status (straight from his new book ). Make sure to read the comments section to the post, these cleared up a number of questions for me...

My friend Steve Hansen from Office Zealot posted a very interesting scenario for how Office Live could leverage Excel Services . Almost everybody in a small or medium business uses spreadsheets, right? Well allowing them to easily publish those spreadsheets...

From Guy Kawasaki's blog , a new study by Frederic Lucas-Conwell looks at what a technical evangelist is and what motivates them (us). Here is the abstract from the study: The purpose of this study was to gain a clearer understanding of the relatively...

Watch it, Code it, Read it, Explore it – New Office Visual How To’s! Office Visual How To's combine a video demo, a code sample, a conceptual overview, and links to related resources in a single experience. All this provides a wide variety of learning...

On Tuesday, January 30, Michael Scherotter from Mindjet and I will be giving a free technical webinar on how the Word 2007 Map Editor for Mindjet MindManager works. Here's the description: Join Don Campbell, Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, and Michael...

Tim Aidlin , Design Evangelist at Microsoft did some work for us customizing our Office Live demo site called Northwind Inn, which was built by my co-worker Rohit Puri - Rohit, you need a blog I can link to! He did almost all of the customization using...

Our first Office Live mash-up sample app is posted on MSDN , and Microsoft Watch wrote about it even before we we did. This is a nice mashup, and a great example of calling the Office Live web services apis from within JavaScript. Basically, it allows...

I love this tag-cloud generator tool - Todd Bishop did an analysis of the keynotes that Steve Job gave at Macworld and Bill Gates gave at CES. It's interesting to see the kinds of terms they each use, and how often. Bill likes to say "great" and Steve...

The prolific Mindjet labs has produced another great integration with Office 2007, this time with OneNote 2007. This integration allows you to From MindManager, you can easily map out the Notebooks, Sections, and Pages, including hyperlinks to the notebooks...