search.subscribe.share in outlook 2007 : General

On Word & Outlook 2007...

michaelaffronti — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:14:00 GMT

In past versions, Outlook actually used two rendering engines – IE’s for reading content, and Word for editing when you were composing messages. What this meant was that if you were replying or forwarding HTML emails, previous versions of Outlook would first use IE’s rendering engine to view it, then would have to switch over to the compose engine (Word).

This wasn’t an ideal experience for customers, as the content people created often looked different to the recipient receiving it – like the formatting would be slightly off, or things wouldn’t appear as they had when the message was in “compose” mode. Added to that, one of the big things we heard in designing Outlook 2007 was that our customers wanted the rich editing tools they were used to from Word. As great as IE7 is, it was never designed to be an editing tool for text.

On their end, the Word team had been making advancements of their own in how Word 2007 handled HTML content, based on HTML and CSS standards. So we made the decision to unify the rendering and editing engine in Outlook by using Word’s engine.

While there are some HTML and CSS attributes that aren’t currently supported by Word’s rendering engine, the capabilities that our customers most wanted for their HTML newsletters are supported by Outlook 2007.

See msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx and msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx for more details on what HMTL and CSS standards are and aren’t supported.

Another great reference is this whitepaper describing the new Word integration into Outlook: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102109301033.aspx.

new blog from the Vista Shell team

michaelaffronti — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 22:27:16 GMT

The Windows Shell Team has a new blog entitled "Shell Revealed". From the site…

Welcome to shell:revealed, the home of the Windows Client team. We're the folks that build the core user interface for Windows and we love every minute of it!

shell:revealed isn't about Windows Vista, it's about Windows. Many of the people on the Windows Client team have been here a very long time and have plenty of knowledge to share with the world. This is the place to find out what we're doing, how we're doing it, and why. This site is dedicated to all Windows users.

They were also on /. this morning. Sweet!

RSS in Outlook - upgrading from Beta 2 to B2TR

michaelaffronti — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:01:00 GMT

With the Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh now live on the web, I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about the best way to get your RSS feeds up and running after you upgrade. The B2TR installation is actually a patch that installs on top of the original Beta 2 and makes upgrading very simple.

In B2TR we made a significant amount of changes to the way that are RSS Feeds are stored internally inside of Outlook. These changes were made to deal with several cases where users could receive duplicate items for an individual post, have duplicate feed folders, or even experience the loss of feeds or sync breaking when using an Exchange account.

If you've got a lot of feeds in the original Beta 2 and are going to be installing the B2TR patch, we recommend a few steps to get your RSS setup using the new architecture.

Upgrade Steps

In Beta2, export your feeds as an OPML file.
Patch to the B2TR.
Run Outlook with the /cleansharing command. Do this by going to Start: Run, then type "Outlook /cleansharing".
1. This will remove ALL of the RSS Feed subscriptions from Outlook.
2. It will not remove the folders or the data, but if you go to the Account Manager's RSS tab (Tools: Accounts, RSS) you will not see any more feeds listed.
3. This is an important step since it clears out all the feeds using the old architecture.
4. Note: this will also remove all of the subscriptions to Microsoft SharePoint sites and Internet Calendar subscriptions.
You can now delete the folders for your old RSS Feeds since the next step will create new folders.
1. If you're on Exchange give this operation a few minutes to sync to your server and other Outlook clients.
Import your OPML file.

Those steps should get you working cleanly with the improved RSS architecture in the B2TR. If you've got any comments or issues please use your normal support channel (if you're a corporate beta user) or drop me a comment below.

Internet Explorer 7 Integration

Outlook B2TR's integration with the IE 7 RSS Platform will require the IE7 RC1 build for WindowsXP, or Windows Vista RC1, in order for the sync to work correctly.

Thanks! Good luck with the B2TR build.

IWCenter podast

michaelaffronti — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 08:37:00 GMT

About two weeks I did a great interview with Shawn Murrary for his podcast on the IWCenter. Shawn's site is a fantastic source of information on Office 2007 and how many of the new features across all of the products will change the way information worker go about their day.

My direct podcast is located here, and Shawn keeps a repository of all his podcasts on this page (including one with SteveB!).

Thanks Shawn for this great opportunity to talk about some of the exciting work we've done in Outlook 2007. If anyone has any questions based on what Shawn and I discussed feel free to let me know.

Happy listening... :)

Paul Thurrott review of Office B2TR

michaelaffronti — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:40:00 GMT

Another great review by Paul Thurrott over on the Windows SuperSite: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/office2007_beta2_tr.asp.

He's got some great information on Outlook and talks specifically about the new Instant Search functionality.

Top 10 Ways to Motivate a Geek

michaelaffronti — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:46:03 GMT

I couldn't resist posting about this article. It's a decent read and highlights some of the issues I see affecting us here at Microsoft every day. It's my first visit to the Retrospector's blog and I've already subscribed; another good read is the linked article on "how to become an early riser." I get chided on all the time because I'm one of those "sleeps four hours a night" people and am always up early, but after reading that article maybe its totally normal to do so.

so it begins...

michaelaffronti — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 19:35:00 GMT

9:36am, just ran into Hans (former Outlook PM now Walter Cronkite apprentice) and am sitting in the main room of the conference. We've got a Windows Live booth outside of the conference room that's got a few Vista demo machines and it's also where Joe and I will be demoing Outlook and Word 2007. Check it out!

Gnomedex 6.0 baby!

michaelaffronti — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 23:52:00 GMT

Gnomedex 6.0 starts tonight! Last year was a blast and I'm looking forward to attending this weekend. I'll be there with a bunch of other folks from Microsoft representing Office, XBox, Windows Live, Vista, and a bunch of other teams. We'll have a little lounge area set up where you can come by, chat with us, and catch a quick game on an XBox 360. I'll have a laptop with the latest build of Outlook on it, so come to say hi and see a quick demo of our RSS aggregation, Internet Calendaring and Sharing, Instant Search, and all of the cool new features in our product. See you tomorrow!

Ready, Set, Publish! Internet Calendaring in Outlook 2007

michaelaffronti — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 23:44:00 GMT

Internet Calendar Publishing in Outlook 2007

I talked about Internet Calendar Subscriptions in Outlook 2007 in an earlier post. I would now like to talk a bit about actually publishing Internet Calendars. Internet Calendar Publishing in Outlook gives users the ability to publish personally-created Outlook calendars on the Internet, and start sharing them with others.

Publishing a calendar to Office Online

All you need to start publishing calendars to Office Online is a Windows Live ID (formerly Passport) account and your copy of Outlook 2007, and you are ready to go!

1. Right-click on the calendar you want to publish

a. Clicking “Publish My Calendar…” on the Navigation Pane will publish your default calendar.

2. Click Publish to Internet -> Publish to Office Online

a. If you are publishing for the first time, you will be prompted to register for Office Online using a Windows Live ID.

3. Specify how you want to publish the calendar on the “Publishing Options” dialog.

a. Detail: You can choose among three levels of detail:

Availability Only: Will show information as Free/Busy/Tentative/Out Of Office
Limited Details: Will show the availability and subjects of calendar items
Full Details: Will show full details of the calendar items

b. Time Span: You can publish the whole calendar for non-default calendars, or choose a date range for publishing for any calendar.

c. Permissions:

Unrestricted Access: You can choose to publish publicly, which enables anyone who knows the calendar address to subscribe to it.
Restricted Access: Publishing a restricted calendar lets you decide who will have access to it by sending out Sharing Messages to the users who will have access to the calendar with Windows Live ID accounts.

d. Upload method:

Automatic Uploads automatically pushes the changes on the publisher’s machine to the servers, updating the calendar on the server when the local copy changes. This works great with Internet Calendar Subscriptions, where the changes automatically trickle down to the subscribers.
Single Upload is useful when you know that the calendar information is static, and does not update as changes happen on the publisher’s side.

4. Clicking OK publishes the calendar to Office Online.

After this step, you can send Sharing Messages to the users that you want to share your calendar with. For restricted calendars, this is a necessary step to grant access to others. I will be talking about Sharing Messages on a later post in more detail.

Publishing a calendar to a Custom Server

For users who run their own servers, Outlook 2007 enables publishing to custom servers running WebDAV in addition to the Office Online solution. Users who choose this option can still benefit from Outlook’s rich Internet Calendaring features by setting up an internal server and arranging permissions on the server so that only the authorized persons can subscribe to the published calendar.

Internet Calendaring: Q&A time...

michaelaffronti — Fri, 19 May 2006 06:00:00 GMT

There were some great questions in the comments to my previous post about Internet Calendar Subscriptions in Outlook 2007. I wanted to answer those before I go on to talk about Internet Calendar Publishing in Outlook 2007. - Can

"However, the downloaded calendar will not be updated automatically when the original calendar is changed." So how do they get updated?

Internet Calendars that are ‘subscribed to’ via the webcal:// protocol will get updated automatically. The webcal:// handler on the URL tells Outlook to establish a dynamic link with the calendar that lets us check for changes at each update interval. Downloaded, or imported calendars, are static and will not receive updates. That operation is a one-time only import.

Can you compare and contrast the functionality offered here vs. that of Outlook Calendar Sharing in an Exchange Environment?

Within a corporation or any Exchange Environment, Exchange sharing is still the best way of sharing calendars and other Outlook data. For instance, Exchange calendar sharing can have “read/write” access for the subscribers, whereas Internet Calendar Subscriptions are always read-only. When sharing through Exchange, you will need a connection to your server (possibly inside your corporation’s intranet) to stay up to date with any shared calendars. Internet-based calendars can be accessed whenever Outlook has regular Internet access, and does not require Exchange connectivity.

Willthis work for Free/Busy information (i.e., is it shown when you go to schedule an appointment with someone).

Yes. It’s a great way of scheduling with someone who is outside of your coporation’s Exchange environment. For scheduling amongst people in the same environment, free/busy information through Exchange is still the best way to go.

What scenarios do you see this primarily used in?

If you’re a sports fan, you can easily subscribe to an Internet Calendar version of your favorite team’s schedule. This would allow you to see all of the upcoming games and even overlay that calendar on top of your own – now find out exactly where and when you’ll be able to catch a game. If the team changes location and/or time for a game, as often happens in the playoffs, any schedule change will be automatically sunk down to Outlook. For projects, it offers an easy way for the coordinator to create a group calendar that is accessible by all members of the team.

The personal space has some awesome applications of Internet Calendaring that become accessible with our calendar publishing functionality. Look forward to a blog post about that soon.

Have you looked at using RSS as a transport mechanism for this information? I think there is a service called rsscalendar.com that does this. RSS to me seams like a natural way to syndicate this calendar information. If you have looked at it, what was the decision to not go in the RSS direction?

Outlook 2007 will not support using RSS as a calendar transport protocol. It is a compelling use of the RSS format and we are investigating its integration in a future release of Outlook.

What will be the link (if any) to Outlook Web Access? I guess what I am trying to ask is if calendars added to outlook will be accessible in Outlook Web Access?

Subscribed Internet Calendars are local to your machine, however, the information we use to subscribe to the calendars roams through Exchange. This means that on each machine that you connect to Exchange you will be able to see the Internet Calendars after they have been download onto that machine’s local store. However, they are not available through OWA since they need to be downloaded to your local store.

Would Microsoft provide tools and code samples for developing with the webcal protocol?

The webcal protocol is just a derivative of the http protocol, which enables the browser to hand the Internet Calendar address correctly to any registered iCal client. Thus generating a webcal address is trivial once you have the http address for the *.ics file. For generating ical content, users can choose to save their calendar as iCal (*.ics) or publish their calendar directly in Outlook and share their calendar, as I will outline in my next post.

Thank you for your interest and questions. I’ll be talking about Internet Calendar Publishing in Outlook 2007 in my next post, and until that time, let us know if you have any other comments and questions about Internet Calendaring…

Blogging from Word 2007

michaelaffronti — Fri, 12 May 2006 20:18:00 GMT

My friend and colleague Joe Friend over in Word 2007 land (actually just upstairs from my office) has released the details of some awesome new functionalty enabled in the Word 2007 Beta 2:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joe_friend/archive/2006/05/12/595963.aspx

That's right - blogging from Word 2007 is here! Joe's post is very detailed and includes some great screen shots. I just started using the tool and it is wicked cool. Stop by his blog and check it out! Great job Joe, Krista, and the rest of the Word team.

Internet Calendar Subscriptions - Part 1

michaelaffronti — Thu, 11 May 2006 02:35:00 GMT

This post is coming to you courtesy of Can Comertoglu, our Outlook PM in charge of our Internet Calendaring experience. The new Internet Calendar functionality falls under the Sharing experience for Outlook 2007, so I've asked Can to take a few posts and discuss it with all of you here on the Search.Subscribe.Search blog. I encourage everyone to ask questions at the end of each post; we'll aggregate them together and do another Q&A soon.

Can, take it away...

Outlook 2007 introduces Internet Calendar Subscriptions, the ability to download Internet Calendars (.ics files) into Outlook and receive updates to the calendar content automatically. While Internet Calendars can be downloaded into Outlook without the subscription functionality, the dynamic nature of the subscription-based calendars makes them a compelling solution for online content providers to provide rich content to their users.

When an Internet Calendar is downloaded using the subscription functionality, the calendar is read-only and bound to the original Internet Calendar on the server. This dynamic binding allows updates to be received by the client every time the original calendar changes. Internet Calendars that are downloaded into Outlook without the subscription functionality are not ready-only and can be modified in Outlook. However, the downloaded calendar will not be updated automatically when the original calendar is changed.

Subscription-based Internet Calendars use the WebCal protocol (webcal://), which is a derivative of the http:// protocol and is used to create the subscription binding.

Internet calendars can be brought into Outlook for subscription in three ways:

Clicking a “webcal://” link in a web browser: When you click on a webcal:// link, Outlook displays the confirmation dialog box as below, and clicking yes creates the subscription binding. This is the easiest way to subscribe to calendars found in online Internet Calendar Directories such as www.icalshare.com.
Subscribing via Outlook Account Manager: The alternative option is to create the binding manually by going into Account Manager in Outlook (Tools->Account Settings) and switching to Internet Calendars tab as shown in the picture below. Here you can both change the settings on existing subscriptions, and add new subscriptions by clicking “New”. Once you enter the calendar address in the dialog box, Outlook will create the subscription binding.
Subscribing via a Sharing Message from another Outlook user: In subsequent posts, I will be talking about publishing Internet Calendars from Outlook 2007. After publishing calendars, users can send Sharing Messages to the users that they would like to share their calendar with. Recipients can subscribe to those published calendars from within Outlook, creating a seamless publishing/subscribing experience.

Check out Bill & Kurt's keynote @ the MS Office Developers Conference

michaelaffronti — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 02:30:00 GMT

Bill Gates and Kurt DelBene will be keynoting at the Microsoft Office Developes Conference on Tuesday, March 21st here in Redmond, WA.

It's going to be an exciting presentation that focuses on the 2007 Office system and the major investments made in all aspects of the platform: client, servers, tools - all of them built on XML and readily extensible.

The keynote will be from 9am to 11am on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006, and can be viewed live on the Web through MSDN: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=63190.

Hope you get a chance to check it out!

The Name

michaelaffronti — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:03:00 GMT

It's here... finally! We've closed on the new name for our product, and I'm pumped to announce it as Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. No logos to show you guys yet, but stay tuned.

The official name of the entire product line is the 2007 Microsoft Office System. That's the uber naming that includes the server, client, and add-on tools.

Technorati is so cool...

michaelaffronti — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 03:55:00 GMT

I think one of the coolest parts about having a blog is being able to see who communicates about it around the web, and Technorati is awesome for that. I regularly click on the "who blogs about me" link (http://www.technorati.com/search/http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_affronti?cc=hwnjjtb5rc) to see what types of feedback people have on our work here in Outlook.