The last presentation

Well – the last presentation that I’m going to deliver on behalf of Microsoft as a full time employee that is…

Its been a bit of a poignant day today.  I delivered an Office 2007 presentation for one of the NHS Trust suppliers in the East Midlands.  And I went back to basics.  I tried to imagine what I’d do if I wasn’t technical at all (a nurse for example), and I was using Office 2007 for the very first time.  What would be the first thing I’d want to know?

Well its this little icon in the top right hand corner of the screen.

 

Simple eh?  But no one seems to use the help much.  and it’s so damn good!  Pressing this icon (remember this is your first visit to Office 2007( gives you the search dialog box.  Type “get started” in the box and…

This gives you the option to download the extra tab for Word, PowerPoint and Excel which gives you all you need to get going on the products.  But the best icon isn’t mentioned in the help screen above.  Here’s my screenshot of the tab.

The “interactive guide” is a godsend for anyone familiar with Office 2003.  the button takes you to the web, where you can play the commands you’re used to and see where the commands now are in Office 2007.  Simples…

But why is this tab not installed by default?  There must be many many people who are also completely mystified by the new Ribbon interface and frustrated that they can’t find anything,  This tab should be enabled at install and disabled if the user wishes to hide it – not the other way round.  It would make using the product much more easy from day one.  It’s sad that such a simple thing like this would make peoples lives so much more easy when they’re learning a new product.

So poignant for me as it’s my last presentation for Microsoft – but useful as it’s really started me thinking about when I’m going to do after I leave Microsoft.

I want to help people find a better way to do things.  So where do I start?

 

Technorati Tags: Office 2007

Outlook Thread Compressor – now available externally

Ewan has finally gone ahead and posted this amazing tool externally.  Thousands of us have been using this internally at Microsoft for years.  I make no apologies for reproducing his post (for those of you who don’t click links to other blogs)

Included in the v5 beta (which is a real pain to install nowadays – the previous v4.2.030 version has nearly the same feature set and is a lot more self contained), was a piece of logic which captured stats on TC usage and emailed them back to me.

Since many people at MS are still running that beta (it’s a long story, but the source code went south so it’ll never get out of “beta” state), I still get maybe 20-30 statistics mails a day…

Since August 2003 when the first statistics email arrived – from me, kind-of naturally – until 24th April 2007 (when I last did an analysis of the stats), TC v5 beta had scanned over 400m email messages and had compressed over 30m, worth nearly half a terabyte of email data.

I can honestly say that the Thread Compressor has been great for my productivity and is the first thing i install on my PC after a rebuild… It’s small, neat, efficient – and cuts the mail down in your Inbox dramatically – allowing you to have lots more coffee!

Do read the warnings though that Ewan blogs about.  This DELETES your mail  So of course there are disclaimers over on the site .  But it will save you a heck of a lot of time too…

Great stuff mate – Forgiveness, not permission

Technorati Tags: Thread Compressor,Outook

Interact 2009 and Exchange 2010

 

Interact2009 was a really amazing event yesterday, even more so because we’d given all of the attendees pre-release information about Exchange 2010 so that they could blog about the new features today after the deadline.  The beta is available to download and there’s a new site dedicated to the features of Exchange 2010 with a link to the download. 

I’ll leave all of the techy bits to Steven and Mark, who have done much more research than me, but i will share some photos and a video from the event yesterday.

 

   

Steven Jenkinson meets Steven Jenkinson – which caused us some frantic checking of our registration lists

The afternoon consisted of virtual sessions streamed from Redmond and viewed in Boston and Reading.  Local facilitators were in each room

After the keynote, it was off upstairs to PubWorld.  one of our regular meeting rooms had been converted into a pub for the evening.  here’s a video about PubWorld  and some more photos

and a final video with some soundbites from the camera shy attendees

A great day and a great announcement about Exchange 2010.  Nice one team….

 

Technorati Tags: Interact 2009,Exchange 2010

OCS R2: A really easy way to share your desktop

I didn’t know just how simple and easy this was.  I was chatting to Jane who is onsite at a customer and showed her how to share your desktop and to transfer control.

All you need to do is click the sharing icon – the one with the hand under it… which sends an invite to the other party in the conversation.  Here’s the notification that Jane sent me:

Here’s Jane’s desktop with her in control:

It’s easy enough to give control to the other person click on the drop down box and decide who to give control to.  in the box below – Jane has given me control of her desktop

So this is fine if you just want to have a 1:1 peer to peer conversation – but what if you want to include someone else in the conversation?  Easy.  just use the invite button as normal.  Notice that Ewan, who has just joined the conference has automatically been added to the sharing session.

And now I have the option who I choose to give control to.  All, or just one of the participants.  Great for collaboration.  Great ad hoc way for working together..

  and all from a button on the Office Communicator R2 client. 

Magic…

Technorati Tags: OCS R2

Technet Virtual conference. Vote for your sessions

We’re planning a Virtual conference in May this year as we’re not going out on the road this summer with the TechNet roadshow.  Alex, who writes the TechNet Newsletter,  has created an online poll so you can vote for the sessions that you’d really like us to deliver.

We’ll be creating the Virtual Conference based on your answers to this Poll so please can you vote for the sessions that you’d most like us to deliver and we’ll schedule the day round your responses.

George has the information about all of the sessions on her blog if you’d like to see what the sessions are all about before you vote.

 

I’ll share more information about the sessions when we have a decent number of votes to make a good choice of sessions…

Technorati Tags: Virtual conference,Technet

Boy exposed by Windows mobile :-)

This is too good not to share.  The latest Viral ad showing  just how connected we can be – and how easy it is to get caught doing something you shouldn’t.  It’s a great show of our Windows home stack too.

Thanks to @lokeuei for the original tweet on this…

Technorati Tags: Windows mobile

SlideShare ribbon for PowerPoint

I’ve finally got round to installing the Slideshare ribbon for PowerPoint – just the thing for sharing my session decks on the web.  I’d forgotten to install the .NET framework 3.5 and then I built my new PC – all excuses I know   Then I went ahead and installed the ribbon onto Powerpoint

Meet the SlideShare ribbon for PowerPoint

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: slideshare microsoft)

I like it.  It brings PowerPoint closer to all of the other Social networking stuff I do and enables me to seamlessly post presentations to the cloud directly from PowerPoint,  It’s a simple little addin – just like the blog from Word 2007 feature – that brings the cloud and your desktop seamlessly together. It also allows you to search for and download presentations from the cloud and modify them with Powerpoint.  now THAT’s useful.  Techcrunch and the Read Write Web seem to like it too.

So with that and the ability to post your own SlideShare widget on your blog so everyone can find your latest presentations.

Such a great add in…

 

Technorati Tags: SlideShare,Powerpoint addin

Missing Drafts folder in Outlook 2007: Found again with MFCMAPI

Techy:  Someone that won’t let something go till they get to the root of the issue.  That’s me…

That damned missing Drafts folder in Outlook has been bugging me and I’ve had lots of mails and Tweets asking me whether I’ve found it.  I couldn’t let it rest at all.  I’d started Outlook with the /resetfolders switch, and the /resetfoldernames and the /cleanprofile switch but no use.  The folder was still missing.  So I gave up and asked our internal Outlook DL if anyone had any further ideas to point me on the way.  Well thanks to Mitesh, I now have the answer – and the solution.

What I needed to download was MFCMAPI (to try and see if the folder was there and hidden somewhere in my Outlook profile).  And here are the steps I followed:

Download MFCMAPI

1) Install MFCMAPI. Close Outlook.
2) Click on the Session menu and select “Log on and Display Store Table”.  (This prompts you for your Outlook profile)

3) Double click on your mailbox in the top pane.
4) Expand Top of IPM_SUBTREE then find and select the Drafts folder – Check for PR_ATTR_HIDDEN attribute.

5) If it is set to True, then right click on it, click on edit Property and uncheck the checkbox, which set it to False.

6) Then launch Outlook and you will see the Drafts folder back.

 

Phew.  I’m happy now.  And no longer worried that I’ve lost mails or not sent them when I was distracted …

 

Technorati Tags: Drafts folder,outlook 2007

Unified Communications online tutorials

Unified Communications tutorials are now available.  If you’ve never seen what Unified communications can do for you and want a step through guide then have a look here.  There are modules on:

Module 1: Intro to UC and Enterprise Voice Launch
Module 2: Communicator Instant Messaging and Presence Launch
Module 3: Enterprise Voice–Soft phone Experience Launch
Module 4: Desk Phone Experience Launch
Module 5: Communicator – Audio and Video Launch
Module 6: Microsoft Office Live Meeting & Microsoft® RoundTable

 

 

 

As you might notice, this training has been put together using SCORM compliant which is used extensively in education to put learning modules together.  We use this type of learning material internally to do our internal training and development and it’s easy to set up your own online training using this.

Thanks to Neeti in the UC team for forwarding the link.  These modules are a nice set of learning sessions for anyone who wants to get to grips with UC in their organisation…

Technorati Tags: Unified Communications,scorm,tutorial

Office Communicator R2 for your mobile phone

Just noticed this over on Johanns blog who got it from the Unified communications team blog and it looks really really nice.

I love the single number reach and the call routing features.  I transfer my desk phone number to my mobile, use simultaneous ring and have one voicemail message.  My unified messaging voicemails go straight to my email inbox and can be accessed from anywhere.  now with the mantra:

“One Phone, One voice mail, Single Number Reach”  I think I’m almost there.

Now to pull down the latest build and demo it to everyone I see.  Thanks Marc for such a comprehensive post – we’ve been waiting for this to be blogged for a while now.  Great stuff!

Technorati Tags: communicator mobile,office communicator