The Microsoft Wow Blog!: Office

Office Live Update 1.1

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:47:48 GMT

The Office Live Update 1.1 for Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta makes working with Microsoft Office programs faster and lets you access workspaces from Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The Office Live Update 1.1 installs (1) performance updates to make using Office Live Workspace with Microsoft Office programs faster, (2) the latest Office Live Add-in for Microsoft Office that enables you to access your workspaces directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and (3) the Multiple Document Upload Tool.
The Office Live Update 1.1 auto-detects and installs these necessary updates to ensure optimum performance:

Update for Office 2007 (KB 941637)
Update for Windows Vista (KB 933860)
Update for Windows Vista (KB 945145)
Update for Windows Vista (KB 945435)
Update for Windows Vista (KB 947864)
Update for Windows Vista (KB 948531)
Windows Live Sign-in Assistant

The Office Live Add-in adds new menu options in the 2007 Microsoft Office Suite and a toolbar in Microsoft Office XP and Office 2003. You will be able to open documents located in Office Live Workspace directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You will also be able to save files directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to Office Live Workspace.
The Multiple Document Upload Tool lets you add multiple documents to a workspace at once and even allows users to drag and drop files directly from their desktop.

Download At Microsoft

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Search Command for Office Ribbon. Official Download!

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:34:23 GMT

Search Commands helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need. Search Commands also includes Guided Help, which acts as a tour guide for specific tasks.

Click here to download.

Requirements:
32 bit Windows XP or Windows Vista. Office 2007.

Limitations:
English only. Works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint only.

Last updated:
04/23/2008

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Real meaning of "Security" ? - flashback to Office XP

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 11:13:50 GMT

The uneXPected eXPerience on Office XP...

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Office 2007 SP1 Installation/Slipstream Guide

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:01:27 GMT

Some of you may be wondering how to do a clean install of Office 2007 using an Office 2007 RTM image along with SP1 at the same time. As you may know, Office 2007 makes use of the Updates folder in the installation media to install any new updates that it finds in the folder however the updates need to be in the .msp file format for them to be recognized. Since the Office 2007 SP1 update file is delivered in the .exe format, an extra step is required before being able to proceed:
First, you should copy the contents of the Office 2007 RTM image to a temporary folder. For our example we're using C:\O2007Temp\. We have also copied the Office 2007 SP1 Update file (office2007sp1-kb936982-fullfile-en-us.exe) to the D:\ drive.
Then, using the Run command in Windows XP/Vista (WinKey+R), run the following command:

D:\office2007sp1-kb936982-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:C:\O2007Temp\Updates\

replacing D:\ with wherever you stored the Office 2007 SP1 update file and C:\O2007Temp\ with wherever you stored the Office 2007 RTM files. After agreeing to the Microsoft Software License Terms, SP1 will be extracted to C:\O2007Temp\Updates\.
That's it! Just start the setup for Office 2007 and the updates for SP1 will then be picked up and installed during the setup. The same method applies to any other Office 2007 SP1 update.

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Office 2007 SP1 ready for download today!

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 02:35:34 GMT

Today SP1 ships. hurray. It's not up there yet but should be later today. Also the kb articles for each patch don't seem to be live at this moment but should also appear later on today.

Looking down the list of fixes, here are some that caught my eye (read the whitepaper for the full list):

Communicator won't let you IM a distribution list any more for security reasons
Icons for presence have been modified so that red/green colour blind people can tell the difference between available and busy by looking at the icon rather than the text next to it
That Excel bug with 65,534 getting shown as 100,001 is fixed
SharePoint works on Windows Server 2008
ASP.net AJAX supported on SharePoint for web parts
Outlook delays with opening large psts eliminated

For a full list of improvements in SP1, download the Service Pack 1 whitepaper.

Initially, SP1 will be available as a free download from OfficeOnline. SP1 will be made available via Automatic Update in the next 3-6 months, and we'll issue 30 day advance notice prior to delivering SP1 via automatic update.

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Microsoft Delivers Office Live Workspace Beta

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:00:41 GMT

Microsoft Office Director of Consumer and Small Business Product Management Kirk Gregersen discusses the public beta of Office Live Workspace, an online extension to Office that provides new Web storage and collaboration capabilities.

Microsoft today is beginning roll-out of the public beta of Office Live Workspace, a secure online workspace to which Office users can post Word, PowerPoint, Excel or PDF files directly from Office applications to work on remotely from virtually any web-connected PC and collaborate on with others.

To learn more about Office Live Workspace, PressPass spoke with Kirk Gregersen, Office Director of Consumer and Small Business Product Management.

PressPass: So, what are you announcing today?

Gregersen: We’re announcing that the public beta of Microsoft Office Live Workspace is going live for the first set of people in the United States who pre-registered for the service at www.officelive.com.

We’re also introducing community discussion forums on the Office Live Workspace Community site, which should provide a great way for our early beta users to share their experiences, tell us what we can improve and ask any questions they might have.

PressPass: What is Office Live Workspace and how does it try to help Office users?

Gregersen: Office Live Workspace is the first Office Live service for all Office users. It provides an easy way for people to save their Office documents and other files to the web, and then to share their work and collaborate with others. We think that Office Live Workspace will be important for our 500 million Office customers because it’s one of the first tightly integrated web-based sharing and collaboration services designed to give a seamless experience for Office users.

The service also responds to some of the top requests that we’ve gotten from Office customers, which require a combination of the web and great integration with Office on the desktop to really solve. The way that Office Live Workspace extends Office on the desktop is a good example of what Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie refer to as our “software plus services” approach.

PressPass: How will people be able to use Office Live Workspace and what will it mean for their everyday work and personal lives?

Gregersen: Customers have asked for an easy way to save their documents from Office to the web, so that they can get to their information or projects if they’re away from their PC. People also get frustrated with the confusing free-for-all that can result when multiple versions of documents circulate in e-mail attachments that then have to be manually pulled together by the original author. We’re hopeful that Office Live Workspace helps solve these challenges by providing a place online to keep a single version of a document that everyone can work on – so you’ll always know if you’re working on the latest draft.

Office Live Workspace also provides a seamless connection with Office on the desktop, which has been one of the most important customer requirements. For example, if I’m creating or editing a document in Word, I want to be able to save it to the web as if I’m saving to my own hard drive – no hunting around for URLs or saving and then uploading. We’ve seen that if people are working on a document and have to go to the browser to upload, many just can’t get over that hump. So we’ve learned you have to make it super easy for people to do things like get their documents from Office to the web, as well as to save work back to the web with one-click if they’re making edits.

We’re hopeful that focusing on solving this “last mile” problem – providing an on-ramp from Office on the desktop to the web and vice-versa – will make things a lot easier for people in their everyday work and personal lives.

PressPass: Do you expect enterprise customers to use the service as well?

Gregersen: There’s been significant interest from people who’d like to use Office Live Workspace at work, so we’re expecting a lot of use by people in companies who work with Office, collaborate frequently on teams and work with partners outside the corporate network.

That said, we also know that many business customers will require the added capabilities provided by products and services such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Office Groove 2007 and the new Microsoft Online services. These are collaboration platforms designed explicitly to meet the additional needs of businesses when it comes to things like regulatory compliance, extensibility, archiving and back-up, directory integration, auditing and much more.

PressPass: How does Office Live Workspace handle security and permissions issues?

Continue At Source

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

2007 Office System Service Pack 1 to Release to Web Tuesday December 11th

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 20:02:05 GMT

Next Tuesday, December 11th 2007, the Office System team here at Microsoft expects to announce the availability for download of the 2007 Microsoft® Office System Service Pack 1 (SP1). This is sooner than previously announced for the "release to web" when the target date was announced at the IT Forum in Europe earlier this year!

The 2007 Microsoft® Office System Service Pack 1 (SP1) reflects unceasing efforts by the Microsoft Office System team to address customer concerns. Nearly all of the improvements included in the 2007 Office System SP1 are in response to direct feedback from power users at large organizations or indirect feedback from home and office users through the Dr. Watson bug-reporting system.

By tapping these extensive customer-feedback channels, the Microsoft Office System team has targeted the issues that customers care about most. As a result, the 2007 Office System SP1 will deliver significant stability and performance improvements to the applications that home and office workers rely on every day.

The 2007 Office System SP1 will be critical service pack for a variety of reasons. It will eliminate many deployment barriers to deployment you may have in your environment, it will provide support for Windows Server 2008, and will provide critical fixes to products such as Project and Project Server.

Continue At Source

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Office Live Workspace Add-In now available: Beta to begin soon?

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:16:44 GMT

Thanks to Josh at Windows Connected for pointing out a new download now available that adds in menu options to be able to open and save documents directly to Office Live Workspaces when it becomes available. From the download details:

The Office Live Add-in will install new menu options in Microsoft Office 2007 and a toolbar in Microsoft Office XP and Microsoft Office 2003. You will be able to open documents located in Office Live Workspace directly from Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel, and Office PowerPoint. You will also be able to save files directly from Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel, and Office PowerPoint to your Microsoft Office Live Workspace.
You can pre-register for Microsoft Office Live Workspace at http://workspace.officelive.com.

Pre registration requires providing a phone number for a verification sequence, a simple process.

Office 2003 Add-In (toolbar)

Office 2007 Add-In (menu option)

According to the initial announcement of Office Live Workspaces, which will provide 500mb of free storage "in the cloud", the beta is set to begin "in December". We would expect that to be early in December, based on the appearance of this add-in, and the crush of the holidays coming later in the month. We'll keep you posted, but you can subscribe to the Office Live Workspaces blog for updates as they become available.

Via: LiveSide

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Microsoft SharedView Beta 2

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 19:01:51 GMT

When you write for an organization that spans multiple time zones and often involves collaborative effort between two or more people, one of whom might be in California while another is in New York, the concept of a collaborative online workspace can be quite attractive. Read the copy on Microsoft's SharedView web site, and it's clear Redmond is trying to attract the type of users who need multiple sets of eyeballs scanning the same document at the same time, but who are separated by a few hundred miles in any given direction.

SharedView connects up to 15 people in different locations to collaborate on documents and get your point across by showing them what's on your screen. Share, review, and update documents with multiple people in real time.A Windows Live ID (Passport, Hotmail, or MSN) is required to start sessions, but not to join sessions. New in Beta2: now even easier to use, with group chat and performance improvements!

Hold more effective meetings and conference calls
Connect with up to 15 people in different locations and get your point across by showing them what's on your screen.
Work together in real time
Share, review, and update documents with multiple people in real time.
Use when and where you want
SharedView is easy to use, from anywhere, at a moment's notice.
New in Beta 2!
Now even easier to use, with improvements to the sign-in and join experience, group chat to send messages to others in the session, and performance improvements!
Click here to learn more about the Microsoft SharedView Beta2.

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Microsoft finally unveils its answer to Google Docs

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:02:11 GMT

After months of speculation about what it would do to stave off potential encroachments on its Office turf by Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Microsoft has spelled out its strategy: Office Live Workspace.

Office Live Workspace is, in Microsoft’s words, “a new web-based feature of Microsoft Office which lets people access their documents online and share their work with others.” It’s aimed at consumers and small-business users, not corporations who are interested in being able to access their documents anywhere — from any computer and any browser. In other words, Microsoft isn’t playing up Office Live Workspace as a head-to-head competitor with Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). Microsoft is positioning its Microsoft-hosted SharePoint, Exchange and Office Communications Services (which it has now rebranded with as its family of “Office Online” services) as its GAPE competitors.

Microsoft is taking sign-ups from those interested in beta testing the English-language version of Office Live Workspace starting October 1. The actual invitation-only beta isn’t likely to launch for another month, according to Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office Live. The beta and the final versions of the service (at least for saving/accessing up to 1,000 documents) will be free, the Softies said. No word on how much, if anything, Microsoft plans to charge once users have more than 1,000 Word, Excel and PowerPoint files they want to store online.

Office Live Workspace is not a hosted version of Microsoft Office. Instead, it is — like the rest of the Office Live family — an extension to the client-based version of desktop productivity software. Interestingly, Office Live Workspace isn’t just an extension to Microsoft Office 2007, but also third-party-developed office programs like OpenOffice, StarOffice and more, as well as Office XP, according to Jha. However, as you might expect, Office 2007 will work best with the new Live Workspace feature (other third-party and older Microsoft software won’t “light up” the same way, Jha said).

(Microsoft officials told me about Office Live Workspace under embargo late last week, but didn’t have any screen shots or sample version to show. So I am explaining all this based on a 30-minute phone conversation with Jha.)

Office Live Workspace is a password-protected SharePoint workspace, hosted by Microsoft. It’s a place users can store and access documents for “work, school and home,” Microsoft explained. Users will be able to e-mail drafts of these Web-based documents to multiple people. Those without a desktop version of productivity software handy will still be able to view and comment on stored documents via a browser.

Microsoft is positioning Groove (finally — a real, understandable use for the technology developed by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s former company and aquired by Microsoft a couple years ago!) as the way that users will be able to access documents in their workspaces when they are off-line, Jha said.

“Groove will be the way you take any Workspace offline,” Jha said.

Microsoft is planning to rely on the same back-end infrastructure for Office Live Workspace as it does for Windows Live. Microsoft plans to share the same contact lists and calendar entries between Windows Live and Office Live Workspace, Jha said. And Tahiti — a k a Microsoft Shared View, a real-time collaboration service which Microsoft began beta testing earlier this ear — also will be integrated, over time, with Office Live Workspace, Jha said.

Jha deflected questions about when Microsoft plans to field the final release of Office Live Workspace and/or the Groove component of it. How and when, exactly, will Microsoft add support for third-party desktop offerings? Not sure. And what about users who don’t want the desktop office-product anchor around their necks at all — those who want to create documents on the Web, not on their PCs? Microsoft seems to have decided to ignore that segment all together….

Right now, there are lots more questions than answers about Microsoft’s planned Google Docs competitor. But at least Microsoft has acknowledged it has an alternative in the wings for the home/small-business set who want this kind of functionality.

From what little information is known so far, what do you think? Is Office Live Workspace a real competitor to Google Docs? If not, what’s missing?

Source: All about Microsoft

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:17:08 GMT

Gartner Inc. has positioned Microsoft Corp., a leading provider of business process management (BPM) software, in the “Leaders” quadrant in its 2007 Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis (BPA) Tools, 2H07-1H08 report.¹ The report evaluates services and products that include Microsoft^® Office Visio^® 2007.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPA Tools examines how business process analysis tools continue to grow in importance as business managers, process architects and process analysts seek to better capture, understand, streamline and automate their business processes. Gartner also underscored that BPA is increasingly used for compliance and process improvement initiatives. For business process (BP) improvement, BPA is the key link between business activity monitoring and workflow assembly and business orchestration.

“As businesses look more and more to process improvements as a core driver of growth and profitability, they made it clear that they want an easier way to analyze their processes, many of which are already captured in Office Visio 2007 diagrams,” said Richard Wolf, general manager of the Office Graphics Division at Microsoft. “This led us to focus Office Visio 2007 on integrating and displaying process, system and activity data directly in Office Visio 2007 diagrams for easier exploration and understanding.”

Office Visio 2007 makes it easy for IT and business professionals to visualize, explore and communicate complex information. Through the ability of Office Visio 2007 to graphically show data from multiple sources within diagrams, users can finally see process information within its context, resulting in an easier way to streamline business processes, track projects and resources, chart organizations, map networks, diagram building sites and optimize systems. Instead of static pictures, users can create data-connected Office Visio 2007diagrams that display data, are easy to refresh and can dramatically increase productivity.

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Office Ultimate 2007 for $59 only!

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 16:00:46 GMT

Seize the deal! Get Microsoft® Office Ultimate 2007 for just $59.95. It’s a total steal: save time and money with this premium offer. Office Ultimate 2007’s brand new features and fresh look will help you organize and get all your work done in the blink of an eye. The Ultimate Steal is finally here, so grab it now!

Check out the links below to see whether you are eligible for Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95. Offer is valid till April 28th 2008.

Links:
The Ultimate steal presented by Microsoft
Press Release by Microsoft
Office Ultimate 2007 Home Page

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector released

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 16:32:27 GMT

On August 14, Microsoft made available for download the final release of the free connector enabling access to Windows Live Hotmail or Office Live Mail from inside Outlook 2003 or 2007.

With Outlook Connector, you can use Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 to access and manage your Windows Live Hotmail or Office Live Mail accounts, including e-mail messages and contacts for free! Calendar, tasks and notes can also be accessed and managed in Outlook for accounts with a paid subscription.
Outlook Connector enables you to use your Live Hotmail accounts within Outlook:

Read and send your Office Live Mail/Windows Live Hotmail e-mail messages.
Manage your Live Mail Contacts.
Use advanced options for blocking junk e-mail messages.
Manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place.

With a paid subscription, Outlook Connector enables these additional features:

Manage, share, and synchronize your Windows Live Calendar in Outlook.
Access your Tasks and Notes.

Download Link:
Microsoft Office Outlook Connector

Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)