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Day one at Office Dev Con 2006 was full of information. On the non-technical side, the people are great, the wifi is pervasive, the food is decent and plentiful and the fabled Microsoft coolers full of pop, juice and other beverages are always magically full. Perhaps they employ gnomes or house elfs?
If I had one complaint is was distributing the Office 2007 beta 1 refresh to us via BetaPlace. We are on day two and we still don’t have our welcome emails so we can access the builds. For me, one of the most powerful things about the conference would have been to be able to load the code on our laptops, run our apps and customizations on it and then be able to leverage being here with the Office team to provide feedback and ask questions. A simple DVD on our seats at the keynote or in our bags would have been great. I don’t know the logistics of churning out 1000 DVD's but if anyone can do it, Microsoft can. I registered on BetaPlace and filled out the survey literally minutes after getting my welcome email.
The keynote was the usual Bill Gates vision talk. I was glad to see him do a Q&A after. You wont get that at TechEd. Everyone got a chuckle when someone asked him about the Google\Writely acquisition. He announced the launch of openxmldevelopers.org. A website dedicated to community around XML. Apparently Apple and Intel have signed up as well. Bill said it has his two favorite words: Open and XML. That brought another huge laugh. Then Kurt Delbene came up and did a deeper drill-down on all the Office System pieces. Nothing ground breaking though if you live this stuff everyday.
I spent most of my time in the sessions around the new XML format of the Office file types. As an infrastructure engineer moving to information worker, I am not yet technically skilled enough to get something out of some of the sessions that dived deep in to certain Sharepoint features. However, the information in the sessions I attended was very powerful. The new XML file format for Office delivers a lot of new functionality as well as a whole new way to interact with Office file types programmatically. If you take any document saved in the new file format (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) and rename the extension to .zip, you can then open it up via the Windows shell and access and modify its contents. The "file" is broken up logically in to several folders that contain the XML bits that are then parsed in to the file you get in Office. However, you can take all the files out of all the folders and save them in the root and the file will function just fine once renamed back to its Office extension (eg. .docx).
The XML files are also broken up into functions for any particular document. For example headers and footers in a Word document, comments in a PowerPoint slide deck, etc. This allows you to manually or programmatically edit parts of a file without having to wade through one large XML file. Another good example is wanting to delete all of the comments from a PowerPoint slide deck. Just delete the XML file.
Want to change the header on 500 word files? No problemo. Modify a style? Change the spacing? Change the slide master? And on and on. You get the picture.
Tomorrow is all InfoPath! And as luck would have it all the sessions I was really jazzed about are after my flights leaves! I guess I will have to wait for the DVD.
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I am packing up for Office Dev Con and I wanted to send out a last broadcast for a geek dinner Monday or Tuesday night. Andrew Connell is also interested and I have had some email's of interest as well. Post a comment if you would like the information once it is set up. See you all there!
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Running the February CTP of Vista (5308) I am presented with this dialog box when overwriting files during a copy. I can only assume they think we know left to right is source to target but some more meaningful labels and dialog would be helpful! I cannot wait to see Beta 2 …
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I’d like to think I can solve any problem. However, getting Office Communicator to install on the February CTP of Vista has got me quite perplexed! It will get all the way to the end of the install, then say it encountered an “error” and roll back. You know, that installation progress bar in reverse we all hate to see? I even tried to run the .msi in verbose logging mode, but the User-Mode protection in Vista wont let me create the log file. A plain ‘ol text file! Come on! Application compatibility mode and “run as administrator” were no help either. Has anyone else run in to this or has anyone got this to install successfully? We are running the web-based Communicator at my company but it just isn't the same!
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We have just finished implementing web-based Office Communicator at our business and I love it. It is cool to have that “instant access” to the team whenever I am at a web browser. If I am at a client site I can instantly communicate with my team and get important information. Which brings me to:
The Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access Management Pack for MOM 2005 monitors the health of computers running Office Communicator Web Access server components on the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system.
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Thanks Brian! It works like a charm!
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Now playing: Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We're Goin Down
I have run in to problems with the Offline Address Book an amazing number of times; and more often than not, on brand-new Exchange 2003 installs. Some of the common fixes, like rebuilding the OAB or deleting it and creating a new one, don't often work. The Outlook 2003 client is stuck with the infamous 0x8004010F error.
After reading this article at msexchange.org I downloaded the mentioned OABInteg utility and had my problem fixed in about 5 minutes. This is the syntax I used:
oabinteg /s:<servername> /t:oabfldcheck >c:\oab.txt
I pipe the results to a text file so I can peruse them at my leisure and compare successive tests. The test is even so kind to suggest the correct course of action to fix the errors it finds. Nifty! Hint: the Outlook profile you have on the testing workstation cannot be one using Cached Mode, so disable it while you run the utility.