Microsoft

Two more articles that I liked - I have highlighted a couple of items, but it is very much worth reading the full articles: Yahoo Board to Decide Fate of Company Today Sources have indicated to us that Yahoo has scheduled a special board of directors meeting on Friday to determine, effectively, the fate of the company. After a week of hectic negotiating, it’s clear that no one is going to step in with a competing acquisition offer to what Microsoft put on the table last Friday - $31 per share . Softbank, the last real chance for a competing bid, bowed out today and said they would not be challenging the Microsoft offer. There are only two options left. Accept the offer in principal, and try to increase the price with no negotiating leverage at all, or do a deal with Google to outsource search advertising and, likely, search itself. <snipped> A Google Deal - Short Term Independence/Long Term Nightmare If Yahoo were to outsource search to Google, the immediate upside would be 25% or so to Yahoo’s cash flow...

This is a quick one - hope along to http://uk.msn.com and today you will be greeted with the Office 2007 ribbon bar. You can change the formatting of the picture or the MSN section at the top using the live preview function of Office 2007. This will be 24 hours only I am told, so about 14 3/4 hours left! Image changes as you hover over the formats - available in Office 2007 and now MSN UK for the day!! We also have style changes on the headers. ttfn David Technorati Tags: MSN , Office 2007

This is another area I get a lot of questions, so I thought I would share the answer. While my person preference is to tell people to load the tools onto Office 2000/XP/2003 machines as documented at How to open Office 2007 (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007) files on Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003 by downloading the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for File Formats - David Overton's Blog for some people this is not an option. So, how do you force Office to save in the older format? If you want to do it to lots of machines then look at http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2007/07/14/default-save-as-doc-and-xls.aspx . If you want to do it on your own personal machine, try this: Go the the "Opal" or the round Office button, and select Word Options Then go to the save tab and choose the file format you want, so Word 97-2003 for .doc files. You need to do the save in Excel and PowerPoint to get those too do it too. ttfn David Technorati Tags: Office 2007 , Office 2003 , Office XP , Office...

This has been banded about a lot inside Microsoft, but it is just too good to ignore. Enjoy!! Foxit PDF Preview Handler in my daily work i spend a majority of my 'computing' time in outlook. communicating with peers, team members, customers, etc. is mostly done via communication (sad, i know). a lot of that time it involves sending information attachments back and forth, using office documents, etc. i've said a lot about how much i love the preview functionality within vista and office 2007. i even wrote a code preview handler for .cs, .vb, .sql, .js files. one of the samples in the msdn article was for pdf files...of which i receive a lot. i don't use adobe reader because i think it is overkill for reading pdf's personally. the sample, however, relies on having adobe reader installed...which i didn't like. i started working with the foxit activex sdk , because i love their reader product. after some communication with the team at foxit, we started collaborating. as a result of that collaboration, foxit software...

Events/WebCasts 1 May 2007, Leeds: Windows Vista After Hours You may be familiar with Windows Vista at work - whether you have deployed it, or are evaluating it - but have you ever thought about the possibilities of Vista outside of work? This session, aimed at IT professionals, explores not only the built-in elements of Vista, such as Search, Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker and the Networking & Sharing Center, but also how you can extend your Windows Vista Experience, with Windows Media Center, Xbox 360 and specific applications to open up a new world of gaming and home entertainment. 01 May 2007, Leeds: An Introduction and Overview of Microsoft Licensing Licensing can be confusing - but it needn't be. Attend this course to understand Microsoft Licensing and how to best apply it in your company to fit in with your business needs. This session is aimed at IT professionals who wish to gain a better understanding of Microsoft's Software Licensing. The briefing assumes no previous in-depth or technical...

Software as a Service, Software plus Services etc, etc is a hot topic, but the reality for most of us is that for today we need to deliver traditional software while planning for the future. Steve Ballmer discusses this and more at the Gartner ITxpo 2007 event. I have snipped a few words that I thought were interesting, but please read the rest of the article for more info. For a video of Steve on Microsoft in the online world, have a look at Steve's blog at Steve Ballmer video - The Online Opportunity Ballmer addressed what appeared to be recurring questions among attendees: What is Microsoft's strategy around SAAS (software as a service), and what is Microsoft's answer to Google? Ballmer made it clear during the session that seeing any similarities between Microsoft and Google would be a mistake. "We don't look alike at all," he said. There is a "world of search and advertising, where Google is the leader; we're number three, working to be number two and then working to be...

I saw this and thought it was another reason why you need to be prepared for Vista and Office 2007. Among small and mid-sized enterprises 47 percent of them plan to upgrade to Microsoft’s Vista operating system in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to a Cowen & Co. survey. The survey, which is done in conjunction with CRN magazine , also found that 78 percent of small and mid-sized businesses will adopt Vista by the second quarter of 2008. Simply put, the small fry will lead the charge when it comes to the Vista upgrade cycle. Cowen analyst Walter Pritchard said in a research note that his firm’s most recent survey is above the adoption rates predicted in February. In February, 43 percent of small businesses indicated they would adopt Vista by the end of 2007. » Survey: SMBs more aggressive with Vista upgrade plans | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com ttfn David Technorati Tags: Vista , Small Business

I saw some people talking about this on the Yahoo groups and on the blogs, so thought I would do some investigating. The retail price has moved quite nicely in the UK .. in the following blog they talk about a drop of upto 40+% in the UK, while US prices only dropped 20% http://hackinthebox.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=25990 - Microsoft is cutting the retail price of its Windows Vista operating system by as much as 39% here in New Zealand. Prices in the US will drop 20% and in the UK and Europe, savings of up to 46% are available on some versions. On Friday, Microsoft announced sweeping price cuts to boxed copies of Vista, saying then that the cuts would range from as low as 3% in developed countries to nearly 50% for some editions sold in poorer nations. Prices just released by the local Microsoft office show that New Zealand has done pretty well with a drop of 39% for the top Vista Ultimate from $979 to $599, and a 24% drop for the Home Premium edition from $589 to $449. Home Basic also drops...

I saw this and thought I had to share. While not as funny as some, still worth watching. For the record, no-one has ever thrown money at me! Look for the Jedi master mind tricks (failing) at about 4 mins. Life At Microsoft - The Truth Revealed Life At Microsoft - The Truth Revealed People often stop me in the streets to ask "Hey Tina, what's life "really" like at Microsoft? Sometimes I can't even walk outside my house without somebody standing there with a giant neon sign that blinks "What is life "really" like at Microsoft"? Instead of answering every individual separately and so you can save your money on those neon signs. I decided to create a video that would answer that simple yet complex question. I want to throw out a special high-five to the following because without them and a lot of beer this video never would have happened. ttfn David Technorati Tags: Microsoft , humour , fun , Star Wars

The Symposium is coming - 1/2 MS Speakers coving MS Strategy, Products such as EVO, Live, Security and much much more, but not only do you get all this. You also get experts from your community presenting to you about how to make it work, be it with Technology, business practises or the community iteself. This is the one event of the year to find out what Microsoft is doing and planning on doing, how you can join in, and then what the community has been doing and will be doing and how this can be of huge use to you and your business. (Updated 16th Jan - Link to book the event is http://www.microsoft.co.uk/events/EventDetail.aspx?eventid=8591 ) Susanne has a little bit about it here - http://www.uksmbgirl.co.uk/blog/archives/124 and there is more at SIGN-UP Page http://www.bmsnet.co.uk/blog/?p=30 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SBSManchester/message/124 http://www.sbsbpi.co.uk/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=2225#2225 See you there. ttfn David

OBA is not the nicest sounding acronyms, but we still seem to use it. Oh well. If you want to know more about performance management and business intelligence, or these terms mean nothing to you and you are now getting worried, then watch Partner TV at http://blogs.msdn.com/ptstv/archive/2006/11/28/partner-tv-ben-tamblyn-on-office-business-applications.aspx ttfn David

I blogged about this a week or so ago, but the new site is now up and running and looks pretty fabulous. Click the Image to get to the new site. You can see that it is split into two sections, for those starting a business and those growing a business. Have an explore to find out what is there that you or your customers can use. Remember that bCentral was able to draw over 1/4 million UNIQUE visitors in a month, so your customers might well be on the list. The new blog can be found at http://blogs.technet.com/smallbusiness/default.aspx - it already has some excellent entries which I will be referring to soon. ttfn David Technorati Tags: bCentral , Microsoft , Small Business

If you are having problems with authentication issues when trying to debug with Visual Studio on Vista then there is a fix for you. A Visual Studio patch that fixes the Visual Studio F5 debugging of IIS7 applications on Windows Vista Home Premium and above has been released! This patch solves the "An authentication error occurred while communicating with the web server. Please see Help for assistance.", and "Debugging failed because integrated Windows authentication is not enabled. Please see Help for assistance" errors, that until now had to be worked around using the instructions below. This patch also enables customers using Windows Vista Home Premium customers to use Visual Studio F5 debugging, who were not able to use this feature at all previously because Windows Authentication was not available on Windows Vista Home Premium. Mike Volodarsky's ServerSide : Fix problems with Visual Studio F5 debugging of ASP.NET applications on IIS7 Vista ttfn David Technorati Tags: Developer , Vista...