Office System - David Overton's Blog

Hello, It is rare that I copy from MS newsletters, but I suspect many people do not get the UK MSDN (developer) newsletter, so since this issue talks about the online videos for Office 2007 and scenarios on how it all works together, I thought I should highlight David Gristwood, a great colleague who cares passionately about Office Development and also wrote this little article. I have clipped it to remove some of the more developer oriented content. Note the links for the videos to see more of the product. ttfn David Office Developers Conference, Redmond - David Gristwood <sniped> One of the big announcements was openXMLDeveloper.org , a community site supporting Open XML. You can see the video on demand here . (Bill Gates also gave an interview with InformationWeek just before the dev con, which you can read here , which explains more of his thinking) Part of the keynote included a very compelling demo, that showed end to end the various client and server elements of the Office platform all fully integrated...

One of the recent heated discussions has been around the services that Microsoft has started to offer to consumers and small businesses. Last night at the Thames Valley Partner Group I was asked in Microsoft was going to start servicing customers directly. This was then followed by Matt's presentation ( http://www.axxis.com ) on SLAs and much discussion was had about how people do/don't want to deal with those "how do I format my Excel spreadsheet" type questions. So I thought I would highlight the services Microsoft offers, for both consumers and small businesses, but we are hardly alone in this and I think it ties up to Vlad's post at http://www.vladville.com/2006/04/your-potentialour-passion-they-took-r.html . The world is constantly changing, online services are being offered by many people and Microsoft is working to see how new partner can benefit and existing parnters can take advantage of them. So let's look at the services: SB+ / One Care - information about this can be found at https://www.microsoft...

Hi, many of you may have seen me present Vista and Office at recent events and I thought it was only fair that I updated you on the changes that have been annoucned over the past few days. Two press releases have been made, both confirming the ship and launch plans for the products, which now falls before and after January. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/mar06/03-24OfficeTimingPR.mspx covers the Office plan and annoucnes that the product with RTM in October and a release to Software Assurance customers will happen pre-Christmas and an aligned launch with Vista will happend in January. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/mar06/03-21WindowsVistaDeliveryPR.mspx states pretty much the same, with Software Assurance customers getting access pre-Christmas and the launch (obviously as it is joint), in January. This is being described in the press releases as a business and consumer launch, but since many small business customers do not have Software Assurance, they will be in the January group...

Hi, so one of the often asked questions is "How do I take my business to market without spending a huge amount". While I don't have all the answers, this question is often asked and I have seen answers on both www.bCentral.co.uk - THE UK destination for Small Businesses, but I also saw this article on the US MS site - http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/marketing/customer_service_acquisition/10_low_cost_ways_to_market_your_business.mspx?xid=c0007 - it has the top ten tips that we recommendations and by simply going through the guide and asking your customer "Would you consider doing this", you can start to get the grey matter going. In fact though, don't ask the question above, ask this one - it becomes easier to clear the fog around the benefit of technology "What would be the impact on your business if you did X?" - and try to get that impact down to a financial statement - this is your budget :-) Of note, the Marketing pages on bCentral are not all about product and can be found at http://www.bcentral...

So the Harry B event for me was another great time to chat to people and update everyone on the direction Microsoft was headed. The core elements for me were: 1) Microsoft understands that you have a growing and capable business model today 2) We believe that using our new technologies over the next 18 months there is even more opportunities for partners and customers alike 3) We also believe that making use of the technologies already deployed in customers is a great way to expand your business. This includes Windows Sharepoint Services and the 30 templates available for these – I will post more on these on Monday – MS CRM, Office on the desktop and so on 4) You need to understand our roadmap to choose when to jump on and why The technologies covered in the presentations were: SBS 2003 R2 MS CRM V3 Windows Vista Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003 Microsoft Small Business Accounting SBS Longhorn – note this is x64 only, but many servers are already running x64 chips, even though they are running 32-bit...