Office

Beta Invites for Xobni

Chris Haaker — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:10:41 GMT

After checking out Xobni for a couple of days I have been extended five beta invites. Leave an email addy in the comments and I will send them out to the first five. If I receive more I will post an additional request. Also, sign up to be on the beta wait list by clicking on the badge in the left-hand column and it will go to get me more beta invites to hand out. I will post a further review soon, but so far it has lived up to its billing and is pretty sweet. I just don't know how to tell my wife she is only ranked #10 by the software of the people I email. I wont tell her today! It might spoil our ten year anniversary. Thanks for ten awesome years honey!

Technorati Tags: Xobni,Anniversary,Tin

Improvements on Outlook

Chris Haaker — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:04:02 GMT

I have been looking at a new software add-on package for Microsoft Outlook called Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards). I was directed to it by Viral's blog and it is quite interesting. It is in by-invitation beta right now, click on the badge in my sidebar to get more information and sign up (disclosure: clicks get you quicker beta product access).

Some of the features the product provides are :

"Lightning" fast email search (I put lightning fast in quotes as I have not had a chance to try the product. Once I get a beta invite I will provide a more in-depth preview.) Emails and contacts appear as you type.

Email analytics - graphic rich stats on the people you email include message counts, frequency, dates of conversations, contact information and quick links. Telephone numbers are extracted from emails and associated with senders "contacts."

Navigate your Inbox by people - leverage the "social" aspects of email and associate conversations and people rather than looking at individual messages and entries. Also chart's the relationships between people and their emails.

Intelligent assistant automatically finds open slots in your schedule when arranging meetings.

Historical attachments are made available on a per-contact basis in the sidebar without searching for the specific email they are attached to. Hover over the attachment to see the associated email.

Overall Xobni shows a lot of promise as an extension to Outlook. I can see myself leveraging a lot of these new features, especially the enhanced threaded conversations. This is something that is lacking in the current version of Outlook.

Some of the more intelligent association of data concepts are missing from Outlook too and I don’t understand why they were never included. The simplistic phone number harvesting and association is big winner that can be implemented with little effort. Other companies have added things like calendar previews when hovering over a date in an email so you can reconcile your availability on the fly.

I wont get too optimistic however, until I can actually get some hands-on experience with the beta. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Xobni,Outlook,Microsoft Outlook

SnagIT to OneNote 2007

Chris Haaker — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:21:20 GMT

I love SnagIT and I love OneNote 2007. Like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup (PS do all those peanut butter cups belong to Reese's?) now two great things taste better together. SnagIT releases an add-on that allows you to capture directly to OneNote 2007. You can also set it to send the capture to the cursor, a new page in a section, etc.

Problems With Zoho Notebook

Chris Haaker — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:22:23 GMT

I am in a training class all this week in Toronto at the EMC office in Burlington, ON for EmailXtender. Usually I am a well prepared traveler having consulted for many years. For some reason though I forgot my power adapter for my laptop on this trip. I sought out the local Best Buy to see what a universal charger (like the model from Kennsington) would set me back - Yikes! $125.00 CAD. I have my Blackberry so I thought I could make it through still having email and internet access from the device. One thing I was not looking forward to, however, was taking pen and paper notes. I am a OneNote junkie! I remembered Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook and having used Google's version on occasion decided to give the Zoho product a spin. While the results were overall positive, there where definitely some show stoppers IMO that will keep me from using it more.

1. Other shortcuts and links can high jack your browser window where you are taking notes. This happened to me after I had not saved for awhile. There doesn't seem to be an auto-save in the background every time you add new data as there is in OneNote. In OneNote you never have to do a File -> Save. I lost a half page worth of notes.

2. I cannot find a way to get the data *out* of Zoho Notebook so I can distribute it to my co-workers. You can publicly publish the pages, but I don't want to do that. It seemed simple enough to cut and paste the data from the last two days in to a Word doc, but Zoho will not let me. Some inferences on the forums point to the version of IE being the problem but I have tried it on IE6 SP1, IE7 and FF2 in XP SP2, Windows 2000 Server and Windows Vista Ultimate. No dice in any combination of browser and OS.

3. When you re-select Zoho Notebook as the active window and click on the page to begin typing the cursor always jumps to the top middle of the page and I have to use the arrow or page down key to get my cursor down to the bottom of the page where I was before I moved my focus to another window.

4. Can someone say numbering? Bullets? Bold? Italic? And make the default tool for a new page the text tool and not the drawing tool. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out why I couldn't type on the page! I think 90% of the people will be typing ...

5. Import OneNote files in to Zoho Notebook. I am NOT doing all that work over.

6. Spell-check. Not as much of a problem in FF2 - but still ...

7. Technical support. I submitted a question to the support forum yesterday around 6PM EST and it is still awaiting approval for submission the next day at 9AM EST. This seems like an unacceptable delay.

Update: Google Notebook has basic formatting like bold, italic and other. But alas, no numbering or bullets. It does, however, auto save my work every few minutes for me.

Is Outlook 2007 Bad for Exchange 2003?

Chris Haaker — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:18:27 GMT

I have had this brought up by some co-workers and wondered if anyone from MS would like to officially comment? When Outlook 2003 was released there was the potential for un-patched Exchange 5.5 information stores to get corrupted or experience problems and dismount. Is Outlook 2007 officially (as in written somewhere - not just anecdotally) supported against a mailbox on an Exchange 2003 SP2 server? Comments welcomed.

Update: I finally found, buried here, this: Connectivity to Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 or later is required for certain advanced functionality in Outlook 2007.

River of Mail?

Chris Haaker — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:58:00 GMT

In the world of RSS and newsreaders there is a war of preferences going around over how people prefer to read their feeds. Categorized by feed, type of feed, or as a “river of news.” In other words first in, first displayed, in a long list and you simply scan top-to-bottom. I have tried both and IMO both have merit. River of news lets you see everything in an instant, and I find it useful for quickly locating important event. Then I read the “normal” stuff later on. When I am ready to consume all my news, I prefer to read by feed as I find it more efficient not having my brain change cylinders from sports to tech to music item by item. I can keep it focused as I read a whole collection of news at once.

Now that I am piloting Vista and Office 2007 with integrated Desktop Search support, I wondered if this approach can work for mail as well. For as long as I can remember, I created a hierarchal folder system in Outlook and sorted my mail manually or with rules in to “buckets” of knowledge. If I needed an email from my boss, I knew exactly which folder to go look for it in. Perhaps the days of all those folders are past? Why not just keep all of my mail in one folder and allow the powerful properties of search to help me easily locate a message? On an enterprise level, I have a feeling there is some power here as well. Why the need to memorize or bookmark obscure URL’s or UNC paths? Index the enterprise and search for it. This isn’t a new idea, but it is one that the technology can finally support. Why do so few use it. Is it such a shift – to feel that all your data is just out there – unorganized – willy-nilly? I can see search driving the control freaks crazy. How do you really know everything is as or where it should be unless you look in your neat little file folder system and see it sitting there?

So this is what I am experimenting with now. As an Exchange administrator, I know having thousands of mail items in my Inbox will eventually catch up with me. However, email archiving should prevent me from feeling the ill effects of this. I have already cast off my PST shackles and imported them in to the archive. My precious PST’s! Right now it is taking some getting used to seeing all my alerts, MOM messages, personal and business emails floating in one folder. I want to see where this goes however. No zero mail inbox here! I haven’t been disciplined enough to do this with my files yet on my laptop. That is next though. Even though I remember to use Vista’s awesome search capabilities when I need a document, they are all still neatly organized in their safe little folder in Documents - One thing at a time.

Download Office Communicator 2007 Beta

Chris Haaker — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:03:00 GMT

Download the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 public beta here. Includes the Standard and Enterprise Editions as well as the Office Communicator 2007 client.

OneNote 2007 Power Toys

Chris Haaker — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 15:04:00 GMT

My favorite note taking application has some new power toys!

Technorati tags: OneNote, OneNote 2007, Power Toys

Microsoft E-Learning Offers Free Office Communications Server 2007 Clinics

Chris Haaker — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 19:51:00 GMT

Microsoft is now offering free e-learning clinics for Office Communications Server 2007. The following clinics are offered in the bundle and the content is good for one year!

Collection 5125: Introducing Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007

Clinic 5126: Introducing Enterprise Instant Messaging Using Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 (Beta)

Clinic 5127: Introducing On-Premise Conferencing Using Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007

Clinic 5128: Introducing Enterprise Telephony Using Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007

Clinic 5129: Customizing Real-Time Communication with Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007

And Now That Exchange 2007 Has Been Released

Chris Haaker — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 13:06:00 GMT

Now that you will soon be able to download that shiny new copy of Exchange 2007, you should begin in earnest designing the environment in which you want it to operate (and you know that means someone up the food chain will want a pretty picture of said design). So, without further ado, here are the Exchange 2007 Visio stencils. Just in the nick of time! I am a little disappointed that they arent done in the "new" style Microsoft has been using for all of its Visio icons, but rather the "old" flat Visio 2000 style. Nothing like this to make the new technology look old!