Check out the story here about a Lucille Hester who was accused of fraud after reading out her half brother’s supposed posthumous letter.  The letter said to be written by football star and former olympic sprinter, Bob Hayes, was read out on national TV.  Later it was shown to be using calibri – a font that didn’t exist before Office 2007 and wasn’t invented until 2003.  Hayes died in 2002.

OMG apparently there are reports of frozen water falling FROM THE SKY!! and landing ON THE GROUND!!  London and Reading declare state of emergency, cancel all buses and trains.  Nobody can get into work today so meetings start to get cancelled due to the weather… and then… the penny drops… don’t we have this amazing technology that lets us work from home?

Today I’ve been loving the way that the lack of any alternative is forcing people to try using our unified communications technology and them finding out that it really works and is dead easy.

Things I love about unified communications:

1. Got your number.  You don’t need to look up phone numbers any more.  With presence globes everywhere just kick up a call from any application – emails in outlook, communicator, any office application, any sharepoint portal page, a mysite (yes that is a sharepoint page).  Why do I want to remember your phone number? I have a computer for such menial tasks for goodness sake.
2. No voicemail jail! You actually get to talk to someone – imagine that? because I only phone people who can take the call because usually I IM them first and then click on the phone button and I can already see if they are in a meeting or already on the phone from their presence.
3. I see you baby I lied on point 2 because I prefer to use video calls – just hit the webcam button from an IM and it’s just like having a face to face meeting.  OK so I can’t touch you but then ask yourself is that really appropriate anyway in a business meeting?
4. No emailing the slides! if we want to present some slides or discuss a spreadsheet, just hit the live meeting button from the IM or conf IM. In Live Meeting we can all see the slides and not have to faff about trying to get the right slide up.
5. Roundtables rule! 360 degree cameras in all our meeting rooms, cost a fraction of the cost of a video conferencing suite and they work brilliantly.  You just plug the USB into your laptop and communicator and Live Meeting know what to do, connecting you up with lovely clear audio and if you want a panorama view of the room.
6. It’s free.  Microsoft spends millions on conf calls every year.  Communicator conf calls uses VOIP using the network and is free – and the call quality is usually better.
7. I see less of the M4.  It means I didn’t have to fight my way in through the snow and it’s better for the environment.

So my advice is to use the weather as an excuse to spend that 15 minutes playing with all this UC stuff rather than sitting in traffic.  You’ll find out how easy it is and you’ll save yourself loads of grief. 

Hurray!

by the way if you are interested in UC check out blogs by Mark Deakin and Ewan Dalton

I think it is a key factor in any successful blog to have a clear idea of your topic.  The really successful bloggers around me are those who pick a subject and stick to it – I think of Mark Harrison’s blog on SharePoint, Jason’s blog on mobile, Steve’s on security, Steve Clayton’s marvellously varied but wonderfully opinioned Geek in Disguise and outside of IT, Matthew Stibbe’s badlanguage.net all about how to write well.  I have huge respect for these bloggers because they are speaking from a position of passion and vast experience.  I’m not a fan of very vague blogs or those that just aggregate news without opinion.  Some of these have their place but they can descend into the “what I had for breakfast” scenario or the other pitfall where it looks like an email inbox on the web. 

So how should you stop?  When should your restart? Here are my tips:

Keep the faith

Stay true to the purpose of your blog.  Know what it is and stay largely on topic.  It’s ok to take detours but remember your core theme.  Your readers value your experience and perspectives.  If you have nothing more to say about that topic, perhaps it is time to call it a day.  There is nothing wrong with that.

Was it something we said?

When you do stop, don’t just peter out painfully, declare that you will be stopping and why so your readers aren’t left hanging.  I didn’t do this – I did stop fairly suddenly last summer but I never took the time to explain why.  Looking back on it that was poor.

Be motivated by passion not guilt

Don’t declare “I’m BAAAAaaaak! :)” if you aren’t sure you are going to keep it up.  You see that a lot where people apologise for not blogging, write a couple of posts and then revert to rss silence.  Blogging is a discipline and it does take time.  You stopped because life got busy or different.  If you are restarting, take it one step at a time.  I probably won’t blog as much as I used to but I will try to do it fairly consistently (we shall see).  The point is to be realistic about what energy and time you have to devote to it. Restarting a blog is just like going back to the gym.  When you are doing regular exercise, you are pretty fit and it’s just what you do, it’s easy.  Once you stop though, it is hard to restart it.  Classic mistake is to go running every day and blitz it – this only ends up getting you injured and fed up of it.  So a sensible pace, get back into the discipline, don’t beat yourself up that you aren’t immediately back to peak performance on day 1.  Don’t feel bad about it, just rediscover your love of the subject again.

Set some triggers

Instead of going on a blogging guilt trip, I said to myself that when my daughter slept through the night every night for a week, I would restart the blog.  Might sound silly but I know that the fatigue of all those 3am checks drained me of the energy I need to take on blogging again.  It was a way for me to sensibly keep a balance. 

Just do it

It’s tempting to feel that the first resume post needs to be a stormer but I found that just ended up being a procrastination technique.  There’s no magic, you just have to start.  So get that golden resume post over with and get back to the rhythm of blogging as soon as you can.

Refocus

Restarting provides a good moment to think again about the point of the blog. Refine the theme or maybe start a whole new blog.  With OfficeRocker, the theme will increasingly be about Office 14 as we get nearer to it. Similar to 2007 but a little adjustment.  I’ll also be aiming to include more customer evidence and topics on deployment and adoption.

Tell your friends

OK so my technorati rating is in the toilet but maybe my blogging friends would be kind enough to give me a link back to help get me going again? Go on - how about a friendly leg up? :) If I still have any friends on the blogosphere any more that is..

One of the challenges in retail is when customers buy a PC with Windows on it and think they also have Microsoft Office.  They get home all excited to write their first letter on Word and find to their dismay that it isn't installed.  From their point of view, they bought a PC with Microsoft on it and assume it will have all the applications.  This is why Office Ready PCs are a good thing because the customer does get this preinstalled. Even if they don't opt to buy Microsoft Office, with an ORPC they can use the trial and later convert it to a licensed copy online.

Gill Le Fevre, she of the Microsoft Office newsletter - yes she is a real flesh and blood person - has been running the work experience program this week on campus.  She asked the students (aged 14-18) to work in groups and come up with an explanation of the difference between Windows and Office, that would help the “average” PC shopper.

I thought I’d share the winning two explanations with you:

“The CD player”

A PC is like a CD player – when you buy it, you don’t get any music with it and have to buy that separately. Programs, like Microsoft Office, are like CDs – you buy them according to your own taste and can then play them on the CD player.

“The fishbowl”

A PC is like a fishbowl. On it’s own it doesn’t do anything. You first of all need to add water – water is like Windows. Once you’ve got water, you can then add fish (fish represent the programs you could add to a computer).

makes a change from every IT analogy being about a car :-)

Following on from my Office Live demo at the NCVO event, Tim Kimber sent me this today which is worth sharing I thought:

Microsoft Office Live Small Business has reached a pivotal milestone: In less than two years since its November 2006 commercial debut, the online service that helps entrepreneurs take, promote and manage their businesses online has surpassed more than 1 million subscribers.

This 1 million worldwide subscribers milestone demonstrates that increasing numbers of small businesses - particularly those with fewer than 10 employees, for which the Office Live Small Business service is specifically designed - are realising the importance of having a Web presence.

Although Internet access is pervasive among small businesses, many very small businesses still lack a company Web site, signaling a strong opportunity for millions more to get online. Today, as more and more consumers turn to the Web to search for products and services, small businesses are increasingly choosing to embrace the power of the Web through services such as Office Live Small Business, which has more than doubled its subscriber base in the past year alone.

Office Live Small Business focuses on three key things: make the service easy to use, make it affordable and make it all work together. Microsoft is able to entice small businesses to come to the Web by making the barriers so low, you can do it yourself and get started for free. Some of our most successful customers have told us that their Web site is their business. It’s not about a static online brochure. When you have back-office tools that talk to your front-office Web presence, your online activities go to a whole new level and help you grow your business.

Sign up now and tell a small business friend today : http://www.smallbusiness.officelive.com

Best wishes, Tim

Last Tuesday I was running a workshop at the joint Microsoft and NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organisations) on "getting the most from online communities".

Mainly I wanted to show people what can be done either free of charge or for very little money using the latest offerings from OfficeLive. See my interview with Tim Kimber, the Office Live product manager.

The demo I did was to:

1. Go to officelive.co.uk
2. Sign up to small business
3. Talk about the offer (free domain name, free website, 50 email accounts)
4. Show how you can get your own domain name
5. Design the web site
   • Go to the no photo style and add logo picture
   • Add some photos
   • Create a calendar page
   • Add a contact us module
   • Add a live spaces blog
6. Show reports
7. Contact manager - show how people who subscribe to your newsletter show up in contacts
8. Back to home and show apps:
   • Document manager, team workspaces, customer workspaces
   • Admanager and newsletter service

The demo went OK the first time but really quite slick the second time - perhaps the little bit of practice made the difference..

The questions I got asked and will attempt an answer now:

1. Is there any sort of restriction on the downloads from the site? If my site is stupidly popular and I get a gazillion downloads will it crash and you’ll point to some bandwidth small print?

We used to publish bandwidth and charge different levels for different amounts of it. However, we found that nobody was getting anywhere near the limits, so we removed it from everything. Everybody now gets the old OL Premium bandwidth of 20GB or more.

2. Are there any restrictions on hotmail on the number of outgoing emails you can send? 

Hotmail recently had to introduce a new limit of 250 emails per day (see here) and makes it harder to mail more than 10 people at the same time. Yahoo have just implemented the same and Gmail are expected to follow suit shortly. The reason for this is that ‘spamming factories’ are setting up tens of thousands of Hotmail accounts per hour and immediately sending out spam. It’s a nightmare that we can only resolve for the moment with these fairly restrictive rules.

3. Is it possible to register a subdomain only so for example I have www.youthuk.org registered at some ISP but I want to register just www.youthuk.org/downwiththekids with officelive? 

the answer is no

4. What support is there for porting pages from our existing website?

We now have reasonable cut & paste support. It really depends on what the original website is developed in. for instance, if built in Dreamweaver, just upload the Dreamweaver files into OLSB free hosting space.  For html pages, currently all you can do is save them to your PC, then upload into image gallery. It’s really complex to get these things to render properly in an automated way.

5. When it comes to closing it down how easy is it to totally remove the site?

You can delete every page, or make them blank with some sort of “site dead” message. You can also call support and have them close down your account entirely.  We plan to have a “cancel my site” button soon that customers can self-delete

6. I don’t want the site to be live until its ready, how do I stop it being ‘found’ by search engines until I’m happy with it?

One trick is to build the site on the 4^th level domain (eg darren.web.officelive.com), then only associate a domain name with it when fully ready. Search engines don’t trawl 4^th level sites.

7. How do users of my officelive site unsubscribe from the newsletter?

Every newsletter you send out from the newsletter tool has an ‘unsubscribe’ button embedded

8. Can I restrict access to the officelive site so that only people I trust can see parts or all of the site?  If I could do that it could work as a kind of intranet for us too.

You can set up intranet functionality and invite users in with their WLID – team sites, workspaces, etc just like in Corporate WSS. We don’t have ID/Password protection for the whole site though (I believe there are some third party tools that can be integrated to do this).

9. What about multilingual versions of officelive?

We’re gradually rolling out new languages but you can only have one language per site. Of course, if you want multiple pages on your public website in different languages, you can just write each page in the language of your choice.

10. I guess we can’t put code on the server but what about flash pages and animations and things?

You can integrate things like Flash with a bit of html code. This is all detailed on officelivecommunity.com

The Microsoft Store launches today.  This is limited to the UK and Germany - not even the US have this yet. Have a look at http://www.microsoftstore.co.uk This is the first time Microsoft has made our products available to the customer to buy online direct from us.

This is quite a radical move that allows a customer buy our products direct from us in a very easy and convenient way.  You will find the full range of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 suites, Works and Expression.  You can buy online and download the media. 

Online Software Locker

A very cool aspect of buying from the Microsoft store is that you can just download the software and start using it immediately.  Your keys are all kept on the site so you can always re-download it if you ever need to, removing the need for physical DVDs.  However if you really like the disks in your hand you can order them for a small P&P fee.

The best summary of the story I found is over on Oliver Bell's blog here so I won't retype it here.

I guess people do just expect Microsoft to pull quality code out of a hat these days but it will take some time to bring Office 2007 back in line with the modified standard.  This was always going to be the case.  This should not be interpreted by anyone as any sort of reluctance on our part to do the work, quite to opposite. 

The debate came from this comment Alex Brown made in his post about this effort:

Given Microsoft's proven ability to tinker with the Office XML file format between service packs, I am hoping that MS Office will shortly be brought into line with the 29500 specification, and will stay that way. Indeed, a strong motivation for approving 29500 as an ISO/IEC standard was to discourage Microsoft from this kind of file format rug-pulling stunt in future.

As Chris Capossela said:

We’ve listened to the global community and learned a lot, and we are committed to supporting the Open XML specification that is approved by ISO/IEC in our products.

More commentary from Doug Mahugh on that post from Alex which is a good read.  In his comments he says:

Yes, Max, the day that the vote passed our products didn't automatically start supporting the changes that were made to the spec in recent weeks.  And keep in mind that the final spec isn't even available yet from ISO/IEC.

I'm doubtful that there has ever been a product that has supported a standard as of the day it was ratified, but if that has happened then it would have to be a standard that was not materially improved or modified during the standardization process.  That's not the case here: the standards process improved the IS29500 text, and we're all better off for that in the long run.

and later:

we've not announced any details like that yet but I'll post details when we have them.  One thing to keep in mind is that most users want interop across the widest possible variety of implementations.

Every day on the blogsphere (I hate that word) I see one topic of discussion come up a lot.  I have talked about it often too - how to make the transition to the new UI.  There is good debate to be had about why we needed to make this switch from the traditional menus but at the same time take people with us.

I won't go over all the same ground again but have a look at coping with change and also the ever useful Jensen Harris blog for more.  There is also some great research by Forrester on the Fluent UI and how it is adopted by Information Workers.  This research showed found that within 2 weeks users are up to speed with the new interface. Within 10 weeks users are creating documents 17% faster on average than before.

However I also see people still wanting the old menus back and wanting to recreate 2003 on 2007.  There is no way to do this because if there was we wouldn't have needed to make this change of approach.  Although we do have the quick access toolbar to put frequently used features, there is not a way to recreate menus like 2003.  From a developer perspective though, the Fluent UI is extremely customisable.

Just today for example there is a user asking to put their menus back and every day there is another post about the truly terrible classic UI tools (I won't even give you a link).  They are terrible because all  they do is put some menus inside a tab and as soon as you click on one of them you are still going to get galleries, live previews and the rest of the Fluent UI.  See my post classic mode for 2007 on why this is a chocolate teapot solution.  I think this is barking up the wrong tree - the real question is can you help me find my feature in the new layout while I get used to it.  There are of course the really fab interactive command reference guides which can be installed as part of the build now. 

Another part of the Microsoft Office team went public today so I am allowed to share it with all of you.   it is part of an incubation project group call officelabs internal to Microsoft.  This group, headed up by Chris Pratley (creator of OneNote) focuses on testing out ideas that might one day make it into products.  They partner with product teams across the Microsoft Business Division to rapidly prototype concepts and act as a resource to further the innovation process through collaboration.  This is being extended out to the public now so you can get a flavour of some of these longer term ideas.

Two projects that are available today are the Search commands and Community Clips projects.  I use both from time to time.  The Search commands idea is like putting stabilisers when you learn to ride a bike, after a while you take them off again but it does help when you are learning the new UI.  The community clips add-in lets you create little homemade demos right from within Office.  It handles all the recording, screen capture and audio recording all from one simple to use tab inside the Office apps.

These are NOT supported feature, or even betas, I must emphasise - they aren't even Office 14 features but they are interesting as is the premise of the whole group so do check it out at www.officelabs.com

here is one more screenshot where I searched for borders.  If you hover over one of the results, it shows you where the feature is in the ribbon and if you click on a drop down you can start using the feature directly.

more info on the excellent Higher Education Blog.  Amusingly they got the countdown wrong for a while due to a mistake with a system clock.