Mart Muller's Weblog

I dont’ really know what to think of this:

“In the two months since its debut, Office 2007 Beta 2 has been downloaded by over three million people, Microsoft told BetaNews Friday. In fact, the demand has been so high that the company has decided to begin charging customers $1.50 USD for the download beginning August 2.

Via Steve Caravajal’s blog I read something interesting: the upgrade path from Beta 2 to RTM..

“For the millions that have installed the beta 2 bits please pay attention.

1. The upgrade path to RTM will be beta 2 --> beta 2 Technical Refresh --> RTM.  I know you have probably heard me say this but I thought I would write it down (...in case I forget).  NOTE: beta 2 installs MUST upgrade to beta 2 TR.  Said another way, there won't be a supportable path directly from beta 2 to RTM.

2. Beta 2 TR will be released as a patch to beta 2.  Therefore, for those 2 or 3 folks that haven't installed beta 2 because you are waiting for beta 2 TR, well guess what, you'll need to install beta 2 anyway and then apply the beta 2 TR patch.

3. Upgrading to RTM will require an uninstall of beta 2 TR, and a registry key modfication prior to installing the RTM bits.

I know, I know the devil is always in the details so expect more info when beta 2 TR is released.”

Full article

Via Jensen’s blog:

“One of the projects our design team has been working on for the last year or so has been the development of a new suite of product icons for Office 2007. Here are the 32x32 versions of the icons which will appear in the final product: “

So, which one is the SharePoint designer icon, that was still blank in beta 2?

I’ll put my money on the green one at the bottom.

• More Office design
• Complete article

Something we already knew of course, but a nice to read article by Kathleen Richard interviewing John Rymer about developer opportunities in Office 2007.

“The most important thing that enterprise developers need to do, I think, is to be aware that this is one of these periodic big changes that Microsoft makes to the development environment. You have to evaluate it. A lot of people that are doing custom Windows development should probably re-evaluate that because they may be able to get a better result for a lower cost by using Office as a basis for Windows clients. My biggest fear is that people will just sort of let this go by, and just say, 'Well, it is Office, so it doesn't concern us,' and continue to do things the way that they have been doing them, and potentially find themselves building things at a higher then necessary cost in terms of development budgets and ongoing maintenance and complexity. That for me is the big need here, to recalibrate, to take a look, there are opportunities to do things better here if you are in the Microsoft world.“

Read the complete article

Via Patrick and MicrosoftWatch:

“Microsoft is readying the next -- and seemingly final public -- beta builds of its Office 2007 client and SharePoint Server 2007 server products, according to bloggers inside and outside the company.

Last week, Microsoft notified Office testers officially of its plans for the next build, known as Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh (TR). According to a note posted to the Office 2007 beta site:

"The B2TR (Beta 2 Technical Refresh) build will be releasing in the not too distant future and we're starting to outline plans for that release. Over the next weeks we'll be providing more information about what TAP (Technology Adoption Program) members can expect in the way of deployment planning, Vista interoperability and support from our product development teams for B2TR deployments."

When asked for more specifics on Beta 2 TR timing, a Microsoft spokeswoman said the build would go live sometime soon "in the months to come."”

Like many others (I think), I’m really looking forward to that momemt considering all the (setup) problems I’ve had with Beta 2..

Today exactly, my weblog exists 2 years! So, just like last year, some stats over the last year. The number of visits has increased a lot! Over de last year I’ve had:

• a total number of 1317025 visits
• a total number of 3869802 pageviews
• an average of 3598 visits a day
• an average of 10573 pageviews a day
• my blog found with the keyword sharepoint for 67560 times

There has been a lot to blog, especially the news about MOSS 2007. With PDC and Office DevCon 2006 it has been an interesting year. Anyway, another year to come!

New step for Unified Communications:

“Microsoft Corp. today announced availability of the public betas of Microsoft^® Exchange Server 2007 and the new Forefront Security for Exchange Server. Exchange Server 2007 builds on the leading e-mail, messaging and calendaring server with new features for improved security, remote and mobile access, compliance management, and unified messaging. Forefront Security for Exchange Server helps provide advanced protection against viruses, worms and spam, and is the first product available under the recently announced Microsoft Forefront brand for business security products.

Exchange Server 2007 beta 2 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/beta2, and Forefront Security for Exchange Server beta can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/serversecurity/exchange/download-beta.mspx.”

The Office Web Components (OWC) are a set of ActiveX controls that provide four principal components: Spreadsheet, Chart, PivotTable, and Data Source Control (DSC). 

With no regrets: The Office Web  Components are being discontinued because Microsoft needed a more flexible technology to help customers address the following challenges they faced with OWC

• A server-side Excel calculation engine
• Greater parity with Excel when worksheets are delivered over the Web
• The ability to enable spreadsheets to be more scalable and stable when loaded onto a server
• Improved security
• The ability to perform more detailed analysis to improve overall business intelligence.

About support of previous versions:

Source

That SharePoint team blog has posted an interesting article about which browser are supported in what level for WSS and the central administration web pages. In summary:

WSS3 knows two levels of browsers, Level 1 browsers and Level 2 browsers. Level 1 browsers can handle all functionality and experience options in WSS like ActiveX controls. basically the Level 1 browsers are IE6 and IE 7 for Windows.

Level 2 browsers are browsers that still work with WSS 3 but have limited user experience. The central administration pages can only be used with Level 1 browsers.

From the article:

“The good news here is that we have significantly improved SharePoint's cross-browser support in the new release compared to the current 2003 release.  We've also been documenting where our features behave differently in Level 2 browsers, so customers can better understand what to expect when we release the new version.  While subject to change before we ship, the current Level 2 web browsers are:

Windows

• Firefox 1.5+
• Netscape 8.1+
• Mozilla 1.7+

Macintosh

• Safari 2.0+
• Firefox 1.5+

Unix/Linux

• Firefox 1.5+
• Netscape 7.2+

Please note that the following web browsers, which were supported in previous versions of SharePoint Products and Technologies, will not be supported in the new version:

• Internet Explorer 5.01
• Internet Explorer 5.5x
• Internet Explorer for Macintosh
• Third-party web browser versions earlier than the ones listed as supported above

Here are some of the improvements that we have made in our Level 2 browser support compared to the previous version:

• Most context menus are now supported in non-IE browsers.  You'll notice that we've heavily integrated context menus into SharePoint with this version.  These are the menus that appear when you hover over list items and click on the menu triangle, as well as list toolbars, view selectors, etc.  By adding non-IE support to most of our context menus, not only will end users have a better experience interacting with SharePoint sites, but developers will benefit too.  Now they can take advantage of the extensibility we offer in those menus and not have to worry about providing a separate code path for non-IE users.
• Creating file attachments to list items is now supported in non-IE browsers.  This was a popular request from previous versions, so we've extended that support beyond just Internet Explorer.”

Read the complete article

Get this tool! Wow, Todd Baginski did a great job creating a BDC tool that makes life a lot more easier!

From his blog:

“What would you say if I told you that you could create a MOSS BDC Application Definition without writing a single line of code?  How about if the process took less than 20 clicks of your mouse?

You'd probably say, I've seen that crazy Application Definition XML file and I think you are pulling my leg.  You might recall seeing the contents of the nasty XML file during a demo at a recent SharePoint conference and think to yourself, there's no way, this is too good to be true.

Well, as you can probably guess by now, this is possible with the help of an application I created called the MOSS BDC MetaData Manager.  The application allows you to point and click your way to BDC euphoria (if there is such a thing), and requires no knowledge of C#, VB.NET or XML.  If you can use a computer then you can use this tool.  Seeing that you are using a computer and found your way to this web page, you already qualify!”

download the tool here

I’m kind of behind with my blog lately, despite of my intentions (promises) to blog a lot after my return from South Africa… So maybe some old news for some, but too important not writing about: the things we build in MOSS 2007 beta 2. Yes, it is upgreadable to RTM which is a great thing (via Eli). We at Tam Tam have been ‘playing around’ a lot already with MOSS 2007. For internal use, the Excel services dashboards are running, webparts are built, our adminstration database is partly accesible through the business data catalog and master pages are being created for our corperate intranet.

And, even more important, our customers want it all! It’s hard to sell WSS 2 or SPS2003 these days, and even harder to develop on it, looking at the new features and improvements of MOSS 2007.

Today again, I gave a quick demo about workflow in Sharepoint 2007. The workflow could be created with the SharePoint UI, having SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio as a backup. Great things, and looking at our planning, a lot of 2007 stuff to come in the next few weeks. I’ll keep you posted!

Two (PDF) posters for download on the Microsoft site to hang on your bedroom wall . Right here!

This download contains the following files:

• Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 Managed Object Model Poster. Download this poster and get a deep dive into some of the new and enhanced objects in the InfoPath 2007 managed object model.
• Developer Map for SharePoint Products and Technologies Poster. Download this poster and discover the developer roadmap for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Via Jensen’s blog:

“The new Office 2007 color scheme is called "Silver." Here's a picture of it running on top of a recent build of Windows Vista:

Silver color scheme on Windows Vista
(Click to enlarge and view full picture)

This color scheme was designed to provide a very neutral canvas on which to do your work. It draws your eye to the document and doesn't include some of the more decorative aspects of the other two color schemes, such as the architectural elements behind the document. And most importantly for a neutral canvas, Silver isn't infused or saturated with color, so that the design of your document stands out. “

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