justin ho

From: http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2008/08/14/microsoft-officelabs-releases-pptplex.aspx

Taking inspiration from the Plex technology used in the Bill Gates’s TouchWall demonstration at the CEO Summit, OfficeLabs have created a prototype that allows people to have similar zooming capabilities using Office PowerPoint 2007. With pptPlex you can show slides on a zoomable canvas moving around the canvas to show groups of slides, individual slides, or zoom in to display a particular section of a slide.

An Overview of pptPlex

Download: http://msofficelb.vo.llnwd.net/o25/4fcaa65e-086d-4d49-a292-a5e764667263/1.1.0.0/pptPlex.msi

Summary:

Addins for the PDFMaker and other Adobe PDF "features" are unnecessary and annoying.  When you attempt to disable these in the Office 2007 Plug-In centre, you get a message saying "The connected state of Office Add-Ins registered in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE cannot be changed".

Solution:

Start regedit as an administrator.  Navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins.  For x64, navigate to HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office.

To disable the plugins, open the LoadBehavior value for each registered addin in HKLM. Set LoadBehavior to 2.
To remove the plugins entirely, delete the subkeys for the AdobePDF entry altogether.

Search Commands helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need. Search Commands also includes Guided Help, which acts as a tour guide for specific tasks.

Download
http://msofficelb.vo.llnwd.net/o25/2dbf9d2f-522f-4b19-8679-3539cc38eb5f/setup.msi

More
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands/Pages/default.aspx

FAQ
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands/Pages/FAQ.aspx
 

It took me around a day to notice... but after I installed IE8 beta, all my RSS feeds from my "Common Feed List" stopped updating.

As a result, a few things have happened/I have noticed several things:

• Outlook 2007's RSS folder deletion sucks.  I created a "temp" folder, and dragged all my old folders into the temp folder, then deleted the whole temp folder.  Result of design by committee: Your product sucks at very simple tasks because not all use cases end up being included.
• RSS feeds are background noise.  And after a day or so, I "miss" the noise.  Makes me wonder if I should be spending more time on important things instead of reading all this "news".  RSS feeds are a form of noise pollution in my life.
• I manually re-added the 8 or so feeds that I actually need, into Outlook 2007.  Reddit and Digg are both cut, due to the poor signal to noise ratio.
• IE8 opens a lot more connections - and loads sites faster.  Also mentioned here: http://www.ajaxperformance.com/2008/03/07/ie8-the-performance-implications/
• Outlook 2007's RSS functionality is... decent... but still leaves much to be desired.  I have 3 machines, each with Outlook on them against my Exchange server.  This means that most of my RSS feeds come in THREE times over.  Who decided THAT would be a good idea?  The committee did.

Instead of just being rants, I found the following pages to be rather helpful.  There are some nice troubleshooting tips, changes you can make to improve performance, etc..

Why Outlook 2007 is slow: Microsoft’s official answer
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/?p=123

Outlook 2007 is slow, RSS broken
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/?p=54

Problem with Outlook 2007 - Email Receive is Broken!
http://www.roundtripsolutions.com/blog/2007/02/19/208/problem-with-outlook-2007-email-receive-is-broken/

What can I do about Outlook's huge PST?
http://ask-leo.com/what_can_i_do_about_outlooks_huge_pst.html

"My mailbox size is 7.4GB. I send/receive around 200 emails a day; so that 7.4GB of email goes back several years. I don't use too many rules so most of my email ends up in my Inbox (30k items).

My background is in software performance (especially storage performance); so I couldn't live with the status quo. I was stuck, I needed my large mailbox; but I also needed a great/fast user experience so I could effectively process my mailbox. All of my machines had sufficient memory (2GB or more) so I couldn't solve the problem by adding memory (to provide the Windows System Cache with more memory to buffer the OST IO's). "

Continued: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/12/17/447750.aspx

Summary:

1. Make a set of folders containing content that is over a year (or two) old - so that your mailbox size becomes manageable.
2. Separate the content in these folders chronologically.  2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, etc.
3. Set Outlook not to sync these archive folders to your devices.  While online, you have access to this content; offline, you can't access anything older than 2 years.

This maintains the following:

1. Your large mailbox, allowing you to keep all your email online in Exchange for backup and quick access (via a web browser).
2. No PST usage.  No management of pesky PST files, and you don't have to worry about backup - the Exchange is stored on a RAID set, and backed up frequently.
3. Good laptop/desktop/workstation Outlook 2007 cached user mode experience.
4. Ability to search entire mailbox.  Open Outlook in online mode, or open up OWA.
5. Low processing on the server.  Working in offline mode means that the basic mail processing is done locally on my machine, not on the server.

Problem:

Exchange 2007 SP1 Will Not Support the Searching of Content Within Office 2007 Attachments in Messages Until the Respective Office 2007 Search Filters are Installed

Because Exchange 2007 SP1 does not include the search filters from the 2007 Microsoft Office release, Exchange 2007 SP1 cannot index Office 2007 attachments in mailboxes. Therefore, users who have mailboxes on Exchange 2007 SP1 Mailbox servers will not be able search their mailboxes for content within Office 2007 attachments in their messages. However, as soon as the Office 2007 search filters are available, installed, and integrated with your Exchange SP1 installations, this search functionality will be supported.

2007 Office System Converter: Microsoft Filter Pack
This download will install and register IFilters with the Windows Indexing Service. These IFilters are used by Microsoft Search products to index the contents of specific document formats. This Filter Pack includes IFilters for the following formats: .docx, .docm, .pptx, .pptm, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .zip, .one, .vdx, .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, and .vtx.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=60C92A37-719C-4077-B5C6-CAC34F4227CC&displaylang=en

How to register Filter Pack IFilters with Exchange Server 2007
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;944516

More information:
Exchange 2007 SP1 Release Notes
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/e/6/5e672458-592a-44a2-b489-11cec19d3c82/RelNotes.htm

Question:

So you bought a new copy of Office 2007 Professional.  How many computers can you install it on?

The license agreement contains the following:

1. OVERVIEW. These license terms permit installation and use of one copy of the software on one device, along with other rights, all as described below.
2. INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device. That device is the "licensed device."  A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate device.
a. Licensed Device. You may install and use one copy of the software on the licensed device.
b. Portable Device. You may install another copy on a portable device for use by the single primary user of the licensed device.
c. Separation of Components. The components of the software are licensed as a single unit.  You may not separate the components and install them on different devices.

Answer:

You can install it on your desktop, and your laptop, as long as you use both machines.