Office hunts for new niches (Sep 22)
Microsoft plans to announce new specialty software packages on Monday based on the upcoming update of its Office productivity software.
The new packages, which will combine Microsoft software with third-party add-ons and services, will be sold by Microsoft partners under the Office Solution Accelerator Program. The program is part of a broad effort by Microsoft to court partners to help exploit new enterprise capabilities in the upcoming Office System.
Read the full article at CNET
MSN Messenger 6.1 Release Date and New Features (Sep 21)
The new version of MSN Messenger is announced to be released on October 23. As Microsoft often changes the release date of their products it cannot be said if this is really going to be the release date. Check out the website to find out about the features or even try them out yourself by downloading the BETA.
View: New in MSN Messenger 6.1
Repost Download: MSN Messenger 6.1 Beta
Added content (Sep 20)
I added a link in the How To section to a Microsoft website which shows the command line options you have for the Microsoft Office 2003 setup.
When you run Setup for Microsoft® Office 2003, you can use command-line options to change some of the parameters that Setup uses to install Office, such as display settings and default values for Setup properties.
View: Setup Command-line Options
Upgrading to Outlook 2003 from Previous Versions (Sep 20)
With the upcoming release of Microsoft Office it’s good to know what happens when you upgrade your Outlook from previous versions. The article is an old release and marked as BETA but it still applies.
View: Upgrading to Outlook 2003 from Previous Versions
New Hotmail coming up! (Sep 20)
There is a demo of the new Hotmail. It displays some new features which are mainly anti-spam related. Hotmail will look a lot more to Outlook Web Access as well. To check out the demo make sure you are logged on to Hotmail first.
Logon to Hotmail
View: MSN Hotmail demo
Office Live Meeting 2003 review (Sep 20)
As mentioned at the beginning of this week Microsoft launched into web conferencing with Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
Office Live Meeting 2003 is essentially a Web conferencing service that allows you to hold meetings over the Internet, such as team meetings, sales calls, training sessions and customer demonstrations. Office Live Meeting 2003 also allows you to access the desktop of other PCs using the service. There is no need to install servers in order to share content and applications with other people.
Read: Full article at Bios
View: Live Meeting website
View: Live Meeting demo
Read: Press release at Microsoft
PDF Converter Released (Sep 20)
Forgot to mention this last week as the mail ended up in my spam folder :-S. The PDF converter will let you text based pdf-files convert to Microsoft Office Word documents. This can be very handy if you don’t have or lost the original document. Actually there is no need to save the original document at all as the conversion is very smoothly. This way you won’t have to check if the pdf-file is the same version as your original doc-file and edit the wrong doc-file by mistake.
Latest Patch? (Sep 19)
An update on the virus that pretends it is the latest patch from Microsoft is spreading. The mail is starting to look pretty good and can easily fool people who don’t realize that patches from Microsoft are never spread by e-mail. Make sure you are running the latest virus definitions by visiting the website of your virus scan developer.
Read about the virus on Symantec
Screenshot of the E-mail
Toshiba to Preinstall Microsoft Office OneNote on All of Its New Portable PCs Worldwide (Sep 17)
Today at WPC Expo 2003 in Tokyo, Microsoft Corp. and Toshiba Corp. announced an agreement to deliver Microsoft® Office OneNote (TM) 2003 preinstalled on all new Toshiba laptops and Tablet PCs worldwide. OneNote 2003, the new digital note-taking program from Microsoft, will be available to customers preinstalled on Toshiba portable computers when the Microsoft Office System is launched Oct. 21, 2003, in New York.
What’s New in Exchange Server 2003 (Sep 16)
It’s not a complete overview of all the new functionality but this article discusses the most important new administrative and security features in Exchange 2003.
PowerPoint Templates Pack and PowerPoint 2003 Viewer (Sep 16)
This download is a collection of background and design templates included with PowerPoint 4.0 and later versions. Strangely enough they made 3 separate packs for it of just a couple MB’s in size while they just released rollup packages for Exchange documentation of tools (see below). There is also a new PowerPoint viewer which can deal with PowerPoint 2003 files.
Download: Template Pack 1
Download: Template Pack 2
Download: Template Pack 3
Download: PowerPoint 2003 Viewer
Exchange 2000 – Technical White Papers (All) (Sep 16)
This download contains all the Exchange 2000 Server white papers through August 7, 2003.
View: whitepaper overview
Download: all whitepapers
Exchange 2003: All Exchange Tools and Updates (Sep 16)
This package contains all the Exchange tools and updates bundled together in a single download.
View: tools and updates in the package
Download: all Exchange tools and updates
Microsoft launches into Web conferencing (Sep 15)
And the Office family grew with yet another product: Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
Participants log into a central Web site, where they can then concurrently view a presentation, exchange notes or ask questions through chat software, and collaboratively edit documents. A number of companies use it for remote training seminars.
Read the article at CNET
Could we really have had a cool Clippy? (Sep 13)
In an animated video to promote PDC we hear some interesting “facts” about the characters who are now in the Halo videogame. The video is about two squads, red and blue, in heavy combat when all of a sudden one wants to leave as he has to go to PDC (Professional Developers Conference 2003) in Los Angeles. So they stop their war and talk about their life at Microsoft. Pretty funny video with the introduction (or actually replacement) of a very cool Clippy!
Download: Red vs. Blue PDC Video
View: Professional Developers Conference 2003 website
