Tag: Office

Office 2010

Want to know what’s coming in Office 2010? Then visit http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/ where you’ll find all sorts of information. There are a whole heaps of short videos on each of the Office products that’ll give you an idea of what to expect.

From the site you can also visit http://www.microsoft.com/officebusiness/office2010/ which is specifically about Office 2010 for business. There is plenty of really good information about what new features the product will have specifically for business.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of information around the new version of SharePoint. There is however on the Office business site information about SharePoint Workspace 2010 (ex Groove) which allows you to take SharePoint information offline.

I would expect the content in this site to continue to grow as the product reaches a release date but for now if you want to see what’s coming in Office 2010 take a look.

More like it

Microsoft has had some questionable advertising and marketing of late but to me it seems like they are much closer to target with Office 2010: The Movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUawhjxLS2I&feature=player_embedded

There is also some other good stuff at http://www.office2010themovie.com/. If you wondered what happened to ‘Clippy’ then the video may help you understand.

 

So tell me why is good Microsoft advertising like this not getting any traction, while the other totally lame stuff is? Microsoft seem to me to have spent more bucks on Office 2010 the Movie than other recent ads, yet this is the first I have heard about it. Strange.

OneNote vs Email collaboration

Let’s have a look at a typical scenario that illustrates how inferior email can be as a collaboration tool.

Why email isn’t good for collaboration

You start off with a document in Word say. You create an email and attach the document, then send it to someone outside your business for review. If we assume both parties are using the cache version of Exchange with Outlook, you now have created three copies of that one file (call it version 1). The first, on you local machine, the second in your sent items as an attachment to the email you sent to your colleague and finally a local copy in you cached mailbox.

Next, assume that your colleague reviewed the document you sent by firstly copying it to their local machine. They modify the document (which we will now call version 2) and return it to you via email. Apart from the three copies of version 1 of the document at your location there are now two more copies of version 1 at your colleague’s (one in their inbox and one in the local cached version of the mail box). So we are now up to 5 copies of version 1 of the document. We haven’t finished yet though. There are also now three copies of version 2 of the document at your colleague’s, one on the local hard disk, one in the sent items attached to an email reply to you and one in the cached version of the mailbox.

Even before you receive the reply from you colleague the totals so far are:

5 copies of version 1 + 3 copies of version 2 = 8 copies of various versions of the one document.

Continuing on, you receive the amended document (version 2) via email and save it to the hard disk for review. That’s added another three copies of version 2 of the document (one in your inbox, one in the cache version of your mailbox and one copy on your hard disk).

So, for a simple 2 way review of a document we have potentially generated 11 copies and at least two versions of the same document. Think that’s bad? What happens if you were now working in a team of five people all reviewing the document multiple times instead of just two? You may now begin to appreciate how poor and inefficient emails can be for collaboration.

A better way?

There must be better way. Well, I believe using a combination of hosted SharePoint and OneNote there certainly is.

The most obvious solution would seem to be to host the document in a SharePoint document library and use the built in check in/check out features. That certainly overcomes the issue with multiple copies but it is perhaps not as good in solving the collaboration question of people contributing ideas to the document. A better solution I believe is to use a OneNote notebook, on a hosted SharePoint site in which the document is embedded inside OneNote.

Using OneNote still means that every member of the team has a local copy of the document but that is a good idea if they want to work with it offline. If you where to link to a SharePoint document library using Outlook you’d get the whole document library available offline which may be not what you needed. The embedded document in OneNote would allow the team to create notes, cut and paste information into the notebook, tag items and so on as well as work on the document. In the end it provides a complete and encapsulated collaboration environment.

Now, it would be possible to achieve the same result with SharePoint alone but I believe the simplicity of OneNote makes it a winner for most people used to collaborating with emails. As time goes by they could graduate to a SharePoint only solution but using OneNote with SharePoint provides a great introduction to the other benefits SharePoint can provide team collaboration.

As I mentioned in a previous post, when you install OneNote on your system it adds some additional buttons to your applications. One of these is in Outlook like so:

This makes it extremely simple to get information out of Outlook and into something more suited to collaboration. If you are using your inbox as a storage system for information that arrives in email why not take a look at using OneNote instead? You can download the trial version for free to see whether it works for you. Even if you simply use OneNote as your own personal digital notebook I think you’ll find that it will become an indispensible application.

Conclusion

Hopefully you can begin to appreciate that there are potentially many improved methods of collaboration apart from email. Hopefully you can also appreciate that tool like SharePoint and OneNote are designed with team collaboration in mind. Hopefully now you will thinking how much extra time you can save using the right tools for collaboration. Like all work, using the right tools makes all the difference. Remember you probably don’t get paid per email you get paid on how much work you get done.

Opinions on OneNote

Once you have OneNote installed on your system you will notice that it adds an additional OneNote button to a few Microsoft Applications. The first of these is the Internet Explorer browser, which appears like:

Now you can simply highlight the information you wish to record in OneNote and then press the ‘Send to OneNote’ button.

So what I’ve done here is highlight some text and image from a previous blog post in Internet Explorer and pressed the ‘Send to OneNote’ button in the toolbar of the browser.

As you can see above, that exact information has been placed on a new OneNote page that I can file into any notebook I desire. One of the handy things it does automatically as well is also record where the information came from (i.e. the source URL). This makes it exceptionally easy to refer to at a later stage if required.

OneNote also provides the ability to ‘clip’ exactly what is on any region of the screen, much like a standard print screen. In the example shown above I have clipped part of my screen (showing a number of running apps) as an image directly into OneNote. OneNote will automatically time stamp the screen clipping for you as well as making searchable any of the text that actually appears in the image. Yes, that’s right – OneNote does OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the fly.

Apart from being able to simply type information into OneNote you can also tags. These allow you to categorize your information to make it easier to find later. Standard tags include things like: to do, important, question etc. You can even create your own tags. I’ll cover more about searching in OneNote in an upcoming post.

So there’s just a few reasons why I reckon OneNote is worth a look. As I have mentioned before you can download a trial version to get a better understanding yourself. If you do decided to buy a copy I think you’ll be surprised at how little OneNote actually costs, especially when you look at the benefits it can provide.

Ok, so OneNote is great but it does have a few drawbacks in my opinion including:

– No ‘reader’ program. This means you have to download and install the OneNote program before you can open OneNote notebooks. There are readers for other Microsoft Office products like Word and Excel, why isn’t there one for OneNote? How handy would it be to be able to send someone a notebook full of information that they could simply view? Please, oh please Microsoft a reader for OneNote!

– To obtain the best in collaboration OneNote needs to be back ended into a hosted SharePoint site for collaboration across the Internet. Admittedly, you can use Microsoft Office Live Workspace for free but wouldn’t it be nice if Microsoft could provide some space in the cloud for free? Microsoft has this facility via Skydrive for example, why can’t OneNote notebooks be stored there? (I’m still trying to work out whether this can in fact be done).

– Another similar product to OneNote that I use frequently is EverNote (which is free). One of the many handy things about EverNote is that it allows you to browse your notes via web page. You can even edit information in notes via this web page. I have found this invaluable when I’m out somewhere and I need a screen shot. I simply do a print screen, save it to a note in EverNote via the web and then when I return to my desk I simply sync my desktop EverNote with the web and I have the screen shot. Very handy!

I’ll go into more depth on EverNote in an upcoming blog post.
There are a few other minor annoyances I have with OneNote but these are the major three that annoy me constantly. Hopefully OneNote can learn from EverNote and add these few remaining features that would make OneNote a real killer app.

OneNote on SharePoint

One of the most overlooked applications available from Microsoft is OneNote. It is a simple electronic notebook that allows you to store just about any digital information you can think of.

You can even use it to clip information directly from web pages. It is just such a handy application that if you haven’t had a look I suggest you download a trial.

I will leave the virtues of OneNote to another post, what I want to demonstrate here is how much more powerful OneNote becomes when it is utilized in conjunction with SharePoint. Basically, if you save your OneNote notebooks into a SharePoint document library then you can share the notebook between people. If the SharePoint site is hosted on the Internet then people connected to the Internet can collaborate easily.

If you need a free hosted SharePoint solution have a look at Microsoft Office Live Workspace. Combine that with OneNote and you have instant team collaboration anywhere you have an Internet connection.

So, how do you create a OneNote notebook that lives on SharePoint? During the process of creating a new notebook you’ll see a windows like this:

Selecting the bottom option then “On a Server” will then ask for the location of the server. In this case you simply enter the full location of a SharePoint document library like the one shown below.

If you now enter a new folder name OneNote will store the new notebook there with all the sections in files below this.

Once the new notebook has been created you can add any information you require. The information is not only saved locally but also automatically synced with the information in SharePoint. This allows anyone to work on the notebook.

Next time you open OneNote you will see the local copy of the notebook appear. You can continue to work on this copy but if you are connected to the Internet you will see a prompt at the top of the page asking you to login to the SharePoint site as shown:

Once you are logged back in the notebook will synchronize again so you will see any changes that other people have made and that information will be copied to your local machine.

If you take a look around your desk at all the information on bits of paper you should ask yourself why these aren’t in digital form. Once they are entered into a digital form they are easily backed up, searchable and shareable. I can guarantee that it will improve your productivity and reduce clutter. If it can do that for one person imagine what it can for a team of people?

If you are looking at tools to improve your productivity look no further than OneNote and SharePoint. You won’t be sorry you did.

Look familiar?

Now where have I seen that face before? I’m proud to say that I’ve been profiled in a recent CRN (Computer Reseller News) article called “CIA man is an agent of change”. The article covers some of the history about my starting off on my own as well as my current thinking on the state of business as a technology reseller. For those who read this blog then there should be no major surprises (always nice to be consistent eh?).

 

One of the things the article didn’t cover is how I’m generally bullish about moving technology into the cloud via hosted services (especially email). Although detractors can point to many valid problems and challenges these are no different from those facing any previous instance of technology and because of this I am extremely confident that they will be overcome. As such, my advice to resellers is that at the very least you need to be aware of what hosted technology can provide rather than locking yourself into only on-site infrastructure. But then that’s a whole ‘nother article isn’t it?

 

Have a read of the article and let me know what you think (director@ciaops.com).

OneNote – redux

I’ve had instance to talk to a few people recently about some productivity and collaboration solutions, obviously based around SharePoint. One thing I always try and mention is OneNote and sadly, I find that most people have consigned it to the “seen it once, never used it” bin which is really unfortunate.

I will readily admit that for a long time I too considered OneNote in a similar way. That was until I attended a session given by Todd Colbeck at SMBNation 2008. Todd was able to readily demonstrate how effective and powerful OneNote can be. He also demonstrated what a great solution it was on which to build some revenue. This was probably the biggest eye opener of the conference and I went away with the goal to do more with OneNote.

Now days, I find OneNote an indispensible tool to the way that I do business. Because OneNote appears so simple to use many people get fooled into believing that it somehow just a “optional extra” for Microsoft Office.

So what can you use OneNote for? Well I find it is great for all that ad-hoc material you always have floating around that never really seems to want to live anywhere. Personally, I use a simply paper notebook to keep track of things (in the good GTD way), because it is the fastest and most convenient method of documentation. However, I regularly transfer information from this notebook into OneNote so I have an electronic copy. No matter what the information is I can always create new sections and pages within OneNote to store it.

When you start looking around you’ll actually find many of the existing applications on your computer are already OneNote enabled. Both Internet Explorer (above left) and Outlook (above right) are just two examples. If you find something interesting on a web page simply highlight it and click the Send to OneNote button. The same applies with emails and Outlook.

The power of OneNote becomes more obvious when you share notebooks via a network or SharePoint. This means that whenever you open a shared OneNote notebook all the information is sync’ed with your local copy. When you are working online anything you enter is also automatically updated for everyone else sharing the notebook to see. When you are ready you can disconnect and still retain a local copy of the notebook which you can continue to work with and then sync again next time you connect.

Even better, if you have SharePoint available via the Internet then your OneNote notebooks become available anywhere you have Internet access. You could, for example, create a notebook for each client and share that directly with the client. I find this solution great when designing SharePoint sites for a client because they can add information as well as keep up to date with the design progress. It is an excellent collaboration tool that once customers actually start to utilize appreciate its power and actually start rolling it out throughout their business.

OneNote has so many features including full search, tagging, freehand annotations and so on. Even better, if it is not already on your desktop via Microsoft Office then it is very cheap to purchase (a free 60 day trial is available). If you haven’t looked at OneNote in a while I recommend you take a look and I’m sure you’ll find how valuable it can be. Even better, consider combining it with an online SharePoint solution for true collaboration.

Return to 2003

Office 2007 has been out for a while now but many people still struggle with the new ribbon menu system. Now I will also admit that when the ribbon first made an appearance on my desktop I too was a little confused at where everything went to. However over time I found that I actually liked the ribbon but I understand it may hinder people who simply want to get things done in Office 2007 like they did in Office 2003.

Personally, I think it was a mistake for Microsoft not to provide some menu migration ability where perhaps the old menuing system could be turned back on for say 60 days to ease the transition. For whatever reason that never happened, so when you started Office 2007 you had no other option but to use the ribbon menu.

For those who still want the old Office 2003 style menuing here’s a potential solution.
 
As you can see from the above picture UBit menu software has a free plug in that allows you to retro fit Office 2003 menus into Office 2007. You sorta have to wonder why Microsoft really didn’t do this? I suppose that’s the benefit of being the dominate provider of desktop software, ‘everyone will change and change on this version’. I really don’t think that helps sell more software given how many people have used office for all those years.