Category Archives: Office

SharePoint 2013, Office 2013, Lync Server 2013, Visio 2013, Exchange 2013 and Office Web Apps 2013 hit MSDN!

Developer, IT Pro, Office, SharePoint, , ,

A few weeks early, so this was a very nice surprise. We’ll get some precious time before SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas to learn what’s changed, and if things are more stable now than with the betas.

After a few hours of running with Office 2013, I have to say that Outlook 2013 and Lync (client) 2013 are much more faster and stable now. Lync 2013 (Preview) crashed against Lync Online constantly, and so far – no issues!

I’m still missing Project Server 2013, although Project Professional 2013 (the client, that is) seems to be available.

You can get all these sweet bits at MSDN and/or Technet.

Outlook 2013 has a nifty weather widget

Office

Outlook 2013 in the newly released Preview of Office 2013 has a nice and non-interruptive weather widget in the Calendar view:

It seems to default to Imperial (as opposed to Metric) units, and I’ve always sucked with conversions like this. Luckily this is trivial to change to Celsius:

Hit Ctrl-F (File) in Outlook. This gives you the renovated Backstage-view:

 

Select T (Options). From Options window go to Calendar and scroll to the bottom:

 

Change to Celsius and you’re all set!

 

Office 2013: Side-by-side or upgrade?

IT Pro, Office, , ,

In Office 2013 (Preview) there’s an option to either do a side-by-side installation, or an upgrade. The side-by-side allows you to run both Office 2010 and Office 2013 on the same machine, thus allowing you to preview the new version while retaining the (presumably) working Office 2010 version.

The upgrade option allows you to do a full upgrade or simply remove one or more Office 2010 apps (such as Word or Excel) and keep the rest.

To choose between these installation types, first run the Office 2013 installer, and accept the license terms:

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If you now select Upgrade, a full upgrade will be performed. We might want to avoid this if Office 2010 still holds some value for you, so select Customize:

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You may now remove all previous versions (first option, a full upgrade), keep all previous versions (side-by-side with Office 2010) or remove one or more of the older Office 2010 apps:

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There’s one restriction and that’s Outlook 2013. As with Outlook 2010 with Office 2010, in Office 2013 you cannot run Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2010 on the same machine. So even if you decide to go with side-by-side, you have to choose between Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013. Otherwise you’ll end up with Office 2010 sans Outlook 2013.

To avoid this situation, select to remove Outlook 2010:

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SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 Consumer Preview resources

Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Training,

Yesterday Microsoft unveiled Office 2013 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Visio and Project client), SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 consumer previews. Internally these are called Beta 2-level releases, so consider before installing them in production machines.

There seems to be so much to choose from so I’ve decided to compile a list of all the goodness that was released:

Office 2013 clients:

  • Office 2013 (x86 and x64) from MSDN Subscriber downloads
  • Visio 2013 (x86 and x64) from MSDN Subscriber downloads
  • Project 2013 (x86 and x64) from MSDN Subscriber downloads

Product keys are in their usual places for the clients.

SharePoint 2013 bits:

  • SharePoint Foundation 2013 (x64 only)
  • SharePoint Server 2013 (x64 only)
  • SharePoint Designer 2013 (x86 and x64)
  • Office Web Apps Server (x64)
  • Audit and Control Management Server
  • Office 365 ProPlus Preview

Tutorials and support material:

  • Overview of the support material
  • SharePoint 2013 IT Pro Training
  • SharePoint 2013 Developer Training
  • SharePoint for Developers
  • SharePoint 2013 Technical Library (compiled help-file)
  • eBook: Deployment Guide for SharePoint 2013
  • Design sample: Corporate Portal with Path-based sites for SP 2013
  • Search architectures for SharePoint Server 2013
  • Enterprise search architectures for SharePoint Server 2013
  • Back up and restore: SharePoint Server 2013
  • Services on server mapping worksheet for SharePoint Server 2013
  • Design sample: Corporate Portal with Host-named sites for SP 2013
  • Databases that support SharePoint 2013
  • Topologies for SharePoint 2013
  • Language Packs for SharePoint Foundation 2013
  • SharePoint Server 2013 Client Components SDK
  • How to test upgrade
  • SharePoint 2013 Upgrade Process
  • Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2013
  • Configure a SharePoint 2013 in Three-Tier farm
  • Demonstrate SAML-based claims authentication with SP 2013
  • Test Lab Guide: Demonstrate intranet collaboration with SP 2013

Other interesting stuff:

  • Lync Server 2013 (x64)
  • Exchange Server 2013 (x64)
  • Project Server 2013 (x64)

It’s 2012–ditch the PST!

Office, Office 365, , , ,

Where's my mail?This article on the Exchange Team blog introduces the PST Capture tool, that was designed to help you get rid of PST files. It’s an interesting read, since apparently lots of people are still using PST files for archiving and sorting email. It’s 2012 – ditch the PST!

I took a moment to reflect back to a time when I had to use PST-files. That was years ago. I feel old now. Perhaps my mailbox was capped to 500 MB and after careful optimization I was able to live my chained-to-email life just barely under the limit. The obvious solution was to create additional PST-files on your local drive and shuffle emails back and forth between different repositories when necessary.

Backups were always painful. Copying 10 PST files, each 2 GB in size, took ages. Or that’s how it seems when you are forced to reorganize email for artificial reasons. Thank you, 500 MB quota.

With the advent of practically unlimited email storage from Google (Gmail), Microsoft (Hotmail) and others, it’s amazing how many companies are still offering email services with subpar storage and archival options for their employees. Who, in a way, are kind of paying for those services in exchange for their time and skills.

Microsoft Exchange 2010 has supported personal archives for quite some time now. Even the TechNet article states the reason for personal archives: “[..] eliminating the need for personal store (.pst) files”. Sadly it’s a premium feature requiring an Exchange enterprise Client Access License (CAL). The alternative for this would be to employ unlimited archive from the cloud with Office 365 by using Exchange Online Archiving.

I, for one, feel that archiving and indexing old emails is worth the effort. I find myself performing advanced search queries against my pre-2000 era emails several times a month. Searching emails from Sent Items is a daily occurrence, and every too often the email I thought I sent just yesterday was actually sent 2 months ago. This is also a painful reminder on how reliant we seem to be on email. Especially for archiving purposes: stuff is sent over the wire and then forgotten – but I’ve got a copy in my archive.

So, really – ditch the PST. Give your people unlimited email archive, today. There’s no reason not to.

Tips and tricks for using Visio 2010

Office, ,

Here’s a quick article I wrote a while back, it just got published today: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/msareena/ms-vinkit/vinkit+visio+2010+ndash+nelja+tehokayttajan+vinkkia/a698074 

This one is only in Finnish – sorry, here’s my poor attempt at translating it: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fi&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tietoviikko.fi%2Fmsareena%2Fms-vinkit%2Fvinkit%2Bvisio%2B2010%2Bndash%2Bnelja%2Btehokayttajan%2Bvinkkia%2Fa698074