Toluu : Office Rocker!

Office Rocker!

Strange thinking about Microsoft Office

The difference between Vista and OfficeJuly 9 2008

One of the challenges in retail is when customers buy a PC with Windows on it and think they also have Microsoft Office. They get home all excited to write their first letter on Word and find to their dismay that it isn't installed. From their point of view, they bought a PC with Microsoft on it and assume it will have all the applications. This is why Office Ready PCs are a good thing because the customer does get this preinstalled. Even if they don't opt to buy Microsoft Office, with an ORPC they can use the trial and later convert it to a licensed copy online.

Gill Le Fevre, she of the Microsoft Office newsletter - yes she is a real flesh and blood person - has been running the work experience program this week on campus. She asked the students (aged 14-18) to work in groups and come up with an explanation of the difference between Windows and Office, that would

Office Live Small Business has >1M subscribersJuly 3 2008

Following on from my Office Live demo at the NCVO event, Tim Kimber sent me this today which is worth sharing I thought:

Microsoft Office Live Small Business has reached a pivotal milestone: In less than two years since its November 2006 commercial debut, the online service that helps entrepreneurs take, promote and manage their businesses online has surpassed more than 1 million subscribers.

This 1 million worldwide subscribers milestone demonstrates that increasing numbers of small businesses - particularly those with fewer than 10 employees, for which the Office Live Small Business service is specifically designed - are realising the importance of having a Web presence.

Although Internet access is pervasive among small businesses, many very small businesses still lack a company Web

Officelive for charitiesJune 19 2008

Last Tuesday I was running a workshop at the joint Microsoft and NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organisations) on "getting the most from online communities".

Mainly I wanted to show people what can be done either free of charge or for very little money using the latest offerings from OfficeLive. See my interview with Tim Kimber, the Office Live product manager.

The demo I did was to:

Go to officelive.co.uk
Sign up to small business
Talk about the offer (free domain name, free website, 50 email accounts)
Show how you can get your own domain name
Design the web site
- Go to the no photo style and

Microsoft Store launches in the UKJune 2 2008

The Microsoft Store launches today. This is limited to the UK and Germany - not even the US have this yet. Have a look at http://www.microsoftstore.co.uk This is the first time Microsoft has made our products available to the customer to buy online direct from us.

Microsoft support for ISO Open XMLApril 29 2008

seems to be a good deal of chatter recently about our support for the modified version of Open XML that resulted from the rigorous ratification process.

The best summary of the story I found is over on Oliver Bell's blog here so I won't retype it here.

I guess people do just expect Microsoft to pull quality code out of a hat these days but it will take some time to bring Office 2007 back in line with the modified standard. This was always going to be the case. This should not be interpreted by anyone as any sort of reluctance on our part to do the work, quite to opposite.

The debate came from this comment Alex Brown made in his post about this effort:

Given Microsoft's proven ability to tinker with the Office XML file format between service packs, I am hoping that MS Office will shortly be brought into line with the 29500 specification, and will stay that way. Indeed, a strong motivation for approving 29500 as an ISO/IEC standard was to dis