Microsoft Office

NEW Office Live features and functionality

First of all, Office Live WorkSpace has added language support for Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Serbia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Latvia, and Slovenia to use the localised service.

WorkSpaces also get long-awaited FOLDERS, full cut/copy/paste and file storage is being increased to a very respectable 5GB

There’s also a brand new Community and Support site at http://ask.officelive.com/workspace/

For Office live Small Business, several new features have been added to enhance ease of use :

1. Custom colour selector – choose exactly the colours you want in the website templates, even match them to your company logo.
2. Custom page zone resizing – new zone templates have been added, along with the ability to resize each zone to your exact needs.
3. Custom backgrounds – apply custom colours, colour gradients and even images to your entire site or to individual web pages.
4. PayPal button module – sell items from your website, securely accessing your PayPal account directly from within the Office Live Small Business Web Site design tool.

Last but not least, there’s also a new Community and Support site for Office live Small Business at http://ask.officelive.com/smallbusiness/

Source- MSDN Blog

Ballmer: Office 14 not this year

During his annual “Strategic Update” briefing with Wall Street analysts on February 24, CEO Steve Ballmer said Office 14 won’t be shipping in 2009.

“Office 14 will not be this year,” Ballmer told analysts.

Microsoft officials have been careful not to provide a ship-date target for the next version of Office. However, last year, more than a few times execs slipped up and indicated Office 14 would ship in 2009. Just a month or two ago, Microsoft reps were telling corporate customers that Office 14 would ship in either late 2009 or early 2010.

Microsoft released an alpha version of Office 14 — which includes a new Office for Sales SKU — in January to selected customers. A first beta is looking like this summer. Microsoft is aiming to release Office 14 client and SharePoint Server 14 together. It also is aiming to ship the next version of Office Communications Server, tentatively known as OCS 2010, next year, as well.

Office not shipping until 2010 makes for an interesting launch season in the coming months.

Source- All about Microsoft

Microsoft Office Codenamed 14

Swedish technet blog has posted an article regarding the next version of Office codenamed Office 14.

Next version of Office system goes under the code name 14 and contains new versions of all client applications, servers and services.

Office’14 ‘ is planned to be completed 36 months after the Office system 2007, ie. end of 2009

Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote in Office’14 ‘also be offered as a web application. This means that you can read, edit and save documents from a Web browser without any local installation. Consumers can get access to Office Web Applications by using Office Live Workspace. Thus, no individual licensing of Office Web applications would be given.

Microsoft is already investing USD 1 billion in research and development in the Office system.

Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2009

Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2009 is the ideal accounting solution for new or existing home office–based small businesses.Office Accounting Express 2009 helps small business owners and bookkeepers save time on everyday tasks, work the way they want, and grow their business through online sales, online invoicing, and payment processes. Office Accounting Express 2009 comes with the familiar look and feel of the Microsoft Office system.
What’s new in Office Accounting 2009 http://www.ideawins.com/whatsnew.aspx

1. New! Create tax preparation reports with the Tax Integration add-in.
2. New! View accounting information conveniently on your desktop with the Amounts to Pay Today gadget.
3. Expanded! Run over 20 new insightful reports and customize them in Excel

Download it here

Announcing Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office System

We’re pleased to announce that Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system is expected to be released in the near future.  Although we aren’t yet announcing the exact release date, it will fall between February and April of 2009.

Historically, we have waited to communicate details about service packs until their release (or very shortly before).  As we communicated with SP3 for Office 2003 and SP1 for the 2007 Office System, we will be taking steps to increase transparency and visibility into the Office servicing model at the request of our customers.  To that end, we would like to start sharing some details into what will be included in SP2 for the 2007 Office system.  This is by no means an exhaustive list of everything included in this service pack and we will share more details prior to the final release, but we want to start communicating to customers what they should be aware of at a high level. 

To be fair, this is not the first time we have talked about SP2.  Several months ago, we announced that we’ll be further demonstrating our increased commitment to interoperability by including support for Open Document Format (ODF), XML Paper Specification (XPS), and Portable Document Format (PDF) in SP2.  In addition to those file format additions, some other highlights that you’ll find in SP2 include:

For Office Desktop Programs:

· Improved Outlook Calendaring Reliability

· Improved Outlook Performance

· Enabling Object Model support for Charts in PowerPoint and Word

· Improved cryptographic functionality by supporting all cryptographic algorithms offered by the operating system

· Improved functionality in Excel’s charting mechanism

· Ability to ungroup SmartArt graphics (and as a result, the ability to add animations to them in PowerPoint)

· Ability for Visio to export UML models to an XML file compliant with the XMI standard

· Tool that enables the uninstall of Office client Service Packs

For Servers:

· Performance and manageability improvements to variations in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) including STSADM commands for repairing links between source and target pages

· Improvements around processing status approvals from Office Project Web Access into Office Project Professional 2007

· Improvements to read-only content databases and index rebuild timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

In the coming weeks, individual product teams across Office will begin updating their blogs and highlighting some of the specific work that they’ve included in SP2.  You can find the links to some of the blogs at the end of the post.

In the next few days we will also invite a select set of Office enterprise customers to a private SP2 beta.  From these customers we hope to gather great feedback about the service pack, including areas that we’ll need to improve upon before we release it to the general public.  Based on the success of the SP2 beta program and customer needs, we will certainly evaluate whether to expand this in the future.

I have been testing office 2007 SP2 beta for the past 2 months or so and indeed they have improved a lot specially in Outlook which loads much faster then the Office outlook 2007 SP1

Source- Technet Blog

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.5 Update

This update contains several improvements to enhance stability, compatibility, and performance. In addition, this update includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. For more information about this update, please visit the Microsoft Web site.
Applies to: Office 2008, Office 2008 Home and Student Edition, Office 2008 Special Media Edition, Word 2008, Excel 2008, PowerPoint 2008, Entourage 2008.

Download Here

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 2 is now available!

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/FX102380591033.aspx

PerformancePoint Server 2007 with Service Pack 2 (SP2) includes enhancements such as improved query performance, support for SQL Server 2008, increased compatibility with Windows Server 2008, including support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and more filtering capabilities for PerformancePoint dashboards. These enhancements boost the already robust capabilities of PerformancePoint Server 2007. For more information on Service Pack 2, see Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 on TechNet.

Service Pack 2 (SP2): 32-bit, 64-bit

Source- MSDN Blog

Update for Office 2003 Multilingual User Interface Pack (KB924423)

This update provides holidays for the Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 calendar when Outlook 2003 is used with a Multilingual User Interface Pack installed. This update provides holidays for the years 2007 through 2012.

You can get specific information about this update in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article Description of the Update for Office 2003 Multilingual User Interface Pack (KB924423).

Download Here