November 9th, 2009

Why I'm letting someone else run my Exchange 2010 server

Posted by Ed Bott @ 12:22 pm

Categories: Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office

Tags: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Apptix, Intermedia, Microsoft Corp., Hosting Company, E-mail, Servers, Online Communications, Hardware, Ed Bott

Microsoft officially released Exchange Server 2010 today. As an MSDN and TechNet subscriber, I could go download the code for free and install it on my in-house Windows Server 2008 R2 box. But I have no plans to download those bits or install them.

Instead, I’m planning to let someone else handle the heavy lifting for me, and I suspect I have a lot of company. The biggest objection to a complex but powerful server product like Exchange is the hassle of managing it locally. Using a third-party hosting company eliminates those hassles and adds benefits like redundant data storage and simplified administration.

For the past few years, I’ve kept all my personal and business e-mail, calendar, and contact information in an Exchange account hosted by Mailstreet, a division of Apptix. (Previously, I used unmanaged POP/SMTP servers for e-mail and stored messages, contacts, and calendar information locally in Outlook PST files.) Mailstreet’s service has been first-rate, including a recent trouble-free upgrade from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. For our collaborative work on recent book projects, my co-authors and I have also been using SharePoint and Exchange 2007 as part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, which has also been easy to use and extremely reliable.

The first third-party hosting company to cross the Exchange 2010 finish line is Intermedia, which announced availability of its hosted Exchange 2010 product (a custom-developed solution) within a few seconds of Microsoft’s announcement. So far, neither Apptix nor Microsoft’s BPOS division have announced definitive plans to make the latest version of Exchange available as a hosted offering. According to an Apptix spokesperson, being first isn’t necessarily that big of a deal:

Read the rest of this entry »

November 6th, 2009

Seven perfectly legal ways to get Windows 7 cheap (or even free)

Posted by Ed Bott @ 6:21 am

Categories: Licensing, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Windows 7

Tags: Microsoft Developer Network, License, PC, Student, Microsoft Corp., Subscription, Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems

Only suckers pay retail.

If you’ve read any reviews of Windows 7, you’ve seen references to its price list, which ranges from $120 for a Home Premium upgrade to $320 for a fully licensed copy of Windows 7 Ultimate.

Well, guess what? You don’t have to pay that much. Most people have much better options available, if you know where to look. As I’ve detailed here, the best deals go to PC manufacturers, which you benefit from if you buy a new PC.

But there are plenty of other discounts available as well. In this post, I’ve researched deals in three separate categories: upgrade offers available to anyone, special deals just for students, and subscriptions intended for technical professionals and developers.

Most of the details I include here apply to Windows customers in the United States, but some offers are also available in other countries. Where possible, I have tried to track down those details and include the names of countries where equivalent offers exist. If you live outside the U.S., follow these links to find prices and terms for your country.

My goal in this post is to point you to deals that customers legitimately qualify for. I am not trying to encourage attempts by anyone to get away with something you’re not entitled to. If there are restrictions for a specific offer, I’ve noted them here.

[Update 6-Nov 1:00PM PST: Several people in the comments have asked why I didn't iunclude the Microsoft Action Pack in this post. Two reasons: First, it is available only to bona fide system builders, and that's a fairly small group of people. Second, and more importantly, the licenses it includes expire and must be decommissioned if you fail to renew your MAP agreement each year. Every other example I have here includes Windows licenses that are good in perpetuity. I will cover System Builder pricing and licensing in more detail next week. Stay tuned.]

Ready to get started? Pick a category and go.

Page 2: Upgrade offers You can save as much as 58% off the regular cost of a Windows 7 upgrade if you know how to buy smart. I’ve found three options.

Page 3: Special deals for students If you’re enrolled in a college or university, even taking a single course at your local community college, you can get Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional for $30. Students in technical or design majors can get Windows 7 (and many other Microsoft programs) for free if their university or college is signed up for the right programs.

Page 4: Windows (and much more) by subscriptions Are you an IT pro, a Windows enthusiast, or a professional developer? For a surprisingly low annual fee, you can get access to a staggering amount of Microsoft software, including every version of Windows or Office. There are some restrictions, so be sure to read the details carefully.

Next page: Easy (and cheap) upgrades –>

September 20th, 2009

A close-up look at the new Office Web Apps

Posted by Ed Bott @ 12:42 pm

Categories: Microsoft Office

Tags: Desktop, Web Application, Microsoft Office, Cloud Computing, Office Suites, Software, Ed Bott

Microsoft flipped the switch on its new Office Web Apps last Thursday, offering a partial technical preview to a limited set of beta testers and invited guests. I’ve had a couple days to work with the new web-based apps, which are both more and less than I expected. Here’s a hands-on report.

Let’s be clear right up front: These are not replacements for the full-fledged Office programs. They are, to use Microsoft’s carefully chosen phrasing, “streamlined versions” of four programs in the full Office suite. Currently, Excel and PowerPoint have the most developed feature sets, allowing users to create new workbooks and presentations, edit existing ones, and share web-based files with other users over the internet. Word offers the ability to open and view documents, but not to edit them or to create new ones. OneNote notebooks, which will be part of the final release, are not supported in any way in this preview.

And while the Office Web Apps are being developed along the same general timeline as the full Office 2010 suite, the publicly available technical previews for Office Web Apps and for Office 2010 are not in sync today. As a result, I made sure to perform tests using both Office 2007 SP2 and Office 2010.

Ultimately, you’ll be able to use Office Web Apps in any of three different configurations, only one of which is available for testing today.

• Corporate customers who have a SharePoint server and Volume License editions of Microsoft Office will be able to create, open, edit, share, and save documents on a server that is under their control. That’s a huge benefit for companies that are (justifiably) nervous about the idea of putting sensitive internal information on servers not under their own control. This option is not available for testing using the current preview release.
• Business customers who pay for SharePoint access via hosted accounts at Microsoft Online Services will also have access to Office Web Apps. Although my Windows 7 Inside Out team has a compatible SharePoint account on that service, the web apps preview isn’t available yet (and probably won’t be until sometime after final release).
• The general public will be able to access the Office Web Apps via a free, ad-supported interface that works in conjunction with Windows Live SkyDrive. This is Microsoft’s online storage service that offers 25 GB of free storage in an ad-supported environment. Files can be stored privately, shared with other individuals, or made public. SkeDrive allows the file owner to assign read or edit permissions. This is the option I tested for this post.

Compared to the desktop versions, the Office Web Apps are most definitely streamlined. An uncharitable observer might even call them crippled. What works? what’s missing? I’ve assembled a screenshot gallery to help you see for yourself. For highlights, click to the next page:

Are Office Web apps good enough to replace desktop programs? –>

September 17th, 2009

Microsoft delivers a partial preview of its Office Web Apps

Posted by Ed Bott @ 10:00 am

Categories: Microsoft Office, Uncategorized

Tags: Web Application, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, Cloud Computing, Office Suites, Software, Ed Bott

When it released a technical preview of Office 2010 several months ago, Microsoft promised a companion suite of web-based Office applications. Today, the company released a partial preview of that package to a limited set of beta testers and invited guests. I saw a preview of the Microsoft Office Web Apps package last week and learned some details about what it will and won’t do.

Officially, Microsoft is positioning the new web-based offering as “online extensions to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.” In this technical preview release, there are still some rough edges and missing pieces. Specifically:

• Testers will be able to create and edit files using Excel and PowerPoint.
• Word files can be viewed but not edited, and OneNote won’t be available at all until launch.
• The Backstage feature, which consolidates information about files and options in a single page, won’t allow opening or saving documents to the web in the tech preview.
• You will not able to publish to a blog or a website in the technical preview, although this feature will be turned on in the final edition.

In the demo I saw, Microsoft took great pains to emphasize browser compatibility, opening and editing Excel and PowerPoint files using the latest version of Firefox on Windows and promising the same degree of compatibility with Safari 4 on OS X. Retail customers can access the suite via the free, ad-supported Office Live service, which includes 25GB of SkyDrive storage. Corporate customers will be able to install and run the service on their own SharePoint servers or as part of a fee-based hosted SharePoint offering.

And although the new web apps are scheduled to launch around the same time as Office 2010, that’s not a hard link. Users will be able to upload, edit, and share files created using Office 2000 and later versions on PCs and Macs.

The big question, of course, is whether this offering will cannibalize sales of the desktop versions of Office or whether they’ll act as companions and discourage customers from jumping ship to other online solutions. The demos I saw were faithful to the Office look and feel, but I won’t be able to judge their actual features and capabilities until I can try the web apps for myself. When I asked a Microsoft spokesperson this question, I got a predictable response: “These streamlined online versions can do a lot, but the power of the two [web apps and desktop apps] together is important. I’m not going to want to write a term paper or build a PowerPoint presentation on the web-based apps.”

I’ll have a closer look at Office Web Apps next week, after my account goes live and I’ve had a chance to work with it.

[See also: Microsoft Office Web Apps go to testers: Ten things to know by Mary Jo Foley]

July 13th, 2009

Office 2010 makes a splashy (but incomplete) public debut

Posted by Ed Bott @ 5:20 am

Categories: Image Galleries, Microsoft Office

Tags: Microsoft Office OneNote 2003, Microsoft Corp., Edition, Office 2010, Office Team, Office Standard, Ribbon, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software

Can Microsoft hit back-to-back home runs?

The Office team has to be feeling some heat as they hang around the on-deck circle waiting for Windows 7 to release to manufacturing (in “late July,” according to a press release last week). With today’s announcement of a Technical Preview release of Office 2010 at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, it’s pretty clear that Microsoft is taking a mighty cut. But only time will tell whether they’ve crushed it.

My colleague Mary-Jo Foley has a good overview of today’s announcement. I’ve had a copy of the Technical Preview release of Office 2010 running here for about a week, so I can offer some very tentative first impressions (and an image gallery) based on my hands-on experience.

See Office 2010 in action in this screenshot gallery.

But before I get to those details, here’s the view from the top of the stands:

• This is not a public release. According to Microsoft, “tens of thousands of people will be invited to test Office and Visio as part of the Technical Preview program.” It’s already widely available via the usual unofficial file-sharing sites, but you won’t be able to download the code from Microsoft unless you’ve been accepted into the testing ranks.
• This release is a milestone, but it’s far from feature complete. In a briefing last week, Office Group Product Manager Chris Bryant candidly acknowledged, “Some things don’t work as expected at this point.” This release, he told me, is “primarily designed for the engineering team to get lots of feedback.”
• It’s not ready for prime time yet. I can confirm, from personal experience, that this is not code you’ll want to run on a production machine. If you’ve grown accustomed to running the Windows 7 Beta and you’re tempted to try this on a production machine, think twice. And then think again. I like what I’ve seen so far, but it’s staying on a test box until the official beta appears in a few months.
• The most interesting pieces aren’t out yet. I had a chance to see a demo of the new suite of Web-based Office applications (using Firefox and Safari, just to emphasize their compatibility). The demo was impressive, with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel behaving in a browser just as they do in a stand-alone app. (OneNote support is due in the final release as well.) However, none of those pieces are available for review yet, so I have no hands-on experience to report.

One smart decision the Office team made is to trim the number of Office editions. Currently, Office 2007 is available in a mind-boggling eight editions. For Office 2010, Microsoft plans to cut the Ultimate and Enterprise editions as well as the OEM-only Basic edition. That will reduce the total number of Office editions to five, two for enterprise customers and three for home and small business users. The new Office lineup, from bottom to top, goes like this:

• Office Home and Student edition includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote.
• Office Home and Business edition replaces the previous Office Small Business edition. It includes all the programs from the Home and Student edition and adds Outlook.
• Office Standard is the entry-level enterprise edition; it includes the programs from the Home and Business edition and adds Publisher
• Office Professional continues to be the high-end package for consumers and small businesses. It includes the programs in Standard edition and adds the Access database management program.
• Office Professional Plus is the high-end enterprise offering, adding SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove Workspace) and InfoPath.

What can you expect from Office 2010? Based on my limited testing so far, I can point to three major areas of improvement:

A lot of what’s new is aimed at enhancing usability. The Ribbon interface is now part of every Office program, including Outlook, Publisher, and OneNote, which used the old-style menu/toolbar combos in Office 2007. The Ribbon is far more customizable in Office 2010 as well, offering the capability to add and remove buttons and even create your own custom tabs. And a new feaqtuer called Backstage mode is designed to replace many previously complex dialog boxes.

Speaking of OneNote, it gets elevated to a starring role in this release—and it’s about time. In Office 2007, OneNote was part of the entry-level $150 Home and Student edition and the $680 Ultimate edition but was left out of every edition in between. For 2010, Microsoft is bullish enough on OneNote to make it a part of every edition. As Microsoft’s Bryant told me, “We think people will have OneNote open all the time just like they do with Outlook.”

And finally, there’s a slew of new collaboration features I couldn’t test easily. Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote all offer co-authoring features where two or more people can work on a project simultaneously and see their changes in real-time. There are also some slick-looking mail management features in Outlook, including the capability to trim repetitive message text from long e-mail threads and to “ignore” threads where you’re on the CC list but not really involved.

Microsoft has previously announced that a public beta release of Office 2010 will be available later this year, with the final release due in the first half of 2010.

May 11th, 2009

Windows 7 to be ready for holiday shopping season

Posted by Ed Bott @ 10:23 am

Categories: Microsoft Office, Windows 7

Tags: Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

Microsoft has finally acknowledged what outside observers have realized for some time: Windows 7 is going to be ready this year, in time for the holiday shopping season. That’s the official message from the opening of Tech-Ed 2009 in Los Angeles today:

Microsoft Tech*Ed North America 2009 kicked off today with announcements of new technologies that enable IT professionals and developers to help their organizations save money and improve efficiencies during difficult economic times. As part of today’s news, Microsoft Corp. announced that the company is anticipating that the next version of its client operating system, Windows 7, will be available to customers in time for the holiday shopping season. In addition, Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate (RC) is available today with the final product releasing to market in the same timeframe as Windows 7.

If you’ve been awaiting the release of the Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate, it’s now available for download here.

And one other tidbit: All Tech-Ed attendees will automatically get an invitation to participate in the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview program, which will begin in July 2009.

Update: In a post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog, Windows honchos Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan add some more clues to the timeline:

Three months from today is mid-August. Add another month or two to allow overseas OEMs to build products and ship them to the U.S., Western Europe, and other industrialized markets. That pencils out to a General Availability (GA) date in late September or early October.

Now go back almost exactly one year, to a May 16, 2008 post on this blog:

Windows 7 ship date? The crowd has spoken…

If you believe in the theory of crowdsourcing, this community should be able to predict the actual release date more accurately than any individual. So what’s the consensus? I entered the dates into an Excel worksheet and calculated the median, which works out to (drumroll, please…)

September 30, 2009

Damn, you people are good.

March 20th, 2009

Next Office version to ship in 32-bit and 64-bit versions

Posted by Ed Bott @ 2:38 pm

Categories: Microsoft Office

Tags: 64-bit, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, Office Suites, Software, Operating Systems, Ed Bott

You learn the most interesting things when you poke around in some of the arcane files that are included with Windows 7 beta releases. In the most recent build of Windows 7 that I’ve been able to examine, I’ve confirmed that Microsoft plans to release its next version of Office in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. That’s a detail that my colleague Mary Jo Foley didn’t discover in her December 2008 rundown of what we know about Office 14

The clues to an upcoming x64 Office release are hidden in an obscure XML file used by the Windows Easy Transfer utility, which transfers settings for Windows and selected applications from an old PC to a new one. In the official beta release of Windows 7 (finalized in December 2008), Migwiz.xml includes the same list of applications found in Windows Vista. But in post-beta builds, this file has been updated to include more modern programs.

Earlier today, as I was scanning through the file to assemble an updated list of applications that can be migrated to Windows 7, this heading caught my eye:

Directly underneath this block of code is a list of programs to be detected. It’s the same list of nine programs found under the Office 2003 and Office 2007 headings, except that the Office 14 section includes an extra “_x64” entry for each one. Here, see for yourself:

In addition, there are separate sections labeled “Office x86 detects” and “Office x64 detects”. Elsewhere in the file are sections that cover different upgrade scenarios. For Office 2003, there are three rule sets:

• Office2003to2007SettingsUpgrade
• Office2003to14SettingsUpgrade
• Office2003to14SettingsUpgrade_x64

Similarly, you can use the wizard to upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 14 or Office 14_x64.

The fact that this code is being baked into Windows 7 now suggests that the rumors of an early 2010 ship date for Office 14 are accurate. Having native 64-bit support for all members of the Office family is an extra bonus and welcome news.

July 2nd, 2008

Microsoft Equipt: good deal, lousy name

Posted by Ed Bott @ 11:45 am

Categories: Microsoft, Microsoft Office

Tags: Circuit City Stores Inc., Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Ed Bott

I am baffled by today’s announcement of Microsoft Equipt.

I had a chance to beta-test this product beginning in March, when it was available under the code name Albany. The released product combines Office Home and Student 2007 and Windows Live OneCare, plus access to a cloud-based storage and sharing service called Office Live Workspace. The version I tested was indistinguishable from retail shrink-wrapped versions of the software and worked perfectly.

Today’s announcement adds a price tag to the mix: $69.95 for a one-year subscription, with the right to install the software on up to three different PCs (the same as the shrink-wrapped packages of the two separate products). Office Home and Student 2007 typically costs $129, and the going rate for an annual subscription for a security suite like Windows Live OneCare is about $30 (or $90 for a three-year term), which means the Equipt subscription costs much less upfront and the shrink-wrapped option doesn’t hit the break-even point until the end of the third year. Assuming Microsoft updates Office every two or three years, the subscription deal gets even better: Equipt users will be upgraded to the next Office version as soon as it’s available, whereas Office Home and Student 2007 isn’t eligible for upgrade pricing and users would have to pay another $129 to upgrade.

Sounds like a great deal, so why was I baffled?

Well, for starters, there’s the name. Equipt? Seriously? What is that supposed to mean? Presumably, it suggests a “well-equipped PC.” It doesn’t leverage any of the brand equity in the Office name and suggests hardware rather than software or a cutting-edge service.

And Microsoft’s press release delivers co-billing to Circuit City, which is called out in the subhead as if it were an exclusive deal. The body of the press release reinforces this perception: “Microsoft Equipt will be sold in nearly 700 Circuit City stores in the U.S. starting mid-July 2008.” But this part, several paragraphs later, suggests that the exclusivity, if any, is only temporary:

“We are very pleased to be the first partner to offer Microsoft Equipt through nearly 700 Circuit City retail outlets throughout the U.S.,” said Elliot Becker, vice president, general merchandise manager technology, Circuit City.

Mary Jo Foley dug a little deeper:

Starting on or around July 15, Equipt will be sold exclusively through the Circuit City retail chain, but Microsoft is looking to add other distribution channels for Equipt in the U.S. and abroad, said Bryson Gordon, Group Product Manager for Office. Gordon said Microsoft is looking to add other retail partners, PC makers interested in pre-installing the Equipt bundle and other “direct-from-Microsoft” channels over the next 12 months.

It certainly takes some of the luster off today’s Microsoft announcement when their exclusive partner, Circuit City, announces bad news on the same day: the white knight (Blockbuster) that had been considering an acquisition of Circuit City has backed out of the deal, two weeks after the company announced big losses. If your major partner is struggling financially and no stronger partners are willing to step up and begin selling this product, what does that say?

As for customers, the most interesting option for the subscription package is as a way to replace the trialware versions of Office normally bundled on new PCs and available for conversion at steep prices. Customers who would resist the $199 price tag of Office Basic or Standard might be willing to pay $70 for a one-year subscription (as long as they don’t need it for business purposes).

Conspiracy theorists can see this as the opening salvo for Microsoft’s attempts to convert all its software, including future versions of Windows, to pay-as-you-go services. Of course, it really isn’t new at all. Businesses that buy into Software Assurance have been paying the equivalent of subscription fees for years, and Microsoft has run trials of subscription software in other countries. The real question is whether this becomes an alternative to conventional open-ended licenses or whether it’s intended to be a replacement.

September 25th, 2006

WGA strikes Vista, Office 2007

Posted by Ed Bott @ 10:55 am

Categories: Microsoft Office, WGA, Windows Vista

Tags:

Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program was an add-on to Windows XP, Office 2003, and earlier versions of both programs. But the Genuine Advantage code is baked into Windows Vista and Office 2007, as I learned earlier today.

Over the weekend, one of my test copies of Windows Vista RC1, downloaded from Microsoft's servers and installed in a virtual machine with a legitimate product key, began behaving strangely. The new Windows Vista Welcome Center wouldn't open. Control Panel wouldn't display any icons. I couldn't reach Windows Update. I couldn't check the Windows Activation module to confirm that this copy of Windows Vista had been properly activated.

I tried normal troubleshooting techniques, including using System Restore to roll back the configuration and undo any recent changes. None of my efforts were successfuly, so I left the VM running and started working with a backup copy.

This morning, when I returned to the VM window, I was startled to see this dialog box:

Apparently, something in Windows Vista's WGA code has decided that this copy of Windows isn't Genuine. And if you look at that dialog box, you'll notice that it doesn't offer any way to resolve the problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

September 15th, 2006

Vista, Office 2007 beta updates

Posted by Ed Bott @ 5:46 am

Categories: Microsoft Office, Windows Vista

Tags:

The week, Microsoft made new versions of Windows Vista and Office 2007 widely available.

If you didn’t sign up for the Windows Vista Beta 2 Customer Preview Program, you have another chance. Microsoft has now reopened registration for Vista Release Candidate 1. Details are here. The short version:

• It’s available in English, German, and Japanese, in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
• It’s beta software. Don’t even think about installing it on a production system unless you’ve read the system requirements and the release notes, you’re comfortable with beta software, and you have reliable backups.
• It’s time-limited and expires on June 1, 2007.
• If you choose to install as an upgrade over an existing copy of Windows XP, you can’t roll back to your old installation later.
• There’s no official support.
• Yes, you need to activate the software, which you can do on two computers.
• It’s a big download: roughly 3GB for the 32-bit version, 4GB for the 64-bit version. You’ll need to burn the ISO file to a DVD or mount the ISO file using a disk utility to use it. Or you can choose to have a DVD kit mailed to you.
• Afghanistan is on the list of countries where you can choose a download location or have a DVD kit shipped. Iraq is not.

In other Microsoft beta news, Microsoft released a "technical refresh" to Beta 2 of Office 2007. If you’re evaluating Office 2007, you definitely want this update, which fixes a lot of bugs and interface enhancements. It’s a 500MB download, available for free from this page. It installs as a patch over the existing Beta 2 code and updates all programs that are part of the Office Professional Plus package, plus OneNote. It’s especially recommended for anyone who wants to use Office 2007 with Vista RC1.

Before you install the update, note Microsoft’s warnings of compatibility and known issues: Officially, they recommend saving all files you created with Beta 2 (or an earlier version) using one of the older, supported Office 2003 formats before installing the update. Also, make sure you have at least 2GB of free disk space available or the patch will most likely fail. After installation, you’ll discover that the expiration date for the software has been updated to March 31, 2007.

I’ve got Office 2007 Beta2TR and Vista RC1 working together here. If you’re interested in evaluating what Microsoft’s product roadmap will look like in 2007, this is a good place to start.