Category: Microsoft

Two weeks ago at TechEd, Microsoft’s big conference for IT Professionals, my boss showed off some of the things we’ve got in the pipeline. A few people, including Microsoft CRM blogger Alex Barnett and the inevitable Mary Jo Foley, have had a few things to say about what was shown.

For a peek of what we’ve been working on that’s actually shipped, take a look at the new web-based newsreader available through the Microsoft.com Communities site and baked into dozens of product-specific community listings around the entire MSCOM network. The newsreader launched yesterday, and like any new web technology there may be some teething pains, but we think the user experience is really going to make a difference for those who want to talk to other customers, MVPs, and Microsoft employees to figure out how to solve their problems with our technology.

All I can say is, keep watching.

I think Seattle is more pet friendly than a lot of cities, and Microsoft carries that to the next level. This is, I think, the only place I’ve worked where I could bring two dogs in to my office, close the door, and get some serious work done and have no one raise an eyebrow.

Xamlon, the product (and company) of my old friend Paul Colton, just reached Beta 4. As I wrote before, Xamlon is a XAML engine that runs on Windows 98 through Windows XP. And XAML is the user interface development language for Longhorn.

In addition to the new beta release, Xamlon-the-company now has sponsored a community blog site about XAML at XAMLBlogs.com. This means that Paul finally has a blog (subscribed).

The big news on the blog at present appears to be the members’ participation in the XUL Grand Coding Challenge. The screenshots and sample code on the blog show some really interesting UI stuff created entirely with vector graphics declared in XML.

I found Alex Barnett’s weblog via Scoble tonight. Alex is the “online customer experience manager” for Microsoft’s UK website. I’ve been on half a dozen email threads with him regarding my past job as product manager for an internal tool that measured online campaign response for Microsoft.com. Now it seems he’s a kindred spirit in another way. And there are some things we should probably talk about.

LockerGnome: RSS to Outlook. Neat tool, potentially, for bringing RSS data about events, meetings, or what have you into your Outlook calendar where it belongs.

I remember someone doing the reverse case (bringing RSS feeds into iCal) when Apple’s iCal came out. What I wondered at the time was when someone would actually start exposing useful date feeds that people could consume this way. It looks like there’s been a lot of discussion since then, but no killer app. Anyone have a good answer?

Public service advisory: there’s a new worm out nicknamed “Sasser” that exploits the LSASS vulnerability reported and patched two weeks ago. The worm, like Blaster, spreads directly from machine to machine, so make sure to enable your firewall (it hits on ports 445 and 5554). Details about Sasser here, here, here, here, etc.. Removal tools here, here, here, here. First posting about the worm, from a Microsoft MVP blogger, here.

I was recently reminded of the gap on the Windows platform in really good outlining tools. I am a long-time OmniOutliner user on my Mac, and haven’t really found a good, cheap, lightweight tool for managing structured outlines on Windows. According to this thread on Outliners.com, the leading candidates are probably Inspiration and NoteMap. NoteMap knows about hoisting, and Inspiration allows for some unstructured brainstorming in addition to pure outlining. But it’s not apparent that either has one of the elegant simple features I would need: the ability to convert an outline into a structured to-do list (which is desperately needed for our house projects).

Enter OneNote. I’ve had this app installed since I got Office 2003 but hadn’t really played with it until the last few days. It uses a notebook metaphor, automatically saves notes, allows for placement of multiple text and graphics blocks on the page, and has some really good outline features, including quick and intuitive numbering mechanisms and the ability to set to-do checkboxes. No hoisting and no ability to create columns on outline items, but otherwise pretty nice.

Miscellaneous links: Andrew May has a draft MSDN article about new import features in OneNote 1.1; Josh Allen wrote an OPML importer that works with the preview of OneNote 1.1; Omar Shahine writes an RSS to OneNote PowerToy that basically allows you to easily copy items from RSS feeds to an outline for later reading.

The new Search experience on Microsoft.com (not to be confused with MSN Search, which searches the whole Internet; this search “merely” searches the 4 to 6 million pages of content on Microsoft.com) is available.

Before today, if you searched for a term you would get categorized buckets of results: the top three downloads, product information pages, support articles, etc. that matched your terms. Today the results are returned in a flat list, with additional search scoping options available in the right navigation.

Reduced functionality? Not really. As Amazon has found, if you return results in fixed scopes and categories, you run the risk of a highly relevant result in a category that’s far down the page and consequently never seen. Getting the categories out of the way but keeping the option to select them for filtering handy is a kind of “best of both worlds” situation: the categories don’t interfere with relevance but are there if you need them.

It will be interesting to see what people like Korby Parnell (and his commenters in this post) think of the difference.

Aside: while I didn’t work on the actual release, I was part of a team of researchers that analyzed customer data around the last version of search to make recommendations for this version. Kind of nice to see the vision come true; hopefully it will be an improvement for our users.

Channel 9 is on MSDN and not from Outer Space, to begin with. See comments from Dave Winer, Slashdot, and Channel 9 co-conspirator Robert Scoble.

As a Microsoft.com product manager, I ought to be saying something about how Channel 9 doesn’t look like the corporate site. But I think that’s a strength. It’s pretty clear that these are real people inside the company communicating with the customer, not “the voice of the company.” Which is, I think, rather the point of blogging in general.

Looks like Mac Office 2004 has been released to manufacturing. Congratulations to Rick Schaut, fellow Sloanie Angela Liao, and the other folks in the MacBU for completing this release.

Rick notes that there have been some advances in how Mac Word 2004 handles Unicode text, support for table styles, line layout across platforms, and (yes) long file names. Still no XML support, though.

For more info on Mac Office 2004, see MacWorld, our own Mac information site, and MacNN.

Slashdot has just posted a pointer to the Shared Source release of the Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset, now available on SourceForge. The code was released under IBM’s Common Public License (CPL). This is the first Microsoft source to be released under an OSS approved open source license.

Yep. Catch your breath. Microsoft code on SourceForge. The sound of a locked trunk opening?

Details on Rob Mensching’s blog, including both technical details of what WiX does and a description of its path to open source.

News story: Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of knuckle-barking (and Pavement inspiring) furniture store IKEA, has passed Bill Gates as the world’s richest man, at $53 billion vs. Bill’s estimated $47 billion, according to Swedish business weekly Veckans Affarer and Swedish television.

Note 1: The main culprit in Kamprad’s ascendancy was the dollar’s slide in value against other currencies. See Oliver Willis’s comments here.

Note 2: The company denies the claim, noting that Ingvar does not actually own the company: he donated it to a foundation 22 years ago.

Note 3: Scoble points out that writing about IKEA and Bill Gates brings lots of traffic. Heh.

Another Microsoft blogger that I should have known about before: K.C. Lemson, a Program Manager on Exchange, who has been blogging since September 2003 about Exchange, Outlook, and other parts of the Office System.

Among her valuable posts for end users:

• How to hyperlink into the middle of a Word document
• Flag messages with a single keystroke and other Outlook usability tips
• Pointers to coming security features in IE in Windows XP SP2 (hint: bye-bye, Gator)

…and those are just on her front page. Among the rest of the posts: insights into life at Microsoft, being a PM, being married to a fellow Microsoftie, etc., all really personable and highly readable. Subscribed.

Great article in Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine about “death march” projects. Object oriented guru Ed Yourdon taxonomizes those difficult, never ending, no room for error projects according to happiness level and chance of success. High happiness, high chance of success projects are “mission impossible”—everyone wants to make the project succeed, against all odds. There are also “suicide,” “kamikaze,” and “ugly” projects; see the article for the descriptions.

If you have spent any time in the IT industry at all you probably recognize some of those project descriptions. You may even have managed one or two. This is the interesting part for me: Yourdon’s book, Death March: The Complete Software Developer’s Guide to Surviving “Mission Impossible” Projects, gives guidance for managers on how to manage these projects.

Credit where due: link courtesy of Scoble.

Mark Pilgrim announced yesterday that he’s been employed by our competitor (and my wife’s employer) IBM as an Accessibility Architect in the Emerging Technologies group. I can’t think of a better job for a better guy. Congratulations, Mark, and best of luck in your new role at Big Blue. And hopefully your work in Atom and weblogs will become more relevant to your new job as time goes by.