Feb 17, 2007 | blog
So I got Office Pro a few weeks ago and found that I will need to pick up the other Office components as well. Pro comes with Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and a few other incidentals. I don’t count Access as a real app since I’ve seen a lot of shitty programming done with it.
Over the last year, I’ve become very fond of OneNote and will need to pick that app up as well as Visio, and probably Project. They are all too useful not to have them updated along with the rest.
Yes, I’ve been advocating an all-online office for several months, but I still need to have the MS Office suite to do business. By the way, the save to PDF add-on rocks.
Feb 2, 2007 | blog
So I’ve picked up Office 2007 Pro, and of course I need to try out the blogging feature that is built into the new version. We’ll see how this looks once posted.
Feb 1, 2007 | blog
Yeah, why not blog about lunch. Cold turkey sandwich and a cookie.
The morning sessions was pretty good, the Vista/Office deployment features look like they’ll be usable. The Exchange Server Efficiency session was neat as well. We’ll have to include some of the topics they talked about, but we’re already on top of some other common items that you can do in 2003.
The afternoon session’s should be interesting as well; SharePoint, Vista/Office operational efficiency, one on Compliance, search, unified communications, data visualization, and project & portfolio management.
Jan 31, 2007 | blog
WTF?
How many people have read the KB article (931667) over at Microsoft concerning the “Addressing the daylight saving time changes in 2007 using the Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool“? Go read it, I’ll wait…
Ok, glad your back – now I know that it was really congress that passed this smelly turd along to everyone – thanks bastards – but it seems to me that Microsoft really dropped the ball on this. I mean, in the original design phase of Exchange and Outlook, they could have asked the question “what if the DST parameters change” and followed the conversation, just to see what ideas come up. Maybe there would have been a better design, maybe not. Maybe the way Exchange stores this information is the same way every calendaring system stores it. That’s a scary thought – that nobody ever thought of handling this kind of change on the fly!
Not only do you need to patch the systems so that the new range of DST for 2007 is properly set up in the system, but you have to run an update tool to convert all the appointment data in the data stores to the proper time for the meeting. That means that you have to run the tool on anything that stores its own calendar information.
So a stand-alone user needs to run the tool, and enterprises need to run the tool on their Exchange servers. This is all well and good, and hopefully will be a one-time deal, but what about all those archived PST files? What if someone pulls some archived recurring meeting and resends it to people? If you read the KB, there is a usage scenario that actually points out that it will not contain the correct meeting times.
There are more. If your mobile device (or other types) are not updated with the proper DST 2007 information, you could create an appointment or meeting (Task?) with a time setting that would not trigger a reminder at the time you expected it to – it would be an hour late.
Maybe I’m making too much out of this, but all I see for our help desk at work is a flood of calls that could have been prevented by MS long ago. Tell me I’m wrong!
Link to: Addressing the daylight saving time changes in 2007 using the Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool
Jan 31, 2007 | blog
As some may know, I’ve been a longtime PPC user, actually starting with the old “Palm-size PC” back in 1998 or so. But the topic of this post is the parent operating system of the Pocket PC (and Windows Mobile for that matter) called Windows CE.
So we’ve been working on some Windows CE based devices for our warehouse management system at work. The goal, of course, being a fast-booting, lightweight client device to use for a web-based WM tool.
The main trouble with the devices we had, was really the WinCE operating system and its ability (or lack thereof) to be able to use EAP-TLS to secure the wireless network. Eventually a network stack update from the manufacturer did the trick, but it was frustrating to have everything configured correctly, but have the damn software not be able to connect up.
So, it’s one more chapter in alternate operating systems. If it’s not this it would be something else, perhaps Linux of some flavor. I’d actually like to have the ability to work with a Linux system at work – I think there is a huge potential for the OS in what we use PCs for. But that’s another story.
Fortunately its almost over – its been kind of fun, writing some scripts and such. Scripts are something that I don’t get to write as much. We use most tools right out of the box (or try to), so there is as little custom work as possible. Still, once in awhile a need comes along for a good script, and this was one of them for me. 🙂
As much as I’ve liked Windows CE based systems in the past, I’ve had about enough of them at this point. Working with these systems has brought the operating system’s deficiencies to the surface, and they are not pretty.
