- Office Professional Plus 2007
- SharePoint Designer 2007
- Visio Professional 2007
- Project Professional 2007
- OneNote 2007
- Groove 2007
from the media kit I received at WWPC, but didn't feel adventurous enough to install any of the server-side stuff -- need to prevail upon my colleagues to assist with that in a dedicated office lab environment. All of the betas are available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx?showIntro=n
The install process seems easy enough, and generally went smoothly. Of course, this wouldn't be a blog if I didn't find something to whine about. My principal whine is that, in the beta at least, one cannot multi-select from the menu the programs to be installed. So for each element above, I had to select it, enter the 25-digit reg key, select install options (I went as "vanilla" as possible), intervene to tell Vista security to continue, and launch the install. Time-consuming and a minor pain, but not killer. The security nuisance has been discussed to death in other places, so I won't go into it here.
I have been running Office 2007 beta 2 on my work tablet PC (with XP Pro) since June, so I'm getting comfortable with the ribbon and the new UI, but some other elements take some getting used to. (e.g. in Excel, the former Help --> About is now File icon --> Excel Options button --> Resources button --> About button -- good luck to frontline Tech Support people getting version info from end users!). I will add more as I get to start playing with these programs.
About the blog (meta-blogging?):
- I changed the link in my signature to feedburner so that when I move my blog to another medium such as typepad (where my colleagues David Goldstein and James Henry post), it will be seamless to users who just refer to feedburner as a syndication source for blog feeds. I owe thanks to some colleagues from Microsoft (thanks, Ben), who have been using it for some time and turned me on to it.
- I'm still getting my feet wet with this blog, and am aiming to publish a short article twice a week. Your feedback is much appreciated!
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