I'm doing a Webcast for Microsoft tomorrow, taking a look at Exchange, Vista and Office (which to avoid running out of breath the 'softies have taken to calling EVO). To attend - it's in LiveMeeting - you have to subscribe to the letter and sign up for the meeting. www.microsoft.com/uk/business/insights/ has some of my articles on what the new releases mean for business:
Windows Vista for mid-size business
Office 2007: software you'll recognise, productivity you won't
Outlook and Exchange: all-in-one communication

In the interests of full disclosure (and given some recent discussions), I'll say I am being paid for the Webcast because i am, after all A Business - but they know they're paying for my time, not my opinion. There are issues with all software and I already have a list of complaints and requests for the next version of Outlook and OneNote, and a few ideas for PowerPoint and I still want the Excel clipboard to work like the clipboard in every other application... but I can also honestly say that the new Office makes me more productive and if you can take advantage of the backend servers, your business can get a lot more out of it than a lone worker like me can. I want Exchange 2007 as soon as we can install it (for one reason I can't yet talk about and for several reasons that I can, but then it's sbisson who'll get to beat that into shape. I don't think Vista is a panacea - and I think we should have had what it delivers two years ago, and would have had it if more people could tell the difference between an alpha and a Flash presentation. I haven't had time to upgrade my laptop (we've been travelling and my mother isn't well) but a dozen times a day I do things and think 'that would be easier in Vista'. Will I be criticising Microsoft in the Webcast? No. Will I be mentioning areas where there are issues to be aware of? Of course.

And I have to say I love the bio line that the editor has given me. "Mary Branscombe has been reviewing hardware and software since computers ran on elastic bands and good luck".

I use a bunch of abbreviations when I take notes - app, info, hw, sw. When I spell check notes, I usually have to take a minute to manually find and replace them to expand them into real English. Word 2007 has a nice new feature in the full spelling dialog (as opposed to the red underline check as you go). If I type in a correction that's not on the list of suggestions, next time it finds what I've corrected Word will now offer what I typed in as the first option on the list, saving me a huge amount of time - and it's much less likely to go wrong than hitting Change All. I also like the contextual checking; it can suggest that when I typed crated I really meant created and have a good chance of being right.

Nice, pricey for the full versions and going to be popular.

You want more detail? Simon and I have reviewed them quite thoroughly for IT Pro from a business and IT admin perspective but it's also a general overview...
Office 2007
Windows Vista

Outlook 2007 TR2 has changed the UI for a mail message, to make it more like Word; a ribbon tab for formatting text, and Paste in the key top left position. That's where Send used to be in previous beta versions and now I'm pasting whatever is in the clipbaord into wherever my mosue happens ot be when I go to send the message. Send is now *below* Paste, on the line with the address. It's as big as Paste but not as colourful, which is *wrong* because it't the most important action for a mail message. Yes, I've learned my muscle memory on betas that not all the Office 2007 users will have been using, but I learned it so easily that I think it was more logical. If Send is going to be on the address line, maybe it should be on the right - because sending comes after putting in the address and I read from left to right... close is over there already, so I already associate that with getting rid of the window.

Interface design is hard and many of the iterative changes in the 2007 Office betas have been improvements, but I am finding this change a real pain in the (Paste random content here) Send button

Point 1; do not share a OneNote notebook from a OneNote 2007 beta 2 machine with someone using OneNote 2007 beta 2 TR. The master copy of the notebook will be upgraded to the TR2 format and any changes you make on the beta 2 machine will be lost when you upgrade it and resynch the notebook.

Point 2; if you have thoughtfully saved the local copy of the notebook as a package file (more compact, the default selection for Save As and an all-round Good Thing), you cannot use Open Notebook to open the package. Use Open Section and OneNote will unpack the package - and offer all the usual options for when you create a notebook, including saving it on the server as a mult-user notebook. All I need to do now is delete the now-out-of-date notebooks (as I'm not wearing the brave trousers and haven't unpacked the local notebooks over the top of the server notebooks).

This is why I'd like to see a OneNote note manager PowerToy that could let me walk the tree of notebooks, sections and pages and move things around without opening up the notebooks and sections and doing it by hand. Pages, sections and notebooks are like files and folders and I can move files without opening them in an application.

I've just updated 2007 Office beta 2 with the Technical Refresh. The Outlook offline cache hasn't survived and Outlook is trapped in a loop. Black mark. But Word had crashed just before I updated and I was having trouble getting into the auto-recovery files. I knew I could recover everything from ClipMate because I'd been copying between documents, so I decided to give up and install the refresh. After a rather long time with a very uninformative progress bar the refresh completed, warned me in a rather cryptic dialog that other applications would need updating too and showed the new and tasteful (or is it bland? OneNote is much less visible in the notification area) icons. I started Word - and there were the auto-recovered document in a task pane. Full marks!

And I do like the way the 'pinned' documents on the Recent Documents pane of the Office menu now have the pushpin both coloured green - and pushed in to the menu ;-)

I need to write captions for all the images in a folder and rather than copying down the titles by hand, I thought 'how can I grab the text?'. There are utilities that will export the directory listing to a text file, or I could copy from a command prompt if I remember the appropriate incantations - or I could use OneNote 2007. First I used the screen clipping tool to select the folder listing in Windows Explorer, giving me an image of the text. Then I right-clicked on the image and choose 'Make Text in Image Searchable'. Once OneNote has OCRed the text I can right-click and choose 'Copy Text from Picture'. I can use this to grab long error messages on screen or to get text out of a logo, or a streetname from a map... For real OCR I have real OCR software, but launching that takes as long as typing in the list of file names by hand, and OneNote is always open already. Very nifty...

Or how to get a feature into Office.

Beta 2 of Outlook adds a feature to appointments; you can pick the timezone to create the meeting in and you can have a different timezone for the start and end of the meeting. It's very simple, it's very easy to use and it will save travellers a huge amount of grief (and anyone phoning the US from the UK or vice versa). Yes, there was a timezone strip before, but it only did two timezones and it still meant doing sums.

I wasn't expecting to get the timezone feature because it wasn't in the build I saw at the Office Reviewer's Workshop at the beginning of May. So when I started working with beta 2 of Outlook the day before my accident in Seattle and saw it, I did actually sit with my mouth open gaping like a fish for nearly a minute so I took a minute to mail the whole list of thank you’s to everyone who helped me be there that day, clicking the Timezone button in an appointment and setting the start time in Pacific time and the end time in East coast time without a calculator, a headache and a 24-hour miscalculation.

I'll say it again. Thank you! Whether you pointed me at the right person to beg for the feature, put up with me begging for the feature, went back to Redmond and had someone code the feature or actually sat down and did the coding – I thank you! Everyone who doesn’t have to hear me rant thanks you! And probably more importantly, everyone who travels in more than two timezones thanks you too, though you might have to wait until they wake up to hear them ;-)

( Now I can't take credit for this feature. )

And I don't just mean the travelling ;-)

The Marc Smith interview I did for the FT on email overload and social metadata is going to be reprinted in a Swiss business newspaper called CASH. Presumably translated into Swiss German, though I'm not sure yet.

There was a fascinating talk at a press event for 2007 Office collaboration tools yesterday by Carsten Sorensen of the LSE covering how changes in manufacturing technology had defined early working conditions both physical and social, so that it's OK to interrupt people at work but not in a private space because by definition employees are available. Made me think of the stress induced by the Victorian stock tickers by telegraph whcih extended the working day to the club or the home. IT is having that effect: your fluid working day with information requested by email or IM is my interruption. Interconnect everyone for synergy and you make everyone deal with the impact of that on their work and we haven't got the working practices to deal with it, or often the right management attitude. I did like his story of 'email man' - a guy at Deutsche Bank who responds to 1,000 emails a day and who he descrived as an 'interaction machine'.