Office 2007 bug delights Francophiles everywhere
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Others less amused Much to the delight of Francophiles everywhere, Microsoft's Office 2007 switches Outlook Express spell-checkers to work only in French. Those disposed to communicate in other languages are being advised to use third-party programs.â¦
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Microsoft releases open-source plug-ins for Office 2007 today, and Viacom wants its content off YouTube. Bill Gates tangles with Romania on piracy and Digg no longer lists top users. In Monkey Bites.
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Plus: More Office holes, and a major Adobe problem that affects all browsers.
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As Western Europeans head back to the office after their customary monthlong August vacations, they're finding more than just overflowing in-boxes. Their much-cherished short workweeks are under attack.
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Microsoft Office app hit one day after company patches its IE browser.
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Take a look at how the new Office versions for Mac and Windows are rolling out, feature by feature.
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(InfoWorld) - Many corporate IT managers have voiced concerns that the dramatically different user interface in Microsoft's new Office 2007 software will force them to undertake more carefully planned migrations than they've had to do in the past, with an increased amount of end-user training. But Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of the product management group in Microsoft's Business Division, insists that companies won't have to devise "some big sophisticated training plan" to roll out Office 2007. During an interview at Monday night's Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch event in New York, Capossela said IT departments can find plenty of freely available interactive training materials on Microsoft's Web site. Excerpts from the interview follow. CW: Many IT managers say they'll have to do more strategic planning for their Office 2007 rollouts because of extra training time that needs to be built in for users. What would you say to companies that are concerned about that? Capossela: Well, we certainly didn't do this lightly. We've been working on how to do this as well as we could for the past three years. We started by unveiling the new user interface many, many, many months ago to make sure people understood there was a big change coming. And then we did dramatically more end-user testing than we've done on any other piece of software. So I would say to any of the corporations that are considering this: you should know that we've tested this thing incredibly deeply to make sure that your average Office user is going to get up and running very quickly. And the feedback we're getting is that it's far less of a concern than people think it will be initially. There are two data points that we talk about. No. 1 is, for your average Office user, we see that it takes them about two days of working with the product before they say, "I'll never go back." For your power user -- the people who know the ins and outs of Excel, maybe the finance team, or the legal team when it comes to Word -- it takes them more like two weeks before they'll say, "Please don't ever take this away." And that was a little bit counter to what we first thought. We thought the more casual user would be more scared, and instead, it actually turned out to be the more die-hard user, because they know exactly where everything lives in the old version. So it takes them longer. But that's not two weeks of no productivity. That's two weeks before they say, "I'll never give this product up." When they launch the product for the first time, we've designed that very first ribbon so that the vast majority of the common things are right there. There's no hunting around for it. It's literally easy to see: how do I change a font, how do I print a file, how do I open a file, how do I save a file. CW: For those who haven't looked at Office 2007 yet, can you describe the ribbon? Capossela: The ribbon takes the place of menus and toolbars. You used to have menus that dropped down and toolbars that stacked up on top of each other. Now the ribbon is one strip of icons and galleries that you can choose from to author your documents. The vast majority of people -- something like 85 percent of our beta users -- said they were going to be far more productive with [Office] 2007 than [Office] 2003. The other thing we set up to do was to not put the training burden on the shoulders of the IT staff. We really wanted to build the training right into the product and connect that to the Web, where we have really rich training materials. The No. 1 guide I point the IT staff to is something called the interactive guides. There's an interactive guide for Word, for Excel, for PowerPoint. The interactive guide is on the Web, and it lets a user point to their favorite menu item or toolbar item in Word 2003 in a little Web page, and then we play a little video that shows how you do that exact thing in Word 2007. It's essentially a transition tool that you can use. And IT doesn't have to roll anything out. If you hit help within Office, within the product, you get access to that training material. CW: So you don't think IT departments need to build in any training, period? They can just rely on your Web site? Capossela: Absolutely. The best thing for them to do is just take a set of users and do a pilot, where they take a group, a department, and roll out Office 2007. Obviously, do it to a small enough group that IT is going to feel comfortable supporting it and see what kind of support they need for the new user interface. I think people will be very surprised that it's far less jarring than you might think. And again, we credit that to the user feedback that we got in building the product itself. CW: To sum up, then, you think the fears of IT pros about the need for more extensive training are unfounded? Capossela: I think they're rational to be concerned, and planning is a good thing. But all the data we have shows us that it is something that is much, much simpler than you at first think when you hear that the user interface has changed. CW: You said that user feedback has been far more extensive than ever before. By what magnitude? Capossela: Certainly with the focus groups and the usability tests, where we are literally bringing people together and we're watching them and talking to them, etc., I'd say that we've probably done an order of magnitude more than we've ever done before. But the thing that was really the breakthrough this time around was the instrumentation that was built right into the product. When you were using the beta of Office 2007, we were, with your permission, tracking all the things that you were doing with the mouse, all the commands that you were using. And that data was getting sent back to us so that we knew how long people were spending doing certain tasks. That's something we've just never been able to do on this type of scale before. We'd never had 3.5 million people downloading the beta and playing with that. The numbers are just absurd compared to what we've had in the past. We did 600,000 downloads in two days of the beta, and that was more than we had for the entire [Office] 2003 beta cycle. In two days. The vast majority of [beta testers] were sending information back to us, and that's how we got the 1 billion sessions that were tracked. We've just never done anything of that scale before. CW: Do you have any demographic information about the pool of testers? Capossela: It was a mix between consumers, small businesses and corporations. And it was all over the world, because we did the beta in many, many different languages. So it wasn't like it was a financial services thing in New York City. It really was incredibly broad because the download was available for anybody. CW: Did you ask the testers for any information about themselves? Capossela: A little bit of data, but we don't force a lot of profile information. Otherwise, people aren't going to be more likely to play with it. For us, it's not that important to know women between the ages of 24 and 32 beta-tested it. For us, it's just, "Hey, the more beta testers we can get, the more representative that is of the 500 million people that use the product." CW: Are you getting any feedback on the new default file format -- Office Open XML? Capossela: I think it's going to be something that corporations take different approaches on. Some companies, I think, will want the improved security. They'll want the more compact file size. And they'll want to know that they're archiving data in a format that is completely open and that 100 years from now, they won't need a copy of Word to get into one of those files. Then there are corporations that are going to say, "You know what? This is going to take us some time, and we're going to turn the default back to the binary formats because we know those binary formats will work with everybody who has older versions of Office, without them having to download a patch. So, we are going to take a more cautious approach." Some of it depends on what is important for the corporation itself. If they're worried about security attacks against the binary formats, XML is far and away the best way to get secure because that file format was built as a much, much more robust format. It's much harder to break into that format. CW: Isn't it only a question of time before the hackers figure out how to break into it? Capossela: With any piece of software, it's just a matter of time, if somebody wants to dedicate their life to do something like that. But I think it gets a lot harder. It's a little like piracy. Do you do nothing because there will be pirates out there? Or do you do things to really stop the casual pirates, stop the casual hackers [and] make it as hard as you possibly can for people to break into your applications. That's certainly what we're doing. CW: How tough is it to revert back to the binary formats? Capossela: It's a single switch in the Options dialog that says, for my default format, I want to use the binary formats instead of XML. It takes me about two seconds to do it on any machine I walk up to. IT, of course, will do that before they roll Office out. So it's not like you have to go do that to every machine.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp.'s Office 2007 suite is nearing the end of its long testing process. Microsoft on Thursday will offer a refresh of beta 2, the last external test release of the product before it is released to manufacturing, the company said. Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh will feature improved performance, enhancements to its collaboration tools and tighter integration across the individual products, Microsoft said. It also will include improvements in the general look and feel of the suite. Users canÂ download the beta 2 refresh of Office 2007 for free. Beta 2 of Office 2007 was originally released in late May. In the first two months of its public release, it was downloaded more than 3 million times by beta testers, so Microsoft began charging users US$1.50 to download the release at the end of July. The company beganÂ allowing users to test Office online with a Web-based test version of the suite in June. Like its sister product Windows Vista, Office 2007 has been delayed several times, but the company's latest target for release is to have it in the hands of business customers before the end of the year and consumers in the first quarter of 2007. However, online retailerÂ Amazon.com Inc. is already taking orders for Office 2007, and lists the product's ship date as Jan. 30, 2007. Vista, the next major update to Microsoft's Windows client OS, is also expected to be in general release at the same time, and will get to business customers in November, according to its current schedule. Office 2007 features a new user interface and a host of enhancements to its applications that allow users to work together in a collaborative environment.
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Lotus Symphony targets Microsoft Office with a free bundle of applications.
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Many people don&#39;t pay all that much attention to their e-mail software. After all, it takes a real geek to care about the fine points of one program or another, especially when they all do more or less the same thing.
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The first article for this new monthly column looks at eric3, a GUI-based IDE for Python.
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How a simple bug betrays Microsoft's disdain for basic best practice principles
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The Office 2004 for Mac update released by Microsoft on Tuesday patched a long-standing bug that erases messages, contacts and other information from Entourage 2004 accounts on Exchange mail servers.
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Microsoft on Thursday will release a Technical Refresh build of Office 2007 Beta 2, which originally debuted to the public in late May. The update brings to the table a number of performance and reliability improvements in all Office applications.
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La Blu-ray Disc Association a publiÃ© hier un communiquÃ© de presse donnant la liste exacte de ses membres. Cette derniÃ¨re est assez impressionnante et ce sont 73 constructeurs, dÃ©veloppeurs, Ã©diteurs ou
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has released its monthly set of security patches, fixing a critical flaw in Office. Attackers could exploit the bug by tricking Office users into opening a maliciously encoded .pub document, which would then allow attackers to run unauthorized software on a victim's PC. These .pub documents are created by Microsoft's Publisher software, an Office component used for designing print and online business publications. The flaw isÂ described here. Microsoft rates the bug as critical for Publisher 2000, but this warning has been downgraded to "important" for the Publisher 2002 and Publisher 2003 products. Some security experts expected Microsoft toÂ fix a similar bug in Word, which has been used by online attackers over the past few weeks, but that problem remains unfixed. Microsoft acknowledged the Word problem last week and probably did not have time to run a fix through its quality assurance tests, said Jonathan Bitle, a manager of technical accounts with Qualys Inc. "It's really late in their engineering cycle, so it's understandable that they wouldn't manage to get something out," he said. Both the Word and Publisher bugs rely on the same type of attack to work: an attacker e-mails a malicious document and somehow tricks the victim into clicking on the attachment. Security experts have been seeing more of these Office flaws exploited of late. "This is one of the trends that we have observed," said Amol Sarwate, director of the Qualys vulnerability research lab. "The growing number of client-side vulnerabilities where you have a malformed Publisher file or Word file or Excel file." Tuesday's patches also include less-critical fixes for two Windows components: the PGM (Pragmatic General Multicast) protocol used by Microsoft's Reliable Multicast Program software to transfer data, and the Windows Indexing service, which is used by the operating system's search engine. Microsoft's security bulletins offer more information. September may seem likeÂ a bit of a reprieve for harried system administrators who were given 19 updates to test and deploy over the past two months. Microsoft was forced toÂ reissue one of its August patches after it caused Internet Explorer to crash when working with a Web-based enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft and Siebel. But before Microsoft patchers get too relaxed, they should brace for the possibility of another patch later this month, Qualys said. Because attackers are actively exploiting the Word problem, Sarwate believes that Microsoft may issue an "out-of-cycle" patch for the problem, ahead of its next scheduled security updates, which are due Oct. 10. Â
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Blog: Programmers release an early but incomplete and crash-prone version of the open-source office suite for Mac OS X's native Aqua interface.