What's New in Office for October?

  • Article

Time's been passing. Meanwhile, we have a slug (bucketful? melange) of interesting new content out there.

For Office client developers, we have a couple of important updates. One is to Andrew Whitechapel's popular article: Isolating Microsoft Office Extensions with the COM Shim Wizard Version 2.3.1.0. By customer request, we also republished a popular article that was inadvertently dropped in some recent shenanigans: Improving Web Site Usability and Appeal. The latest OfficeTalk column, by guest columnist and MVP Ron de Bruin shows Filtering by the Active Cell's Value, Font Color, or Fill Color in Excel 2007.

Open XML is a hot topic. We did publish MVP Stephanie Krieger's article: Creating Document Themes Using the Office Open XML Formats. Frank Rice also describes how to create a simple search and replace utility for Word 2007 Open XML Format Documents.

I think one of the coolest new things is the AddinSpy tool, posted to Code Gallery (also by Andrew Whitechapel). Using the AddinSpy, you can discover all registered Microsoft Office add-ins on a computer. Read more here (and download the tool): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc984533.aspx.

Performance optimization is always top on the minds of server admins. Here are some tips for all you Groove fans: Optimizing Groove Forms Tool Performance

We also posted updates to the following doc sets:

· PerformancePoint 2007 Monitoring Server SDK Documentation

· Microsoft Office Live Small Business Developer Guide

More information on SharePoint Products and Technologies continues to be in demand. Workflows is the feature this month with another article on workflows: Developing SharePoint Server 2007 Sequential and State Machine Workflows with Visual Studio 2008

I love the title of this article: Capitalizing On the Social Network Capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007 User Profiles. It just makes me want to read it.

A lot of people are big fans of "prescriptive guidance." I remember working on the first "prescriptive architecture guide" for SharePoint about five years ago. Setting up your CMS is particularly challenging, judging from some of the SharePoint discussion threads I see. Check this out for some help: Prescriptive Guidance for SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Sites.

Continuing on the "prescriptive guidance" theme, we have the first article in what will be part of the Team Foundation Server Resource Center. This new resource center is rather exciting. It's goal is to provide the growing development community surrounding Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 custom applications with a prescriptive set of guidance about how to conduct SharePoint application development. Check back with the Resource Center regularly for the latest in the series.

Lastly, we have another article on search: Performing Incremental Crawling with the Business Data Catalog in SharePoint Server 2007. Incremental crawling is much less time-consuming than performing a full crawl so implementing it across your BDC would be a great way to immediately improve your search results.

Here are some great upcoming offerings including:

· Configuring and Deploying Anonymous SharePoint Publishing Sites

· Walkthrough: Master Page Page Layout in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

· Configuring Security in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

· Domain Isolation for Folder Home Page Customization in Outlook 2007

· Inserting Repeating Data Items into a Table in a Word 2007 Document

Comments