Office 2010 Beta – 32-bit or 64-bit – The Choice is Clear

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Microsoft Office 2010 Beta comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and this is the first time that a 64-bit version of Office has been available. 64-bit processing brings some advantages but are they outweighed by the disadvantages of being on the bleeding edge of technology?

If you’re running 64-bit Windows Vista or Windows 7 (or Server 2008 or Server 2008 R2), you can choose whether to the install 64-bit version of Office 2010 beta. (It is not compatible with 64-bit Windows XP.)

The advantages of the 64-bit version are that it lets you use additional memory installed on your computer – for example Excel 2010 workbooks can be bigger than 2GB. Project 2010 can work with very large projects consisting of many sub-projects. You also get enhanced security through Data Execution Prevention (DEP) by default.

But, not many people will actually need Excel Workbooks bigger than 2GB. If you ever made one, you could not store it in SharePoint – 2GB is SharePoint’s limit for any file – and you could not share it with anyone who wasn’t running 64-bit Office 2010 because they wouldn’t be able to open it.

Access databases with their code removed (split data & code in separate files) can’t be shared between 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office and any VBA code may not be compatible between 32-bit and 64-bit versions, particularly where the code declares API calls to Windows or uses the new LongLong or LongPtr data types introduced in the 64-bit version.

Graphic elements may render more slowly in the 64-bit version of Office because 64-bit CPUs may lack MMX support for multimedia and communications.

The biggest problem by far is that ActiveX controls Add-Ins and COM DLLs written for 32-bit Office will not work with the new 64-bit version. Microsoft are due to release a new VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) runtime which will bridge this gap for DLLs and Add-Ins written using VSTO but it isn’t available yet. Other manufacturers will have to test, possibly change, and re-issue their DLLs and Add-Ins in 64-bit versions to get them to work.

There are yet more problems if you try to work with web based solutions that use ActiveX controls. For instance SharePoint uses an ActiveX control to render SharePoint lists in Datasheet View. This view is not supported if you install the 64-bit version of Office 2010.

All in all, the 64-bit version of Office is useful to very few people and has many limitations. The vast majority of people will be much better off sticking to the 32-bit version.

Outlook 2010 People Pane – does it spell death to Xobni

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Completely new in Outlook 2010 Beta is the People Pane. This appears below the Reading pane in the main window and in all the individual item windows. It shows thumbnail images, one for every person (or email address) associated with the item and lets you quickly access other items which are also associated with that person/address.

The contents shown in the People Pane are derived from the Windows Search index which is kept up to date as new items are created or arrive via email. When you first install Office 2010 Beta all your existing Outlook items must be re-indexed so don’t expect the People Pane to spring to life immediately but once indexing is complete all the other emails, attachments and meetings known for a person are just a click away. (more…)

Co-Authoring in Word 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Now Microsoft have released beta test versions of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 we can start to see what they’ve been talking about in the “co-authoring” arena. SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports multiple people editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents at the same time. When you store your documents in a SharePoint document library, any number of people can open the document and they see who else is editing the document in the status bar. Your changes are bracketed with a blue line in the left margin and you get notifications when other people’s updates are available.

When you save your changes, you also get to see the other person’s changes that they have saved highlighted in green.

It seems that making small changes and saving often is the best way not to tread on each other’s toes.

In the Info section in Backstage (File | Info) you can see who is editing the document and send messages to them by email or by instant message (if you have Office Communicator). At the bottom of the Info section you can also see and manage all the different versions of the file, either autosaved or previous versions held in the SharePoint document library.

Co-authoring documents is going to be very useful for many people and it is good to see it is included in the free SharePoint Foundation 2010 and not reserved for SharePoint Server 2010 which will cost quite a lot of money.

Flash 10.1: Developing for Desktop and Device

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Yesterday Adobe made the beta of its new Flash 10.1 player available for desktop testing via Adobe Labs. The fact that it’s only a point release suggests that it’s a relatively trivial update but that’s not the case. In fact 10.1 is one of the most significant releases in the history of Flash.

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Does Windows BitLocker spell the end of the office loan laptop?

Friday, November 13th, 2009

This has been an interesting week for the USB key.

No really; the ubiquitous key, which has been implicated in incidents of corporate data loss around the world, now occupies a central role in Microsoft’s view of corporate security.

Far from being the main means by which secrets slip out of your organisation, the Microsoft security technique depends on carrying your BitLocker keys around on a USB stick.

This is a great leap forward, and I can foresee lots of corporates finding themselves strongly obliged to take up BitLocker, especially when you consider the surprising hard line being taken by the Information Commissioner, as reported in this BBC article. Let’s put the headline conclusion up here so you bear it in mind: if your company loses data, then it’s half a million quid as a fine.

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SimplicITy ‘over 50s’ PC is so un-PC

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

This morning I had a press release emailed to me about a new range of systems by simplicITy computers to be launched today by Valerie Singleton, her of Blue Peter and ’sticky-backed plastic’ fame. She was also presenter of the BBC Money program for many years.

What got me fuming was that this range of computers was for the ‘over 50s’, those people whose brains are just too old and addled to understand new technology, like me and a lot of my friends. I find the term ’silver surfer’ particularly annoying; my hair went grey in my mid-30s so presumably dementia set in then as well. Heck, even our own youthful Jon Honeyball has a few threads of grey, so perhaps he’ll need some help with his computer soon!

By all means market a computer for ‘those who find existing computers confusing,’ but this assumption that the over-50s and silver surfers have special needs is just plain ageist.

As for this computer launch, the operating system is Linux, so you are not going to find as much local help for that as you would with a Windows machine. By all means build an easy-to-use interface on top of Windows, make a simple email client, and remove all the unnecessary buttons from the browser (or use Chrome). But keep an operating system underneath that your kids can help you with, and that has support for all those devices that you might want to plug into it.

I’ll get off me soapbox now.

Microsoft shows courage at Tech-Ed 09

Monday, November 9th, 2009

The initial signs for this year’s Tech-Ed Europe - Microsoft’s annual get-together for its product gurus, partners and IT professionals – being the sort of show rich with standing ovations are not good.

Microsoft is in Berlin around the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, just after U2 has smeared the town with its dubious neo-political imprimatur, and just before Thanksgiving in the US – it’s one of those periods that might well be marked by suggestions in emails as “a good time to bury some bad news”. But: there’s some good stuff here. Calm stuff; stuff which shows MS is getting down to business, and not distracting the world with dancing paperclips.

The basic raw headlines are that Exchange 2010 goes to public availability as from today, worldwide: and Microsoft is very pleased with some rational improvements. (more…)

PowerPoint and Silverlight: a perfect match?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

With its place at the heart of the Microsoft Office suite, PowerPoint is the overwhelmingly dominant presentation software for business. However it has a fundamental flaw – it still doesn’t offer an in-built route for efficient, cross-platform, screen-based web delivery. For a program whose whole purpose is to help users get their message over, this is quite astonishing and unforgivable as we approach 2010.

Microsoft might not provide its own solution but there are plenty of third-party applications which fill the gap such as Adobe’s Captivate and Presenter, the bargain Flair from WildFX and my personal favourite Articulate Presenter. The major embarrassment for Microsoft is that these all rely on the Adobe Flash format.

It’s an embarrassment that is made considerably worse by the fact that Microsoft is currently busily touting its own cross-platform web format, Silverlight, as a direct alternative to Flash. It’s clear that PowerPoint and Silverlight should make a perfect match and native Silverlight export would certainly go a long way to explaining (if not excusing) PowerPoint’s lack of support for Flash.

So where is the ability to convert PowerPoint to Silverlight?

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No Windows 7 drivers turn Dell M1330 into a doorstop

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

At last year’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference), Microsoft handed out shiny new laptops preloaded with the then-new build of Windows 7 to the press corps. It ensured that no-one would get hung-up on installation issues, because each machine was ready to go. Plus it gave the press a machine each to try the various beta builds as it progressed.

I confess that mine stayed in its bag, because I preferred to test both in virtual machines and on my own known hardware. But over the weekend, I was tempted to unpack the laptop and try it with final Windows 7 code.

The laptop is pretty decent — a Dell XPS M1330 with a big battery, 4GB of ram and a decent hard disk. Quite a good workhorse, I think you would agree.

So this morning, in went the Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit DVD. Naturally, I decided to wipe the hard disk and start again from scratch. Once the install was done, there was a bunch of things to download from the Microsoft website via the Windows Update service.

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Typekit brings print-like typography to the web

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

The website is among the most iconic technologies of the 21st Century but, as any web designer will testify, the typographical capabilities of modern web browsers are stuck firmly in the 1990s. In essence, if you want your fonts to appear broadly the same in all browsers, you’re limited to a selection of around a dozen viable fonts . Over the past few years a number of workarounds have been developed, the most notable and widespread being sIFR, a Flash technology that involves embedding the fonts in a SWF. Widespread but hardly ideal.

In principle, salvation is at hand with the almost complete adoption of the CSS @font-face property by modern browsers. This makes it possible to download a font stored on your server into the user’s browser. Theoretically, this solves the entire problem but, in practice, copyright issues mean that even free fonts cannot be used legally in that way. This may change over time but, in the meantime, web startup Small Batch has developed an ingenious solution called Typekit. (more…)