Month: February 2014

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Office 2013 Service Pack 1

OfficeSymbolMicrosoft just released the first Service Pack (SP1) for Office 2013. As an Office SME, I have been developing solutions and worked with the product since the early versions waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back years ago, I’m always interested in what is going on in that area.

Getting information from the Office developer/development team is not easy these days, in fact … it never was… It has been a bit better, at the time they used to have Office Developer Conferences, in early years you even only were allowed to attend on invitation. The Office team is not one of the teams that shares a lot of information before going public on things. The Developer Division is completely the opposite and shares information whenever they can. In my opinion a much better way to work with your customers, get early feedback and make sure you stay on track – keep the train on the rails your customers are on. I know the Office team is just huge and also know the SharePoint Conference is targeted as replacement for the Office Developer Conferences but there is a huge difference between client applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and many more and SharePoint. SharePoint is mostly a Server environment.

Even if you are in the Office Beta process there are only one or two drops to look at and this does not make it easier for a full time Office Developer to get pain points addressed. Identifying bugs (often not in the product itself but in many cases caused by all sorts of ‘undocumented’ collisions or limited documentation) can be -very- time consuming and tedious at times. It would really help if that improved a bit…

Oh well, so much for the rant, back to the Service Pack…

Besides a cumulative rollup of previous fixes released earlier, up to approximately somewhere around January, it also include a whole slew of other fixes found in the product.

A list of fixes can be found here: (Excel Workbook)

For an overview of Service Pack 1 you can read the official announcement on the Office Updates Blog

Service Pack 1 is available through several channels like Windows Update or direct download:

DownloadDownload the Microsoft Office 2013 SP1 32-bit package now

DownloadDownload the Microsoft Office 2013 SP1 64-bit package now

Enjoy your updated Office Suite, it just got to be a little bit better than it already was … Let me know what you think about it in the comments!

Showtime: Free Birds 3D

FreeBirds

The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.

Free Birds, an animated feature about Reggie the Turkey. He found that turkeys are there to be sacrificed and be the Thanksgivings dinner star. He tried to warn his fellow turkeys but ends up as the annual Pardoned Turkey living in wealth and luxury. Until he meets Jake, or rather Jake finds him, the two of them travel back in time to 1621. The story evolves and allegedly history of Thanksgiving is visualized.

A movie with lots of humor for kids but also entertaining enough for adults. I enjoyed watching the adventures of Reggie and Jake with my daughter on the big screen (no, there are no extra credits for that) so Seven out of Ten.

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Satya Nadella is the new CEO of Microsoft

Today Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella will be the new CEO of Microsoft following Steve Ballmer who announced last year to retire in 2014. With that, Satya asked Bill Gates to step back in, but with a different hat on -no not that hat– but as “Technical Advisor focusing on products and technologies”.

Instead of me telling all of this to you, it is probably better to let the board speak for itself and show you the official announcements as available on YouTube.

Steve Ballmer welcomes Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy8Qhcf_moA]

Microsoft Chairman John Thompson on CEO Satya Nadella

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3K5lloQTT8]

Bill Gates welcomes Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5BhQVuRcTk]

All great, these kind words and praise for the man, but what did he have to say for himself? Well, here is his first (short) interview as CEO of Microsoft:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8JwNZBJ_wI]

In fact, I have met him (at a distance Glimlach ) earlier last year and the year before when he did his Keynote for the //Build conferences for the years of 2012 and 2013 in the role of President, Server and Tools Business.

Who would have expected that today he would be CEO of this huge worldwide company? Let’s see how he will do in the near future and how it will affect the current policies at Microsoft.

Showtime: La Grande Bellezza

La Grande Bellezza

The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.

La Grande Bellezza (“The Great Beauty”) is a piece of art, the sceneries, panoramas or just the way it was filmed as a whole is just great. The story is about Jep Gambardella turned sixty-five and is overlooking his life trying to decide if his life had the quality level he wanted out of it, would he be able to write a new book worth reading meeting the quality bar. He once wrote a book and was successful with that one but lived his life after that as a highly respected journalist.

The images of Rome, the nightlife of nightclubs and parties and all of the extravaganza around it all is a joy to look at. The category of the film may be Film Art (and Art it is!) but is not the kind of movies stamped to be dull and boring. In fact I gladly surprised and even though the movie is not for ‘everyone’ on my list it proved to be a Great Beauty and allow it to get Nine out of Ten at least for being something completely different.

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InfoPath, the official message about its future

It has been in the dark for years, InfoPath didn’t get many updates when the latest Office version (Office 2013) arrived and on customer questions there was always the “we haven’t announced any plans or decided change of policy” kind of answer about the future of InfoPath.

InfoPath, if I am honest, never really got off and the adoption rate was low. It was however the foreseen application to build and deploy your forms (often to SharePoint, but could also be used locally). One of the main issues might have been that there wasn’t a free InfoPath forms client to get the adoption rate up.

To me the lack of information about the future of InfoPath always was an indicator that the product was close to end of life. This on the other hand really took a while to be confirmed.

That said, yesterday – out of the blue, there was this Official Office Blog Post to be found on the Office site:
Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms

In this blog Microsoft announced that, quote: “InfoPath 2013 is the last release of the desktop client, and InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Server 2013 is the last release of InfoPath Forms Services”

Existing customers will be supported through 2023 so no worries if you are using this technology. The blog post does not provide any other information on what will be offered as a follow up on InfoPath other than that it will be presented somewhere in Q4 of CY 2014 (this I think actually is Q2 2014 in real life as Microsoft has a broken book year).

My guess is that the announcement of InfoPath vNext will be at SharePoint 2014 Conference (with Bill Clinton as Keynote Speaker!). The SharePoint conference, with the Office Developer Conference disappeared for years now, will be the place to be if you want to know what happens to InfoPath or the other Office products. So… follow the news around the SharePoint 2014 Conference… attend the conference.

Showtime: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

JackRyan

The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.

Jack Ryan (Chris Pine, took me some time to realize that he also did a couple of the Star Trek features) is sure about it after 9/11, he wants to serve his country by joining the marines and meets Cathy Muller (Keira Knightley) when recovering in  the hospital after a dreadful accident with the militaries. It was somewhat funny to hear Keira talk. Her usual British accent was suppressed and she tried to make it sound a bit more American accented. Not sure if that was intended or maybe she took lessons in talking without dialect Glimlach.

After his recovery he gets the offer and joins the CIA. By doing so he gets involved in James Bond alike scenarios and one of those is that he discovered a terrorist group planning to disrupt the US economy by messing up the trade markets on Wall Street. Jack goes to Russia to sort this out and from there blocking the terrorists from executing their plans.

The movie is a nice “sit, relax and watch” movie. Nothing spectacular to remember though but it was sure fun to watch. Seven out of Ten should do it.