Month: March 2014

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SharePoint Conference 2014 Videos and Presentation Slides

SPConference  

Missed the SharePoint Conference 2014, March 3-6 2014 in Las Vegas, or was it too far away to go to from your perspective? Don’t worry, as of today you can view the sessions online on Channel 9. At this time there are about 253 videos available so I’m sure you won’t be bored if SharePoint and/or Office is your area of interest!

The SharePoint Conference is -the- conference to be when you want to learn the internals on how to build Office and SharePoint applications or manage the Office System, including all the client and server components. At this conference the Office/SharePoint teams open the books and share the roadmap for the upcoming year and beyond. This time SharePoint Conference 2014 was held in Las Vegas and has been attended by an unbelievable number of somewhat around 10,000 attendees.

Go ahead and click the SharePoint Conference 2014 Videos link here.

Showtime: Soof

Soof

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.

My guess is the movie won’t be released abroad (outside The Netherland) so this Showtime item probably is not much of use for my foreign friends but if you are a Dutch reader here is my view on Soof.

Soof, a Dutch movie about a what I like to think of as a ‘common’ Dutch family life. A very recognizable representation of a family situation where a wife, husband and a couple of kids live together in an overloaded way of living. The husband Kasper (Fedja van Huêt), businessman, has a very busy company life filled with meetings and constantly trying to be on top of things. His wife Soof (short for Sophie – Lies Visschedijk)  has a hobby of creating dinner services for other people but at the same time has the kids to worry about. Kasper gets the blame of doing nothing in the household and one day Kasper gets enough of it and decides on his own to take a year off and go for the sabbatical.

Soof now, in order to pay the bills, is the one to make some money on her hobby project. Something she always wanted but never imagined that it would really happen. Obviously all sorts of things go wrong, new relations start happening and soon it escalates.

Very recognizable plot for many of us and that is the real fun part of the movie. They did a real great job with that and the comedy level is high without exaggerating too much. The movie has been marketed as a so called Chick-Flick (and apparently that worked, with me only a couple of men were sitting in a room filled with women only, chatting and giggling) nevertheless I had a fun time watching the movie and rated it an Eight out of Ten in its category.

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How to Install Office 2013 SP1 on Office365

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A little while ago Office 2013 released its Service Pack 1 and I explained where to download the Service Pack. On your Windows RT machine there was no option to download an installer to update Office 2013 like you do on a regular Windows machine so I added an additional post to explain how that is done.

Office365 or other subscription based Office installations are also a bit different than the other installations to update your installation. These installations are mostly offered using the so called C2R installations where C2R stands for “Click-to-Run” installations. C2R installations are completely different than MSI installations, you can read more about it here. So how do you update a subscription based Office installation?

When using Office 2013 as part of a subscription the service pack is not offered via Windows Update or standalone installer. In this post I will show you this other installation option: how to install your Service Pack 1 on a subscription based Office installation in the steps below.

  • Start an Office client application such as Word
  • On the top in the Ribbon, Click File
  • Click and go to the Account Tab
  • There you’ll find an Office Updates section:

    clip_image001

    Here above you see the Dutch localized version but the idea is the same. To the left of the Office Updates (Yellow highlighted section there is an Updates Options button (here in the Dutch version called “Bijwerkopties”. From there you can select to check and update your Office version. Right after clicking the update option you’ll get a notification dialog that will say a new version is available or in that is the case saying the latest version already has been installed:

    SNAGHTML6c6abed
    Again, for kicks I show you the here -Dutch- message box, not much different than the English one however … it told me there are Office Updates available and asks me if I wanted to install the update now.

  • Click Yes to continue installing the Service Pack 1 from here.

There you have it, I explained to you in this blog post that there is a slight difference between the installation options between the subscription based and the installed base Office version. To recap, here are once more the four options on how to install the Office 2013 Service Pack 1:

Confusing? A little bit if you ask me, especially if you are like me and have several different options to facilitate, but I guess most people just have one or two of these options in place. It seems that over time more and more people will shift to the subscription based option either in the context of Office365 or the Office Home program where you get five installations on a ‘family’ subscription for under hundred dollar a year.  

Showtime: Walking with Dinosaurs 3D

Walking with Dinosaurs 3D

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.

Supposedly a spin off from the BBC series this is an animation feature where the viewer is brought back to the time on earth when Dinosaurs were around. I went to see this movie with my ten year old son and besides entertaining it probably also provided some learning moments as the movie explained some details around the existence of the Dinosaurs, differences between the various species and their natural enemies. As said, the movie was entertaining, some humor added and 3D effects on top to make it more impressing. Personally I like the ‘fun’ animation features like the Ice Age series a bit better that the more realistic animation feature like this one but I got the impression that for kids it was entertaining enough to earn a minimal Seven out of Ten.

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New Office REST APIs and Developer Tools for Visual Studio Update

Tonight (here in Europe that is) Somasegar announced on his blog that the Visual Studio Team and the Office Team released a “number of significant updates for developers building apps that interact with the Office ecosystem”.

All of the updates are more or less related to building Apps for Office/SharePoint and the Cloud. If you need full integration (interacting between Word and Excel, building compound documents, Ribbon interaction etc.) I think you still need to use the ‘other’ option, VSTO. The downside of –that- however is that it won’t be as mobile a you’d like to see. You win some or lose some, depending on the technology you decide to use.

Back to the updates… Announced today were the new Office 365 APIs for consuming Office data and updates of Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio (not to be confused with Visual Studio Tools for the Office System aka VSTO, that is a complete other thing) and “Napa”.

Go and read the blogs for details on all of this,  no need for me to repeat all of it Glimlach

  • The Office 365 Platform blog
  • The Visual Studio blog

    • This year I’ll try to deep dive on this a bit more to get into the subject of replacing your current Add-ins with Apps for Office/SharePoint – Can you or can’t you? Where are we at the moment. Everyone wants to move their Add-ins into the Cloud, but is it even possible today? More on this later …

Showtime: Philomena

Philomena

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.

Philomena is a movie nominated for 4 Oscars and a whole slew of other rewards. You wouldn’t expect that by just watching the trailer of the movie.

The movie is about a woman who got pregnant at a very young age and therefor was put away in a Catholic convent where her son was born. Shortly after that her son was taken away from her for adoption.

Journalist Martin Sixsmith started to follow Philomena’s story and together with Philomena he started their search for her long lost son who appeared to have been adopted by an American family. On the search they travel to the United States where they tried to find his current location.

The story of a mother searching for her son changed from a series of facts into an emotional piece of art where spectators in the audience had a hard time to keep it dry. In a silent moment you could hear a soft crying from all directions. The producer managed to touch the hearts of many with this drama. Nine out of Ten, highly recommended !

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How to install Office 2013 SP1 on Windows RT

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In my previous post I published the fact that Office 2013 just had just released their Service Pack 1 and explained where to download the Service Pack. On your Windows RT machine however there is no option to download an installer to go ahead in updating Office 2013 like you do on a regular Windows machine. How would updating be provisioned on Windows RT?

Look no further, here are the steps to install Service Pack 1 on your Windows RT machine:

In this case you are looking for an update to be found in Windows Update. So go to the start screen and:

  • swipe in from the right and click on Settings
  • On the bottom right click on “Change PC Settings”
  • Find “Update and Recovery” and click the link
  • Select Windows Update
  • This will show you all available updates, look for the update that says “Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office 2013 (KB2850036) RT
  • Put a checkmark next to the update
  • Click the Install Button

    • That’s it … you only need to reboot after installing the update and you are good to go to work with your fresh updated Office 2013 RT.

Showtime:Last Vegas

LastVegas

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.

This movie does not lack the big names to bring it to a success story, but is that enough? The story is all about a ‘gang of four’ being friends since childhood. They are now well over sixty and Billy (Michael Douglas) decided to take a shot and marry a thirty year or so younger girl and calls his buddies to arrange a bachelor party in Las Vegas (where coincidentally this week is the big SharePoint Conference 2014).

Things never have been very smooth between Paddy (Robert de Niro) and Billy. I won’t go into details to avoid spoiling the plot in details so take this for a fact. The four friends Billy, Paddy, Archie (Morgan Freeman) and Sam (Kevin Kline) need to solve things around this issue.

It’s an old men movie, kinda slow and the ‘big names’ in the movie aren’t making it much better. Events are somewhat predictable and won’t give you the thrills you would expect from the title “Last Vegas – It’s going to be legendary”. It wasn’t that legendary if you ask me. Six out of Ten.