When testing Office 2007 Information Rights Management against an Rights Management Server deployment you may notice that you get a very vague error message that simply states "Unspecified Error ....". Very helpful message right?

It would appear this is caused by using a Windows account that is not yet associated with an email account. Yep that's it; do you reckon Microsoft could of made the error message more descriptive?

John Hodgson (HP Australia)

Working with SharePoint Server means I am often promoting and demonstrating Office 2007; however this demonstration generally follows with questions and raised eye brows over the dramatic changes to Office. Some of our customers are still concerned about deploying Office 2007 because of the inherent changes in Office 2007 and especially the ribbon. The main concern appears to be a disruption in productivity.

Of course those that are using Office 2007 would never go back but there is a definite learning curve irrespective of the technical competency of the user.

In regards to Office 2007 deployment there is a need to consider a number of areas:

• The deployment itself (language packs, updates, configurations etc..)
• User training (The client tools themselves and integration points with SharePoint and other services)
• New Office OpenXML File Format Adoption and content migration (if applicable, you can continue to make 2003 the default format, but there are tools to help)
• Application compatibility (Office addins/custom office solutions)
• Ongoing Support

I find custom applications  like addon's and macros are a primary concern but this is closely followed by user training considerations. Here is a list of resources and tools I provide to customers to assist in planning for user acceptance/training, make sure the user base has easy access to these resources as part of a roll out:

INTERACTIVE GUIDE: Office 2007 Command Reference Guide for Word (Interactive guides also available for Excel and Powerpoint; other tools covered by Whitepapers) http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/word/HA100744321033.aspx

VIDEO: Great User Introductions to the Office 2007 clients
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679481033.aspx?pid=CL100796341033
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679471033.aspx?pid=CL100796341033

STUDY: Real People Doing Real Work with Office 2007 (Part 1) http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/05/655119.aspx

STUDY: You Mean I Don't Need To Retrain Everybody? (Real People Study, Part 2) http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/06/658077.aspx

TOOLS: 2007 Microsoft Office System Migration Guidance: Microsoft Office Migration Planning Manager (Preview) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=13580cd7-a8bc-40ef-8281-dd2c325a5a81&DisplayLang=en

Another stealthy technique for organisations with the appropriate Microsoft software licensing agreements in place is to take advantage of the Office Home Use program; this is a way to give your employees the latest version of Office for use at home. By using it at home they get more familiar with the product and less likely to have issues at work.  Simple.

The investment users make in understanding and appreciating the ribbon will pay off as more and more applications adopt this new powerful way of navigating our day to day tools.

John Hodgson (HP Australia)

Collaborating with customers recently has been incredibly seamless thanks to Groove; in fact our team has also been sharing documents and discussion forums with Microsoft on a recent project. I found myself thinking quite often "how cool is Groove, it just works!"

One customer in particular asked me to look at Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional; I had never heard of it before; originally called Breeze. It was interesting but was browser based and not as stable or as polished as Groove.  The Adobe product did perform a range of tasks that Groove was not designed to provide so I wanted to give the customer a quick overview of what I think Grooves strengths in particular were; here is a quick run down of what I said for those that are not that familiar with what Groove is.

Groove is:

• A locally installed client like Word or Excel
• Designed for short term adhoc workspaces
• Offline cache of the Workspace (every member of a particular workspace has the same content)
• Deals with connected and disconnected scenarios or poor networking conditions
• Secure 192AES lockbox and communications
• Smart and efficient in the transmission of content between users (Bit level differencing)
• Extensible, you can build custom tools  i.e. applications that take advantage of Groove replication
• Part of Office Enterprise
• Can be managed and controlled through policy, just like Exchange and Outlook
• Not just for enterprise customers
• A tool that just works reliably, set and forget

I can invite anyone with an email address to a Groove workspace and they can try Groove for free; its a great way to try this very useful tool.

Free trial: http://us7.trymicrosoftoffice.com/product.aspx?re_ms=oo&family=officelivegroove&culture=en-US

When you have it installed it here are some of my favorite features to try:

• Right click on any Windows folder and Share as a Groove Sync folder then invite people.
• Drag emails from Outlook into a Groove file library; great way to share emails.

These are the tools that are available out of the box in a Groove workspace.

Make sure you try it out.

JohnH