Tag: Office

Community Event: From The Desktop to the Cloud: Let’s Manage, Monitor and Deploy

We’ve just announced the details of the latest user group event in Dublin … it’s a biggie!  I’ll be presenting two of the deployment sessions, on MAP and MDT.

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Join us at the Guinness Store House on February 24th at 09:00 for a full day of action packed sessions covering everything from the desktop to The Cloud, and maybe even a pint of Guinness afterwards.

We have our a fantastic range of speakers ranging from MVPs to Microsoft Staff and leading industry specialists to deliver our sessions ensuring a truly unique experience.  During this day, you will have the choice of attending sessions of your choice, covering topics such as Windows 7/Office 2010 deployment, management using System Center, and cloud computing for the IT pro (no developer content – we promise!).

We have our a fantastic range of speakers ranging from MVPs to Microsoft staff and leading industry specialists to deliver our sessions ensuring a truly unique experience. During this day, you will have the choice of attending sessions of your choice, covering topics such as Windows 7/Office 2010 deployment, management using System Center, and cloud computing for the IT pro (no developer content – we promise!).

We promised bigger and better and we meant it.  This session will feature 3 tracks, each with four sessions.  The tracks are:

  1. The Cloud: Managed by Microsoft Ireland
  2. Windows 7/Office 2010 Deployment: Managed by the Windows User Group
  3. Systems Management: Managed by the System Center User Group

You can learn more about the event, tracks, sessions, and speaker on the Windows User Group site.

You can register here.  Please only register if you seriously intend to go; Spaces are limited and we want to make sure as many can attend as possible.

The Twitter tag for the event is #ugfeb24.

Office 2010 Deployment Guide

Microsoft released this guide for deploying Office 2010 a little while ago.

“This book provides information about how to plan a deployment Microsoft Office 2010, including how to plan for virtualization and Remote Desktop Services”.

Some other documents were also released:

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MAP 5.5 Beta

Watch out, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 5.5 will be in a store near you real soon.  Microsoft just sent out emails about the start of the MAP 5.5 beta:

“What’s new with MAP Toolkit 5.5?

Assess your environment for upgrade to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 (or the latest version)

Are you looking for a tool to simplify your organization’s migration to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8—and, in turn, enjoy improved desktop security, reliability and manageability? The MAP 5.5 IE Upgrade Assessment inventories your environment and reports on deployed web browsers, Microsoft ActiveX controls, plug-ins and toolbars, and then generates a migration assessment report and proposal—information you need to more easily migrate to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 (or the latest version).

Identify and analyze web application, and database readiness for migration to Windows Azure and SQL Azure

Simplify your move to the cloud with the MAP 5.5 automated discovery and detailed inventory reporting on database and web application readiness for Windows Azure and SQL Azure. MAP identifies web applications, IIS servers, and SQL Server databases, analyzes their performance characteristics, and estimates required cloud features such as number of Windows Azure compute instances, number of SQL Azure databases, bandwidth usage, and storage.

Discover heterogeneous database instances for migration to SQL Server

Now with heterogeneous database inventory supported, MAP 5.5 helps you accelerate migration to SQL Server with network inventory reporting for MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase instances.

Enhanced server consolidation assessments for Hyper-V

Enhanced server consolidation capabilities help save time and effort when creating virtualization assessments and proposals. Enhancements include:

  • Updated hardware libraries allowing you to select from the latest Intel and AMD processors.
  • Customized server selection for easy editing of assessment data. Data collection and store every five minutes for more accurate reporting.
  • Better scalability and reliability, requiring less oversight of the data collection process.
  • Support for more machines”.

Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) 2010

You will want to learn about this toolset if you are planning on doing any Windows 7/Office 2010 deployment projects. I know it (previous version) is a minor element in the Vista/MDT 2008 deployment exam.

“The Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) 2010 is a group of tools designed to help administrators during the planning and testing phases of a Microsoft Office 2010 deployment.

OMPM assists administrators in the discovery and compatibility assessment of existing Office documents for migration from the binary document formats (.doc, .xls, etc.) to OpenXML formats (.docx, .xlsx, etc.). Additionally, OMPM 2010 adds features to assess macro compatibility with Office 2010 and 64 bit Office compatibility. The toolkit also contains the Office File Converter (OFC), which enables bulk document conversions from binary to OpenXML formats, and a Version Extraction Tool (VET) to extract saved file versions.

The goal of the tool set is to help administrators understand the number and types of Microsoft Office files in their environment and effectively plan for a smooth rollout of the new version of Microsoft Office.

Refer to the Office Migration Planning Manager reference for further information”.

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KMS Download for Office 2010

Office 2010 activation has gone the way of Windows and now supports both MAK and KMS.  This download gives you an update for KMS activation.

“An Office 2010 KMS host is required if you want to use KMS activation for your volume licensing editions of Office 2010 suites or applications, Microsoft Project 2010 or Microsoft Visio 2010. When Office 2010 volume edition client products are installed, they will automatically search for a KMS host on your organization’s DNS server for activation. All volume editions of Office 2010 client products are pre-installed with a KMS client key, so you will not need to install a product key.

This download contains an executable file that will extract and install KMS host license files. These license files are required for the KMS host service to recognize Office 2010 KMS host keys. It will also prompt you to enter your Office 2010 KMS host key and activate that key. After this is done, you may need to use the slmgr.vbs script to further configure your KMS host”.

SharePoint 2010 Information

Two downloads appeared on Microsoft’s site over the weekend for you BI freaks to get started into SharePoint 2010:

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Office 2010 Information

Microsoft released some information to go with the 2010 RTM of tonight:

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Office 2010 RTM

I just saw on the Office blog that Office 2010 products have been released to manufacturing.  The released products are Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010.

Volume license customers with Software Assurance can start downloading on May 1st.  The official launch will be on on May 12th with a virtual event featuring Stephen Elop.  Retail will be available in June with pre-order available now.  News on MSDN and TechNet releases is being kept suspiciously quiet.  I suspect MS might be trying to avoid what happened with Windows 7 – everyone hitting refresh until it eventually appeared and then they all got slow downloads and moaned on Twitter.

I’ll be sticking with Office 2007 for a while – I’m kinda constrained by the support for the custom ribbon that my publisher uses for formatting.  I’ll probably upgrade the work machine when the partner pack is updated.  I’ve been on the CTP for quite a while now.