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Monday, April 19, 2010

Office 2010 - RTM

Office 2010 has gone RTM as of 4/16/2010! TechNetPlus and MSDN subscribers will be able to grab the bits on 4/22/2010, Volume Licensing customers on May 1, and General Release (aka. Public release) is slated for sometime in June. The official product launch is May 12, with Launch events around the country throughout the month of May. See http://www.microsoft.com/business/2010events/ITProEvents.aspx?CR_CC=100377418 to find a list of local US events.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Time flying again

Long time, no blog. But enough about me. ;)

There are just a slew of new products that have come down the pike and/or are coming soon from Microsoft. I'll hit on a few here.

Windows 7 - Wow. That's all I can say - wow. They nailed this OS. It's everything Vista should have been, and more. I've been running it since Beta, and it's rock solid. I've had a few annoyances, like suddenly-flaky USB device detection and Windows Media Player crashing every time it's launched. But other that, it's a stellar release, and I applaud those who gave us this OS. I heard Mark Russinovich had a hand in some under-the-hood tweaks and changes, and the rumored MinWin takes those to a new level. It sounds like we could be back to a small footprint for Windows and no longer have to deal with this bloated legacy compatibility that's been an anchor on the OS for far too long.

Exchange 2010 - They took Exchange 2007 and gave it some PEDs. LOL... Seriously, though, another awesome product release. The Exchange team took the I/O improvements found in Exchange 2007 and doubled-down - they got about a 70% I/O reduction in the 2010 release on top of the 70% they got from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. They addressed the inherent limitations of HA/DR in Exchange 2007 with the Database Availability Group (DAG), which allows you to have multiple copies of a database across multiple servers. Archiving? Yep, they did that, too, albeit a bit short-sightedly at first (More on that in a minute). Personal Archives are now available for user mailboxes. Think of them as a PST on the Exchange server. The problem is the archive mailbox is in the same database as the original mailbox, so there's no true value to it right now. However, in SP1 (Beta release in June at TechEd), they are addressing this shortcoming by enabling Personal Archives to be in a separate database from the main mailbox.

Office 2010 - Extending the Ribbon UI throughout the Office suite completes the UI transformation that they started in Office 2007. Personally, I like the Ribbon - it exposes much more of the product functionality than before and thus you can actually use more features than you previously would have. I am running the Beta, but since I don't have an Exchange server to connect to I have not had the pleasure of trying out the changes in Outlook. But there are some other changes that are pertinent, like automatically 'locking' a document or spreadsheet that's opened from a website. You have to click on "Enable Editing" to make changes to a document or else save it locally.

I can't even go into Windows Server 2008 R2, or Hyper-V 2.0, or SharePoint 2010, or MDOP, or MDT 2010... because I don't have enough time to play with all this cool technology!! I will try to post my thoughts as I'm able to work more with these and other technologies in the future.

Last note - fingers crossed, hoping to land a new job soon. Final interviews tomorrow, and it's a job I really, really want and believe I would excel in. Let's hope they agree! :)