(Posted by Tiffany)

 

I attended the Office 2007 launch event in Houston two weeks ago. Evan may be attending in San Antonio tomorrow and I'm eager to hear his reaction to the event as well. I followed the IT Professionals track and attended seminars on Infrastructure Protection, SharePoint Server 2007 Configuration and Management, Unified Communications and Microsoft Business Intelligence. The day started with a keynote address that included demos of Vista and Office 2007. Even though I've been working in the Office 2007 environment for about a year now (Evan mentioned "dog food" in his last post), I still love to hear the reactions of people seeing Live Preview for the first time.

 

To that point about how many people were still only seeing these products for the first time, there was such a big focus on the release of Exchange Server 2007 that I almost felt as though I was attending the launch of that product. I remember feeling that way at the end of January too when such an emphasis was put on the launch of Vista, that I felt that Office 2007 took a backseat in the press. I watched Headline News the entire day and it was barely a mention that Office was being launched on the same day. 

 

I am not inside of Microsoft day in and day out anymore, and while I admit that the experience casts a long shadow and co-workers still say that I act like I work for Microsoft based on my fierce loyalty to the products, I've got to stand up for the average home and office user on this one. Microsoft has been on the edge of the largest launch event in history for years now, but I feel that their extensive use and testing of the product, while ensuring what should be the smoothest upgrade that people have seen thus far from the company, has lessened the impact of the release. It's as if working in Office 2007 is so commonplace to Microsoft that they've forgotten that not everyone downloaded and worked in the Beta. Especially not in the Enterprise space (large companies with more than 5,000 licenses).

 

Sure, I know how many resources exist at microsoft.com and I've attended the hands-on labs for SharePoint Server 2007 and InfoPath, but my clients are not always the IT, geeky people who are out there everyday looking for more information on the new products. A lot of the people who attend these launch events are still not the business decision maker of a large organization that is already evaluating the products it will buy within the next three years. Most of the people that I sat around in these seminars had never seen what Excel Services and Business Data Catalog could do for them.

 

It's not that I was disappointed in the event at all. In fact, for the person like me that has already been integrated in the high-level overview of these products, it was great to finally see these features demonstrated live with RTM code. I even got my geek t-shirt from the Microsoft Learning booth for flashing my MCP card. It was a great day that would have bored a typical home user and while I know the event is not intended or marketed for that audience, I still feel that a lot of assumptions are made about how much an IT person is leveraging these products from a personal and team productivity stance. It just made me even more proud that my and Evan's message is out there as a Microsoft Press launch title for Office 2007 because I saw firsthand how our book can bridge that gap  between business decision makers and developers and the rest of us.

 

For more information on Microsoft events, visit www.microsoft.com/events

(Posted by Evan)

 

OK, so our Blog is finally up and running. After a few false starts, here we are at Windows Live Spaces. Of all the Blogging sites and tools out there, this is the one we chose to use. Sure, Windows Live Spaces is still technically a beta product, but we've eaten so much dogfood over the past few years we've grown to like it. What can we say? It's an acquired taste.

 

Anyhoo, our plan is to keep this site as up to date as possible given the demands of our day jobs and any book-related appearances, etc. (We're ready for our close-up, Mr. DeMille.) Check back often for new postings related to "So That's How!" and any other technological musings we happen to muse-up during the week. Or better yet, use Outlook 2007 to subscribe to our RSS feed and have our mind-blowing (or mind-numbing, depending on your point of view) bits of wisdom delivered directly to your desktop or laptop, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

 

Here's how to add an RSS feed to Outlook 2007: