Ben There, Done That

I’m definitely not the first to blog this, nor will I probably be the last; and, chances are that you have already read this elsewhere, but just in case you haven’t, I figured I would post it anyways.

So, here it is, the launch date for Office and SharePoint 2010 has been set!  It will be May 12, 2010 at 11:00 am EST.  You can view all the details and sign up to watch the even live online here – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=N7_NqK7briG.

I was working with SharePoint surveys the other day and discovered an old issue working with surveys and Microsoft Office that appears to have resurfaced.

We were trying to see what other reports we could generate from a SharePoint survey.  Naturally with the option to export to Excel, we figured why not just export all the survey data into Excel and play with it there.  To test it out I tried to get a variety of questions in the survey, one of these questions being the rating (matrix) survey question.

I created a few responses to the survey and attempted to export the list data to Excel (I’m running 2010 Beta).  Everything came over well with the exception of the matrix type questions.  I did some searching and this was also an issue with Excel 2003.  However, people said it was resolved with Excel 2007.  I installed Excel 2007 and sure enough the matrix questions imported into Excel 2007 just fine.  I tried Excel 2010 once more and the values still failed to come over.

So, it appears that the problem with importing matrix type of questions from SharePoint 2007 to Excel 2003 has returned in Excel 2010.  Granted, this is the beta, so maybe it will be fixed by the release.

I also want to do some testing with SharePoint 2010 surveys, Excel 2010 and possibly PowerPivot.  I’ve been reading some great things about PowerPivot but haven’t had much of a chance to play with it for myself.  Once I get a chance to do some testing with these tools I’ll write a new post.  Hopefully there will be some good news about doing more in depth analysis of SharePoint Survey results using these new tools.

For those of you with a TechNet subscription and an itching desire to download the Office 2010 Suite of products, they are now here!! I’m sure every other blogger is writing this same post so I won’t make it long.  The RSS feed for the released products is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscription-downloads.rss if you want direct links to the downloads, here they are:

Office Search Server Express 2010 Beta (x64)

Office SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x86)

FAST Search Server SharePoint 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Project Server 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Project Professional 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Project Professional 2010 Beta (x86)

Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta (x86)

Office SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta (x86 and x64)

Office SharePoint Server 2010 Beta (x64)

Office SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Business Contact Manager 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Web Applications 2010 Beta (x64)

That is everything I currently see on TechNet.  They are all English versions and please, no one comment and tell me I have the wrong names.  I realize the names above don’t all match up to the new names that Microsoft announced when it comes to SharePoint.  I just copied the names directly from the TechNet site.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the SharePoint conference this year. However, I have been trying to follow it all day via twitter and the #SPC2009 hash tag. There have been a ton of tweets and with the tweets and the amount of people a lot of duplicates. As tweets have been going out all day I’ve tried to capture new blog posts about the 2010 stack and am attempting to put together a good list of blog posts that I’ve have noticed today (and continue to notice throughout the week). Feel free to send me any blog posts I have missed or you would like me to add to my site. So, here they are:

SharePoint

SharePoint Overview from the Microsoft SharePoint Team – http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx

SharePoint 2010 Home Page - http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx

SharePoint Conference 2010 Home Page (Keynote video soon) – http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/default.aspx

SharePoint Conference Video Highlights – http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/videohighlights.aspx

SharePoint 2010 MSDN Site – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd776256.aspx

SharePoint 2010 TechNet Site – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx

Pre-Register for SharePoint 2010 Beta – http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx

Arpan Shah, Welcome to SharePoint 2010 – http://blogs.msdn.com/arpans/archive/2009/10/19/welcome-to-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Andrew Connell’s Blog (Several SharePoint 2010 posts already) – http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/

SharePoint Sharpener, Rundown of New Features – http://sharepointsharpener.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/spc09-sharepoint-2010-unveiled-rundown-of-new-features/

SharePoint 2010 Installation (not in English, but has screen shots of the install) – http://sharepointsisters.de/2009/10/installation-sharepoint-server-2010/

SharePoint 2010 Preview by Knowledge Management Associates – http://blogs.kma-llc.net/microknowledge/2009/10/sharepooint-2010-preview.html

A listing of SharePoint 2010 Documentation and Posters published by Microsoft – http://bink.nu/news/sharepoint-2010-documentation.aspx

Document Management in SharePoint 2010 – http://dotneteers.net/blogs/aghy/archive/2009/10/19/document-management-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

ZDNet SharePoint 2010 Announcement – http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4278

Corey’s SharePoint 2010 Observations – http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2009/10/19/corey-s-big-post-of-sharepoint-2010-observations.aspx

Ballmer, SharePoint and the Economy – http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/microsofts-ballmer-shows-sharepoint-and-cites-its-link-economic-prosperity-587

Another index of some SharePoint 2010 postings online – http://webpartner.com/PNPT#7fc51a6079d86e3841db

Mike Gotta Notes from SPC09 Day 1 – http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2009/10/sharepoint-2009-conference-morning-keynotes.html

SharePoint 2010 Public Beta to be released next month – http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10377483-56.html

StoragePoint for SharePoint 2010 – http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS164545+19-Oct-2009+PRN20091019

SharePoint 2010 Central Admin – http://planetmoss.blogspot.com/2009/10/central-administration-in-sharepoint.html

Eli Robillard, Sandbox Solutions and Security in WSS 4.0 (SharePoint Foundation) – http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/

SharePoint Conference 2009, Morning Keynote from The Burton Group – http://ccsblog.burtongroup.com/collaboration_and_content/2009/10/sharepoint-2009-conference-morning-keynotes.html

SharePoint 2010 Links from S.S. Ahmed, SharePoint MVP – http://vspug.com/ssa/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010-links/

Lookup Columns in SharePoint 2010 – http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2009/10/19/sp2010-what-s-new-lookup-columns-spc09.aspx

Overview of SharePoint Conference 2009, Day 1 – http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2009/10/19/the-kimono-is-open-the-veil-is-lifted-the-gags-are-removed-spc09.aspx

BI

BI in SharePoint 2010 – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/GetThePoint/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=8d9e2a99-f288-47c2-916b-2f32864f7b82&ID=268

Office 2010

PivotPoint for Excel 2010 – http://www.powerpivot.com/

Office 2010 Public Beta to be released next month – http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10377483-56.html

Visual Studio 2010

Announcing Visual Studio 2010 – http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/10/19/announcing-visual-studio-2010-and-net-fx-4-beta-2.aspx

Again, this is just a list of what I could capture while keeping an eye on twitter all day.  Feel free to email me addition blog posts or add them as a comment as I will try to continue updating this list throughout the week.

After installing Office 2010 on my computer (both laptop and desktop) running Windows 7 RTM, I had a problem opening any Office files stored in our SharePoint 2007 environment.  I would click on a file to open it or edit it, the Office 2010 application would open, however, the file wouldn’t open.

I could download the document to my desktop, open it, edit it, and re-uploaded it, but this fare far from ideal.  I could link the site to Colligo, but I don’t want to have connect to a site every time I want to open a document.

Finally, today I ran across this helpful string of comments on the TechNet forum – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/office2010general/thread/230fc30a-8922-4c75-a8fc-540b0282dff8

In short, the solution is to make a fake proxy in IE:

1. Open up Internet Explorer
2. Click Tools –> Internet Options
3. Click the Connections tab
4. Click LAN settings
5. Check “Use a proxy server for your LAN (These settings will not apply to dial-up or VPN connections).”
6. Enter 127.0.0.1 for the address
7. Click Advanced
8. In the Exceptions type: *.*
9. Click OK, OK and OK

You should now be able to browse to a SharePoint site, click an Office document and have it successfully open in your Office 2010 client.  This successfully worked for me with MOSS and reports in the TechNet forum are that it works with WSSv3 as well.

Yesterday the Groove team announced on their blog the change to Groove.  They said, “The name makeover is in concert with the direction the product is going.  SharePoint Workspace will provide easy access to SharePoint content (or content from any server that implements the publicly documented protocols) in an effort to provide a seamless online/offline experience.”  It will also now be bundled with the Office Professional 2010 package.

I’ve used Groove some but ran into some limitations as I was running all 64 bit machines.  The post doesn’t mention anything specific about running on 64 bit, nor have I heard any other news about it, hopefully this is another thing that will be updated, the same functionality on 32 bit and 64 bit.  Stay tuned for more news about Office 2010 as it emerges.

Lots of news on the Microsoft Office front today so I decided to add a blog post instead of just twittering about it.

The first items comes from a recent posting by www.microsoft-watch.com.  Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 will be release in two weeks, on April 28.  Two of the largest changes are the PDF/XPS printer will now be included automatically in SP2 rather than the separate add-on download/install that it is now.  The second improvement is the added support of ODF (Open Document Format) documents.  The list of improvements and bug fixes is long, but those are the two major ones in my opinion.

The second one is that Office “14” is going to be Office 2010.  There was a posting earlier about it, that also receive some doubt about it’s validity.  However, this posting by Mary-Jo Foley seems to confirm that the initial posting was accurate, even if the screen shot wasn’t valid.

I’m not going to go on way or the other on the validity of the screen shot, but needless to say, there were plenty of very strong indicators that the next version of Office will indeed by Office 2010.