Being one of the lucky ones who was able to sign-up to the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview program, I have started looking at the deployment of Microsoft Office 2010 today.

My first observation was that unfortunately the provided documentation seems to be ahead of the Office Installation sources that have been made available for download. I noticed this when making an attempt to run the setup.exe /admin command which would normally launch the Office Customization Wizard, but it wouldn’t because the necessary components that are usually located within the Admin folder aren’t available yet, in fact the whole Admin folder as such seems to be missing. OK, so no advanced customizations for now, back to basic.

The current Office 2010 beta that is made available for download is packaged into an executable called “O2010_SingleImage_retail_ship_x86_en-us.exe”. (32 bit version). To create the administrative installation point, extract the content using the following command:

O2010_SingleImage_retail_ship_x86_en-us.exe /extract:c:\office2010

You should then see the following content within the C:\Office2010 folder.

As a next step, open the config.xml file located within the folder SingleImage.WW and modify the file as shown below. (replace the product key with the one you received).

And finally create a batch file that runs the following command:

setup.exe /config SingleImage.WW\config.xml

Office 2010 Beta will now be installed in silent mode. this might be helpful when planning an automated deployment for testing purposes.

More about Office 2010:

Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog

Backstage with Office 2010

Office 2010 – The Movie (I recommend watching this one)

Office 2010 for IT Pros

A Look At Office 2010 with Chris Capossela

Yesterday I received my new mobile phone. Everyone that has switched mobile phones once, knows the pain of getting all the data transferred to the new device.

I had heard about the My Phone service from Microsoft, a web based solution that allows you to backup and restore your mobile phone data to a secured web site.

So I signed up to http://myphone.microsoft.com. I had all my data synched from my old device to the new device within 15 minutes. This is what i did.

I Installed the MyPhone Beta application on my old device by launching www.myphone.microsoft.com/install. Once installed I had to sign-up with my existing Live-ID account and when logged on I could define the content I wanted to have synchronized.

Once the synchronization was completed, I launched www.myphone.microosft.com and could actually see my uploaded content. So far so good.

I then installed the MyPhone Beta application on my new device, again by launching www.myphone.microsoft.com/install. Once installed and having completed the initial sign-up, i could simply synchronize the previously backed up data to my new device.

I have been switching mobile phones since 1998, but it has never been that easy.

More Information:

www.myphone.microsoft.com
http://sn1-p3.myphone.microsoft.com/mkweb/MoreInfo.po?tsid=1247307256129&mkt=en-US

Looking for answers on Windows 7 ? have a look  on the Microsoft Technet Forums for Windows 7 Beta.

In October 2008 I dropped a post called Don’t wait for Windows 7. Well during the past days I have changed my mind and I guess many others did as well concerning waiting for Windows 7.

When Windows 7 came up on the horizon last year, we heard statements like “it isn’t expected to begin for Windows 7 until at least mid-2011” also at that time, nobody expected Microsoft to provide a public Beta of Windows 7 that early. So far Microsoft seems to receive a lot of positive feedback, first because they made it look like “Hey guys we know you’re all waiting for it, here it is, Surprise !!!” and secondly because what they gave us seems to be quite stable. But now that they have made us all happy in providing us something we can put our hands on, to me it looks like we are now entering into the second phase of speculations about when Windows 7 will go RTM.

I’m not joining those that are negative about Windows Vista, in my view it’s being “talked” more worse than it really is. But fact is that with a possible release date of Windows 7 already this year, why would one that had planned an OS migration not wait for Windows 7 that now seems to be that close ?

Just before Windows Vista was being released we had of course had the same thoughts like “why not wait and deploy Vista”, the reason then to continue or move to XP was mostly related to hardware requirements and application comparability. The required hardware upgrade investments often couldn’t be justified over the advantages Windows Vista would bring.

Today things are a bit different. All hardware we have bought in the past 2 years will be capable of running Windows 7. I was just told today that Win7 would even run ok on a HP nc8000 that is more than 5 years old now. Related to application compatibility we have all had the time to familiarize ourselves with UAC as well.

I personally think it would be great if Microsoft would be more precise about the current plans, knowing that communicating dates can be a risk and if they aren’t met will raise new speculations, but just based on what we have seen in these days from Windows 7, I am pretty sure that in the next couple of weeks, Microsoft should have a pretty good idea on where they stand with Windows 7.

Should it become realistic that Windows 7 is being released this year, those who do plan an OS migration can start planning now and execute shortly after it has been released and because we are all that positive that this time Microsoft delivers a great OS, we wouldn’t wait for Service Pack 1 to deploy it.

Just found out that Microsoft has released MDT 2010 AND AIK 2.0 BETA on Microsoft Connect. So now we cannot only test Windows 7 BETA but we can also start looking at it’s deployment.

According to a blog post on the Windows Blog from Mike Nash, Windows Vista SP2 will be made available on TechNet Thursday December 4th.

Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) Customer Preview Program (CPP

The current plan is to ship Vista SP2 in the first half of 2009.

….. in fact it’s already available on MSDN now: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/securedownloads/default.aspx

Today Google launched its own first web browser called Chrome. Less is more, Chrome comes with a very nice lean design.

Chrome has a couple of nice features, one I personally found quite interesting is that the address bar also acts as the search bar. As you type in words in the address bar, you receive instant search results.

I’m quite sure that the chrome browser will get quickly adopted by home users, as we have seen previously happening with the Firefox browser, but I’m curious to see if this browser will become a serious competitor within the enterprise space, where Internet Explorer still plays a dominant role and most likely will continue to do so.

As always…… give it a try.

Earlier as planned, Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. A final release date has not been communicated yet.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/