Office 12 – Biting the Bullet

You may recall I mentioned in a post quite some time ago that I was really excited about the future of the Microsoft Office suite of products.

I'd seen a webcast and it was all wonderful and made me excited to be in the computer industry.

I have had access to the Office 2007 (formerly Office12) beta download and Windows Vista some time ago, but the idea behind the beta software residing on my laptop that I use on a daily basis didn't put my heart rate to a resting state.

This evening I attended the June WWITPRO meeting and met up with a Technet Advisor Barnaby Jeans. We always have excellent discussions and tonight was no exception. He mentioned how much he really likes the Office 2007 Outlook, and me being the email lover that I am thought, "Well if Barnaby is working with it, this release must be good." So I installed the Office 2007 Beta 2 cd for only Office (there were four cd's in the pack - I have yet to install them all - give me time) and got to work on it right away.

The install was really quick. It allowed me to keep my existing install of Office 2003 (with the exception of Outlook - which is obvious we shouldn't run two versions of a mail client) and it retained all of my settings. A seemless upgrade from Outlook 2003 to 2007 and my Exchange profile and all pop accounts worked great. My mailbox retained all of the email, appointments, tasks etc as I had in 2003 and WOW - can you say SLICK.

The interface is clean. There are still many menu and toolbar features in Outlook that you don't get in Word/Excel/PowerPoint or Publisher, but what a wonderful tool.

I've yet to dive deep into it, but the look and feel makes me happy I took the plunge. You can find a download of the beta software at the the Microsoft Office site.

I highly recommend taking a look at the future of office productivity software.

Microsoft Technet IT Manager’s Blog - Canada

As a member of the executive committee for Waterloo-Wellington IT Professions (WWITPRO) I met some wonderful TechNet Advisors with Microsoft Canada.

I was asked to prepare an article on training designed for IT Managers, so you will find my post in the Canadian IT Managers Blog.

Also, you will find another article I wrote on getting my Blackberry mobile device synchronizing with the new Office 2007 Beta.