My article for the May issue of ComputerUser Kansas City
My article or column for the May issue of ComputerUser will go out next week. But since they’re not online yet(!), I post them here for your viewing pleasure. This month’s rant concerns Boot Camp, Apple’s boot manager for the Intel-based Macs. Follow the “More” link to see the entire article. I’ll be adding links shortly.
Veerle’s new design debuts
Everybody has seen this, but I had to put this out for consumption. Veerle has released a new look and feel for the blog. Gorgeous, simply gorgeous. I’d love to have the time to put together a look like that.
Microsoft Office 12 gets a makeover and gives application trainers something new
The user interface change in Office 12 will make some people crazy. That assumes it and Vista get most recent announced release dates, which keep retreating into the future. Here’s the latest from various sources.
Network World reported on April 10 that:
Sharepoint Portal Server will be part of Office. This puts Microsoft and Office at the heart of collaboration, workflow, document routing and approval, and a host of other collaborative tools. This looks like a direct challenge to Adobe and another run against Notes. And Microsoft is planning on including templates for wikis, blogs, and instant messaging in addition to the web-based spaces of Sharepoint.
In a February 20, 2006 article, Network World reported that FrontPage goes away, to be replaced with “Sharepoint Designer 2007.” This would seem to indicate that Microsoft has decided to make Sharepoint and its self-service web site creation model the centerpoint of Office. Now, whether FrontPage will be promoted as a web page editor as well is not clear.
And Microsoft has a great deal of information available:
User Interface demo
System Preview
Pricing
Get the beta
All of the versions, explained
The “Ribbon” in 30 minutes. Office 2007 Beta required.
Changes in Word, and how to use the “Ribbon”. This also requires the beta. I may be real tired of hearing about the “Ribbon” real soon now.
Excel changes in the new version. Microsoft has changed things in Excel, so this may be helpful for us “old” users.
I use Microsoft Office when I need to, mainly because most all of my clients and customers use it. For better or worse, we’ll have to deal with .doc files and .ppt material as we work on their web applications. As a trainer, I get questions about Word and Excel simply because that is what most everyone uses. From a business standpoint, my income is enhanced when Microsoft changes things.
And Office 2007 looks to be a nice enhancement.
Mike Fisher at ElephantDrive replied to my earlier post and ComputerUser after I took them to task for not having enough product detail on their site. He kindly and politely responded with links to their support blog, and their security policy.
I’ve had an opportunity to do some further testing of their online backup service. I’ll post some additional comments here after more testing.
But regardless of which online backup service you use, or whether you have another backup routine established, the key is to use it. I’ve rebuilt three hard drive images in the past week for people that hadn’t backed up anything. Ever. And all three were mechanical failures that rendered the data on the hard drive useless. Well, almost useless, because the amount of money to retrieve the data would have been prohibitive.
Back it up, folks. Do it now.
I’ll be presenting a 2 hour seminar on blogs, blogging, and their use for the MAGWeb, the Metro-area Government Webmasters group and public information officers of metro-area governments and non-profits. The date is June 20th. I’ll be posting additional material for that presentation as the date nears.
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Talking to myself, mostly.
