Where did my Office 2003 command go?

The Ribbon in both Office 2007 and 2010 has been around for some time but still some people are faced with the challenge of moving from Office 2003 and the menu/toolbar based UI. If you or your group are in [...]

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Fall in Vancouver

As time has passed, I’ve seen the different “faces” of Vancouver weather, I’ve yet to see the real Winter, but so far I’ve experienced Spring, Summer and now Fall. I think it’s safe to say this is my first Fall [...]

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A “Kuler” way to find your pallete

Just wanted to share this really interesting online tool from Adobe, Kuler. If you are in need of a color scheme for your website, PowerPoint presentation, or any design in general, you will find Adobe Kuler very handy for either [...]

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Where did my Office 2003 command go?

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The Ribbon in both Office 2007 and 2010 has been around for some time but still some people are faced with the challenge of moving from Office 2003 and the menu/toolbar based UI.

If you or your group are in this situation have no fear! Microsoft has provided great resources that can help ease the transition by providing interactive guides an lists of Office commands that map out where to find your commands.

The guides for Office 2007 and Office 2010 are located in the Office Support Site.

As reference, look at the following screenshot for Office 2007, the 2010 version of the guide uses Silverlight, but its worth installing the plug-in.

interactive_guide_screenshot

It was fun to do Beta testing for MOS: SharePoint 2010 (77-886)

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Last friday I had the opportunity to take the beta test for Microsoft Office Specialist on SharePoint 2010.

Overall I found the test really good, specially if it is been aimed at users and power users who have experience with SharePoint 2010. I love simulation based tests, as it feels more accurate to grade based on actually performing different tasks.

The study guide was very helpful to identify the points you will be required to know to take the test, so I would recommend you fire up your SharePoint site and go through each topic to prepare.

Oddly enough, there are some questions that deal with operations performed under Central Admin, which to me defies the purpose of the exam, since most users will never see Central Admin, unless they are involved in Farm Adminstration tasks. Hopefully this will change and instead include other topics involving other SharePoint 2010 features that are accessible to the day to day SharePoint user.

I scored 828, no passmark defined yet but with a bit of luck I might just pass! :)

If your organization uses SharePoint, this might be a good resource for your power users to get more aquainted with their inner SharePoint.

Fall in Vancouver

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5168755224_6e1f975b4b_bAs time has passed, I’ve seen the different “faces” of Vancouver weather, I’ve yet to see the real Winter, but so far I’ve experienced Spring, Summer and now Fall.

I think it’s safe to say this is my first Fall season ever, this is because in Mexico City we normally don’t get a “proper” Fall, being a proper Fall, a moment where most of the trees have their foliage turn to yellow and reddish colors.

I’m including some pictures for you to see, I just wish I had taken them a couple weeks prior because I would have caught a lot more leafs on the trees.

Well, enough said. Enjoy!

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Native Boot to VHD, making 64 bit virtualization more accessible.

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I suppose you got really excited about the new development tools around Visual Studio 2010 in regards to SharePoint dev.

While a lot of the pain around building SharePoint solutions is alleviated, having a dev. environment on your Desktop or Laptop can be difficult because you would normally have a client operating system installed, you may not want to mix your day to day work and your dev. environment,  and Virtual PC won’t support 64 bit environments.

Well, one option would be just to repartition your HD and install Windows Server on the bare metal, but I actually went for the Native Boot to VHD approach.

Native Boot to VHD will allow you to create a virtual hard drive and install Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 on it, then booting to that VHD as if it were installed on the metal.

This will give you very much the same performance as installing directly, you will use your own hardware drivers, and the best part, you will be able to add the Hyper-v role on that OS (if you install Windows Server) and run other VM’s inside this environment.

This helped me a lot to be able to use the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine on my laptop. Another approach (probably even better) might be to use BCDEdit to attach the VM directly, instead of using hyper-v within the VHD. You can find more information on this VM provided by Microsoft on my previous blog post.

The fact is that it is very easy to do, and I learned how to do it with some really good videos that were created by Dan Stolts, so make sure you check out his blog post to get more details on how to take advantage of this feature.

One a side note, my laptop came with Windows 7 Home Premium preinstalled so you don’t need higher versions to do this side by side, however, if your VHD will be Windows 7, you probably need Enterprise or Ultimate

A “Kuler” way to find your pallete

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Just wanted to share this really interesting online tool from Adobe, Kuler.

If you are in need of a color scheme for your website, PowerPoint presentation, or any design in general, you will find Adobe Kuler very handy for either browsing and searching for a particular scheme, or building your own.

Here’s a sample of the creation UI, very simple to use, or you can browse the themes if you have “Designer’s Block”

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