Wictor Wilen

Wictor Wilén is Product Leader at Microsoft. Former Microsoft Regional Director and SharePoint MVP, as well as an author and a well known international speaker

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office binary formats available under OSP

The Microsoft Office Binary File Formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt…) are now available for everyone under the Open Specification Promise, OSP. This is good news for all of you working with the traditional binary format, when for example moving them to the new Office Open Xml, OOXML, file format. The binary file formats have previously been available for download for a long time (under RAND-Z), but now you download them here. This change to put it under OSP, is due to the comments on OOXML by the national bodies and Microsoft has now promised ECMA International to make it easier to get hold of the specifications.

• 1 min read
SharePoint

Open linked Office documents in the application instead of in Internet Explorer

I have several time stumbled upon clients who complain that their hyper linked Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) opens up in the web browser, Internet Explorer, instead of in their respectively Office application. In SharePoint document libraries these problems are solved using a special JavaScript that fires up the correct application, but today I had a client complaining about this problem when having Office documents linked in a Wiki. So I dug up some information from the Microsoft Knowledge Base on this matter and though I should share it (or at least have it written down for future reference).

• 2 min read
SharePoint

Install script for the SharePoint Application Templates

The Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, also known as the Fab40, is a set of forty different templates that can be used within a SharePoint environment. These templates are good to use as a starter when creating new SharePoint sites or custom solutions and I recommend that you install them into your test or development environment. But the download contains 40 different .wsp and .stp files which has to be installed one at a time; either using STSADM or using the web interface.

• 2 min read
Business

Planning Capacity for SharePoint and Exchange

If you are about to plan capacity for your Microsoft SharePoint 2007 topology you can get great assistance from the Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Model. What is Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007? The Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) 2007 is a pre-deployment capacity planning tool for Microsoft Server products when creating distributed application deployments. The SCCP allows you to create a model of your hardware, network and applications/servers using a Model Editor. The model can then be run through a simulator which warns you of eventual bottlenecks and allows you to analyze all kinds of different data.

• 3 min read
Windows Vista

Vista SP1 is imminent and Windows Server 2008 is RTM

The Release Notes for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 just appeared on the Microsoft Downloads Site. And just after this Microsoft posted a Media Alert: Microsoft Releases Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2008 to Manufacturing. Finally! Vista Service Pack 1 will be available “to customers in March” and Windows Server 2008 will “be available […] on March 1”. When will it be available on Microsoft Downloads or for MSDN/TechNet Subscribers? Update: The Windows Vista Team Blog has detailed timings for Vista SP1

• 1 min read
Windows Vista

Possible solution to the missing icons in the Vista Notification Area

Finally there is a possible workaround for the missing icons in the Vista Notification Area, see my post from march 2007. The workaround is documented in KB945011 - “System icons may not appear in the notification area on a Windows Vista-based computer until you restart the computer”. It’s the network, power and volume icons in the notification area that suffers from this problem. The KB article pins down the cause due to heavy processing on a Vista based machine during the first startup and that it typically not reoccur after the first reboot. This is because of the “welcome sequence” in Vista that initializes services and applications for the first time.

• 2 min read
.NET

News Reader SDK released - WPF sample

A few months ago I wrote about the Architecture Journal Reader, a great demonstration app for a “occasionally-connected” Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF, application. I asked for source code and more samples like this, and sometimes dreams come true. Today Tim Sneath announced the public availability of a News Reader SDK and a Syndicated Client Experiences (SCE) Starter Kit and source code for it. At the same time the team created a MSDN Magazine reader application using the starter kit. The SCE is built upon the Microsoft Sync Framework and .NET 3.0.

• 1 min read