Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Wow, it has been a long time since my last blog post! For those of you wondering: your browser is not broken since my blog displayed the same page for more than 2 months, I’m still alive and kicking, I’m not stuck in China and I’m still knee-deep in Information Worker technologies at U2U. Those guys have kept my really busy the last couple of months and made it possible to travel to lots of great cities to “evangelize” the 2007 Microsoft Office System: Zurich, Dubai, Jeddah, Lisbon, … Thanks for all the people attending the gigs, it was great to show you around in Office 2007!

Finally my holidays have arrived! After a great week in Barcelona (SharePoint 2007 Bootcamp) I’m leaving today for a trip trough China. Until August 15th I will have very limited email access, and don’t expect to see any blog posts. Enjoy your summer holidays!

Fresh new goodies on the Microsoft Download site:

Sure the 2007 Microsoft Office System looks very sexy, but I know lots of people who are quite hesitant to install it on the machine that they use during their everyday life (and they are probably right). So you’d like to try out the beta bits without messing up your main operating system and without the hassle to install and configure the server components, this is for you:

One of the more common things to customize in SharePoint 2003 (both WSS and SPS) are the pages that display lists or document libraries. Users end up on those pages when they click on the list/document library in the Quick Launch, or on the web part title that’s displaying the list/document library data. Those pages can be customized but you need to build your own site definition or you need to use FrontPage.

I’ve been running Beta 2 of the 2007 Microsoft Office System on my main laptop for a couple of weeks. At first I was a little bit hesitant to install the Beta of my main machine since I actually need to get some real work done as well (sometimes I feel like a real Information Worker!). But so far I only experienced some minor glitches, so I can uninstall the old, trustworthy Office 2003 bits from my machine (I went for the side-by-side installation of Office 2007). Some of my colleagues are running Vista Beta2 as their main operating system but I didn’t dare to do that yet. But those guys have the really slick looking black/gray UI in Office 2007, old-fashioned people (like me) have the blue UI.

This week we had the pleasure to organize a first Train-the-Trainers (TTT) course on the 2007 Microsoft Office System at U2U in Brussels. It was a very international group; 18 passionate trainers coming from all over the world: Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Chechia, Russia, Litva, Marocco. Of course we took the opportunity to show them the touristic side of Brussels as well and let them enjoy some Belgian beers. You can see some pictures over here (scroll down to "Office Development and SharePoint 2007 Train-The-Trainer at U2U"). It was great teaching you guys, and I want to wish you all the luck for your trainings!

Sometimes a very small feature in SharePoint 2007 can mean a big relief for SharePoint users. Do you know the “pain” to add a user to a SharePoint site for example: you need to know the exact account name or the email address. One small typing mistakes will result in an unrecognized user. In the next version of SharePoint this scenario is drastically improved, and resembles a lot the experience that you get in Outlook.