1. I like the new Ribbon UI design. Sure, it will take some getting
used to, but it would appear to be more functional than using the menus.

2. I like that there is a built-in RSS reader. I don't quite like the
functionality yet, but we'll see how it does. So far, comparing it to
my previous RSS reader (Intravnews), Intravnews is still a much better
choice. Since this is still Beta 1, I'd suspect that Outlook's handling
of RSS will get better.

3. So far, I'm not so fond of the memory usage. When I first
installed, I upgraded from Office 2003 SP2. Perhaps that was my first
mistake. After the upgrade, my CPU frequently shot up to 100% and
memory usage went as high as 700mb (I have 1GB installed on my laptop).
YIKES! It seems that the solution ended up being deleting and
re-creating my profile. Why (or how) my profile would have caused this
is beyond me, especially since my laptop was just recently rebuilt and
Office 2003 had only been on there for about a week. Anyways, now that
the CPU usage is under control, Outlook is still using quite a bit of
memory. I'm told that this may be by design, but I don't see any
documentation (yet) that references this.

4. There is a new cool "To-Do Bar", that identifies upcoming things.
It shows you a condensed Calendar view (month view), upcoming meetings,
and tasks. It doesn't take up a lot of space, and is quite
informational. This is definitely a big plus.

5. Word is now your default E-mail editor. All I will say is, let's
hope that Word as e-mail editor has vastly improved. That used to be
one thing I would always turn off.

As I continue testing Office 12, I'll post additional thoughts.

- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 10:22 AM 1 comments

Lots of new announcements at IT Forum in Barcelona.

1. Exchange 12 will be 64-bit only. This is sort of a bummer for
anyone that has non 64-bit hardware, but honestly, there is quite a bit
of hardware that is x64 capable right now, and that will only increase.
Let's review what current processors support x64.

Intel's moniker for x64 is EMT64. The following processors from Intel
support EMT64:
Xeon (2.8Ghz and above)
Pentium D (2.8Ghz - 3.2Ghz)
Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (3.2Ghz)
Pentium 4 with Hyper threading support (most 2.8Ghz and above with some
exceptions)
Celeron D (some starting at 2.53Ghz and above)

AMD also has quite a few products that support x64:
Opteron (all)
Athlon 64 (all)
Other mobile-based 64-bit processors weren't mentioned...

Many of these products have been out for quite a while now. In fact,
you may be surprised to find that your system already supports x64. It
may perhaps require a BIOS update, but if you are running an x64 capable
processor, odds are that the rest of the hardware supports 64-bit
computing as well.

Really, it makes sense - in order to lift some of the memory constraints
(we're talking virtual memory constraints here), 64-bit is really the
only way to go.

2. The pricing for Virtual Server has been dramatically reduced.
Virtual Server R2 Standard
Was: $499
Now: $99

Virtual Server R2 Enterprise
Was: $999
Now: $199

VMWare - watch out :-)

Seriously though, this is a pretty substantial change. With the new
licensing changes, If you buy one license of Windows Server and are
running Virtual Server 2005 R2, you can run up to 4 additional instances
of Windows Server at no extra cost.

3. Several other products will be 64-bit only as well. Among those are
Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, Windows Server "Longhorn" Small
Business Server and another server product code-named "Centro". Other
applications will be (or are) optimized" for 64-bit, including SQL 2005,
Visual Studio 2005 and Virtual Server 2005 R2.

The Microsoft Press release can be found here
and a related article on Infoworld can be found here

- posted by Ben Winzenz @ 2:23 PM 0 comments