Re-enabling audio devices in Vista

This might be obvious to pretty much everyone else but I’ve just had an issue with audio devices in Vista so I thought I’d share the solution-just in case

I was trying to record some sound from my PC but it kept picking up sound from the built in mic which was quite annoying. So I went to the Sound section, right clicked the deivce and “disabled” it…it then disappeared from the list! Furthermore I now couldn’t record ANYTHING so I needed to get it back, but how? I had a little look around in Control Panel until a Bing search eventually led me here, which shows that you simply need to right click in the white space and “show disabled devices”…nice and simple

Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 was a big star of today’s opening keynote at Microsoft’s WPC 2009 event, and boy did it shine brightly! The new version of Office is always exciting and there have been some features leaking out recently, mainly around Outlook with it’s “mute button” and conversation threading etc, but the video demo’s today were amazing.

Unfortunately the keynote video isn’t available on demand yet  is available on demand now at www.digitalwpc.com (as I couldn’t get over to N’Orleans), so I’ll have to try and remember the new features that I saw for now

Word 2010: One new feature of Word is an improved Copy & Paste function. At first glance you wouldn’t think you could do much with it, but it is actually a great new addition-it gives you a live preview of what you’re about to paste…clever eh? I often hit “Ctrl + V” only to find that it’s something completely different than I expected so this will definitely come in handy… as Stephen Elop (MS Business Division President) says, the aim is to get users away from the pattern of “paste, oops, undo”.

Powerpoint 2010: Two big additions to Powerpoint 2010 are Photo Editing & Video Editing. These give you the ability to crop the image/video, change colours and hues, add borders etc all within Powerpoint; that will definitely make creating slide shows quicker, easier and more enjoyable!

Another great feature is the ability to “broadcast” your slideshow via a Live-Meeting style effort so people can see it in real-time. This feature extends to users of mobile devices and not just Windows Mobile-iPhones too!

 Excel 2010: Many of the new features in Excel 2010 are centered around Business Intelligence (BI). One such feature is Sparklines: these give a snapshot of data trends in a single cell, which makes charting many different data ranges in one datasheet much easier, and much more attractive for readers

Outlook 2010: Outlook now has the ribbons interface to bring it in line with Word, Excel etc and also contains many new features. Namely the “Mute Button” which will allow you to remove yourself from the “Reply All” floods that occue when someone accidentally puts the addresses in “To” rather than “Bcc” and everyone, for some reason, decide that they need to “Reply All” each time. This quite quickly makes your inbox a joke…now however with a simple click of the mouse they’re all gone…plus it also keeps any future replies from appearing too

Another new Outlook feature I’d forgotten about is Mail Tips, which provides info & hints to help prevent you making daft mistakes! Just added 250 names in the “To” field-it’ll tell you…sending a mail to someone who’s out of office-it’ll tell you…added people outside of your organization-it’ll tell you (to help prevent confidential info leaking out) and much more

Conversation View lets you group emails by conversation helping clear up inbox clutter. This is a BIG one for me!

Sharepoint 2010: This wasn’t really demo’d during today’s keynote so I don’t have much to say (yet) other than it has the ribbon interface and “embraces” social media/web 2.0.

Office 2010 now supports co-authoring, this means that multiple people can work on the same document at the same time without users receiving the “this document is already in use” error…this is really something and gives a pretty big middle finger to other pretenders to the crown such as Google Apps and Zoho.

So far I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen of Office 2010 and by the end of the week I expect to be even more impressed!

A great top 10 features list can be found here, props to Sarah for this

Thanks to Techcrunch for the pics…

Windows 7 available in September

Microsoft today announced that customers who purchase via Volume licensing (which is the majority of businesses I’d have thought) will be able to order Windows 7 from September 1st!

Another Windows 7 announcement from the 1st day of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 was that there will be a 6 month promotion making Windows 7 up to 15% cheaper than Vista.

Microsoft BPOS Partner features

Already this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is seeing great announcements and, if my time conversion is right it only started no more th an 1 hour ago!

These first announcements are around Microsoft BPOS and primarily concern MS Partners who resell Microsoft’s Online Services.

Partner Order on Behalf Of: This is a feature that I and pretty much every other BPOS partner has been waiting for; the ability to place BPOS orders on behalf of our customers. The current model of sending the customer off to purchase online themselves is quite alien to how this is usually done and can lead to confusion all around. Being able to order ourselves makes it easier for partners to be truly Value Added Resellers.

“..The feature allows partners to initiate trials, specify the services and quantities they recommend for their customers, pre-configure orders for their customers to complete..”

Partner Commerce Dashboard: This is again a great addition for Partners. This gives a consolidated view of the status of trials and orders for all the partner’s customers. The data can be exported to CRM systems via Excel too.

They have also announced that Delegated Administration to Partners will be available by (Oct-Dec) Q4 2009. This means that customers will be able to let their Value Add Reseller (VAR) perform certain tasks on their behalf, this again fits in better with the current model a lot of Partners/Customers have.

Original post over on the MS Online team blog here.

Microsoft Office Web Revealed

Microsoft have made more details on the Office web products available, a little before this year’s Worldwide Partner Conference kicks off.

Office Web Applications will include:

• Word
• Powerpoint
• Excel
• OneNote

will work on Macs as well as PCs and will run in Firefox too

It looks like Neowin may have seen something they weren’t yet supposed to as the link to the Office Web demo video isn’t currently working…

However one video that is working is this here on Mobile Office 2010. It shows that documents can be rendered server side meaning that “just about” every smart phone out there can view them…yep that includes Blackberry & iPhone too.

Microsoft Security Essentials beta

You  may have seen that, a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced the beta of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE); their free anti-virus/anti-malware software aimed at home users. The beta was limited to 75,000 downloads so I registered within 20 minutes of it going live on MS Connect and got ready to download it…unfortunately the website had a different idea. It told me that I wasn’t eligible to download the beta and that was that-I logged out empty handed

I kept checking over the following days to no avail while, at the same time, Microsoft emailed me to see how my trial was going…I couldn’t believe they were mocking me so! I just logged in now to see if there had been any update on my application for the Office 2010 trial-it’s gone from “Pending” to not being there anymore- but as an unexpected bonus the download for MSE was there

I’ve just got it installed and had it run it’s first scan and it’s looking good. It was a quick 5/6 click install process and it was scanning already-very impressive…here are some screenshots:

Something I’m quite surprised to see is that MSE contains Real Time Protection, helping protect users from zero-day attacks even without pre-defined virus signatures; for a free product-that’s pretty cool!

The Settings tab allows you to:

• Set scan schedule
• Change the default actions
• Turn Real Time Protection on/off
• Exclude files & locations
• Exclude File Types
• Exclude Processes
• Choose to scan archive files
• Choose to scan removable drives
• Change Microsoft Spynet access

Spynet is something I hadn’t heard of before and it is Microsoft’s Online Community that collects, collates and processes information on malware and how it is affecting user’s machines. There are 2 levels of “membership” availalable, Basic & Advanced where advanced sends back more information such as file names and locations of affected software etc. It’s default setting is Basic…although it does say that “…personal information might unintentionally be sent to Microsoft” which, while I don’t really mind will probably upset some people

I’ve only had it installed for about half an hour but so far, it seenms to be pretty comprehensive in what it covers as well as being clear and easy to use. The fact that it provides real time protection AND scans removable drives as well as the basic cover makes me consider if, honestly, there’s any need for home users to look elsewhere.

Microsoft’s Forefront Business security software shows they’ve got the skills in this area and a lot of other products (Norton, F-Secure etc) are notorious for slowing PC’s down until they’re nigh on unusable-so this seems like a great alternative. When it comes to Anti-Virus I’m a Kaspersky fan but MSE looks to be a worthy competitor…good work once again from Microsoft