You might have just seen my UK TechDays 2011 presentation which will be available online after the show, however if you didn’t get time to make a note of the resources, here you go:

•Springboard: http://bit.ly/W7SB

•Download Windows 7 Eval: http://bit.ly/smw7trial

•Office 365: http://office365.com

•Windows Collection PCs: http://bit.ly/wincoll

Just a quick one to provide people access to the slides from todays OD unplugged session in London.  I can’t share my demo just now but I will record it…here are the slides for OD unplugged.  But also embedded in the post here courtesy of Windows Live and don’t forget to checkout Springboard and the Windows 7 Evaluation I mentioned.

And also here’s the productivity video from my session.

Last week I posted about how to use the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit to plan your deployments of Windows 7 and Office.  In the same vein I’ve noticed an article on the Knowledge Base that brings together tons of resources to help you to go beyond and do more.  The article provides resource to help plan your Office 2010 rollout and provides links out to some really helpful resources like these two which stand out for me:

Deploy Office by using System Center Essentials. Provides detailed technical guidance on the processes and procedures when you use Microsoft System Center Essentials to deploy Office
Office 2010  / Office 2007

Deploy Office by using Microsoft Application Virtualization. Provides detailed technical guidance on the processes and procedures when you use Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) to deploy Office in a medium-sized organization.

Funny what turns up in the KB.

Here are four things you should consider when you decide whether to deploy a 64-bit or 32-bit version of Office 2010.

I created this presentation for a briefing session that I did recently and I didn’t get to run through the whole thing.  So I thought I’d share it and do so by showing off a new and cool feature of Office Web Apps: the ability to embed a slide show from your SkyDrive in a web page.  The question is, what’s the presentation for?  Respond in the comments and the first correct answer will win a copy of the Windows 7 Administrators Pocket Consultant.

If you’re viewing this through an RSS reader you might need to go to my site to see this in all it’s Lego glory.  If you want to know how to do this take a look at the simple instructions to embed PowerPoint.  Obviously you get the best results by sharing Office 2010 PowerPoint docs.

What do you deploy to your people as part of your corporate standard desktop?  Windows 7 – yep gota have that! Office 2010?  Yep you know you need to moving to it if you want your people to work as efficiently as possible.  MDOP – well obviously you’re going to be using parts of MDOP to get the job done, be it App-V to deploy your line of business app or Med-V to deploy the actual desktop.  Over and above that what more are you packing in?  Is Silverlight in there?  In this post that’s exactly what I propose.  You should be rolling Silverlight as part of your standard practice.

I can already hear the question screaming in over the ether…Why? Why? Why?!

And I can hear the reasons for not doing it too… “it’s another thing to maintain”, “it’ll encourage people to watch x-y-z instead of working”, “we don’t code for Silverlight, none of our own apps use Silverlight”, Actually that’s a good way to answer the why.

“it’s another thing to maintain”

That is a stance that you could take, given how hard other plugins are to manage.  But we’ve thought about it well in advance and there are two very easy ways to do it.  Firstly Windows Update is aware of Silverlight, so your WSUS, SCCM or SMS infrastructure that you’ve already deployed to manage your business is ready to keep your Silverlight clients on the latest version.  Then there’s Windows Intune, when it’s released there’s yet another option for management. 

Secondly Silverlight itself can check for updates and install them, something that’s controllable via group policy.  What’s required for this “self update” option is for the user to have Administrator access to their PC and an Internet connection.

If you have a more tightly controlled environment then option one is probably for you but if you’ve chosen not to do too much in the way of management you’ve got yourself covered with option 2.

“it’ll encourage people to watch x-y-z instead of working”

Really?  I’m not sure there’s a huge amount of merit in the argument for blocking peoples access to specific sites these days.  It might be me, I might not be seeing it, but we don’t block access to iPlayer (or SkyPlayer which uses Silverlight) at Microsoft and I don’t see people watching TV shows all day.  Surely as an IT Pro it’s better to provide the flexibility in case they do come across a business critical site that uses Silverlight – perhaps something using Pivot for really rich BI?

“we don’t code for Silverlight, none of our own apps use Silverlight”

Ahh the famous case of the chicken and the egg.  I’m a firm believer that if you give people the ability to build something they’ll push the envelope and really build SOMETHING.  How much of a difference would it make to your people if your line of business application actually looked the part and was so easy to maintain that the dev guys were able to keep it beating with the pulse of your business and users?  IT Pros should be leading here, providing the tools and capabilities to make things better.  It’s the same reason that I always think it’s best to deploy 64bit over 32bit where possible.  Not because you need it right now, but you might. 

I always remember being forced to deploy another browser plugin because a CBT (Computer Based Training) course was developed that would only run with version 9.55 or later and we were on version 7, in a regulated industry where you need everyone (that was about 10k people) to complete the training in 30 days time it was a painful lesson.

Do you deploy Office?  Well if you do and if you intend to allow people to use Office 2010 Web Apps then you’ll get a much better experience with Silverlight installed as helps with even little things like synchronising files to the web.  The Office deployment guide goes into far more detail:

Silverlight enables a better online experience with Office.com, powers the Office 2010 interactive guides (available with Office 2010), improves the user experience of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, improves the performance of Office Web Companion applications, and helps with the process of uploading Office documents to cloud services.

So all up, if you want the best Office 2010 experience you want to be installing Silverlight and if you don’t you’re going to miss out on some great features – the interactive guides significantly diminish the learning curve for your users!

From the why we move into the how:

How do I deploy Silverlight at work?

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times above, Silverlight is pretty easy to deploy and we’ve done all the heavy lifting for you with the trusty deployment guide.  But to summarise it you can:

• Deploy manually
• Deploy with just WSUS
• Deploy with SCCM and WSUS together
• Use group policy
• Deploy as part of your standard image

The last option isn’t mentioned in the deployment guide, however it’s as simple as installing before you sysprep your image and you can then mange Silverlight using WSUS and Group policy to keep it up to date.  It’s probably best to use this option as a more tactical move if you’re a large organisation.

Resources:

For more information on Windows 7 deployment see Springboard, for more on Silverlight see Silverlight.net for more information on Optimized Desktop see

Today I went to grab a copy of the Windows 7 resource kit that I reserved from the learning center to read on holiday.  It has since been used as a dumbell, a door stop and has as a booster to help a colleague feel taller.  It might be heavier than my baggage allowance.  Still it’s a good resource…who out there considers it invaluable…I do!

I’ll actually be reading and reviewing the new Step By Step book for Outlook 2010 on hols.

Gmail’s undo send feature is being talked up all over the web right now.  Why.  It’s revolutionary of course.  WRONG.

Outlook has done this for YEARS, all that’s happening is that a delay is introduced.  To do this in Outlook 2010:

• Go to Options > Advanced
• Scroll down to Send and receive and remove the tick from Send immediately when connected

You can leave it there, or configure the time between send and receives by clicking the Send/Receive button.  Now stuff will sit in your Outbox (from where you can stop it sending by editing it) until the next send and receive which you can obviously start.

I was just catching up on my feeds when I spotted this on lifehacker they’ve run a Hive Fiver poll to find out what tools people use to manage their life and personal projects and OneNote along with Evernote and plain text ala Notepad have come out on top.  What a great result, OneNote is an unsung hero of Office but it’s getting more praise day by day as people discover its usefulness.  It’s even in our most basic SKUs now so home users get the benefits.

A couple of super cool features of OneNote 2010 that you might not realise are super cool till you try them:

OneNote can sync notebooks to Office Web Apps and that does two very cool things for you.  The first is that you can access that notebook anywhere, any time in the browser.  Cool sync feature number two is that if you’re using multiple PCs, like I do every day, then that notebook will stay in sync across multiple PCs.  Synctastic!

OneNote can create outlook tasks so when you take notes in a meeting they can instantly become part of your task management system.  A powerful use of this is when someone sends you an email with lots of tasks in it, copy and paste it to OneNote covert them to tasks.  Deleting the task in OneNote leaves that task in your Outlook.

The Office 2010 Engineering blog posted a great roundup of the tools that you can use to help deploy Office 2010 this week.  It’s a powerful tool set and I honestly can’t see a blocker to deployment that it doesn’t help remove. 

• You don’t know what addins are out there…there’s a tool for that. 
• Don’t know if you VBA code is compatible it 2010…there’s a tool for that. 
• Want it in your standard image…there’s a tool for that. 
• Want to customise what lands on a client…there’s a tool for that. 
• Want help planning deployment…there’s a tool for that. 
• Want someone to get your coffee whilst you deploy Office 2010…you might have to do that yourself!

Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Tools

One of the hurdles that I’ve personally experienced when trying to move people to the latest version of Office to help them be more productive is that those little tools they rely on – that excel add-in that they bought that’s become a core part of their process – just isn’t known to you, the IT Pro dude that has to take responsibility for it.

You’ve never heard of the thing before and you don’t know who the vendor is and you don’t have the time to do a full background check to make sure it works.  Then you do your deployment and that supery dupery add-in tanks.  Finally you have to roll that persons install back and they stick as a thorn in your side for years and you can’t explain away not having hit your target for 100% deployment.  Familiar?

Well we’ve got you an answer… 

Take a look at the Microsoft Office 2010 – Compatibility Resource Center we’ve got tools for inspecting VBA code and a tool that helps you to findout what Add-ins are actually running in your business.  Cool stuff… oh yeah and a list of Add-ins that have been tested.  Nice stuff.