October 10th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
As diagnosed correctly by FeedBurner, the problem of Outlook 2007 not being counted in the RSS subscription statistics lays with Outlook. Michael Affronti, the Outlook Program Manager responsible for the RSS feature, just announced that Outlook 2007 doesn’t and won’t report a custom user-agent string. That means, any service, not just FeedBurner, trying to interpret the data will only see requests from IE7 that look like someone is browsing a feed. Without a custom user-agent string, there is simply no way to differentiate real IE7 feed browsing from an Outlook 2007 feed subscription.
This is extremely unfortunate and with Outlook 2007 probably going to be adopted widely, means that RSS feed subscription statistics will be significantly lower than their real number. How much lower? I can only guess.
FeedBurner reported that I had 148 subscribers and 2445 hits from IE7 on Monday. It seems to me most likely that the majority of those IE7 hits are generated by Outlook 2007. After all, most people would not browse to my RSS feed, but rather browse to my website. Let’s be conservative though and assume that only 80% of the hits (=1956) are generated by Outlook 2007. I don’t know how often Outlook pulls my feed, but once every hour sounds reasonable. If I am very conservative again, I assume that a copy of Outlook pulling my feed is running 24 hrs. In that case, the 1956 hits represent 81.5 subscribers. Looking at my weekend drop though, I would say it is reasonable to assume that most people read my blog at work or at least during office hours. So maybe they don’t have Outlook running 24 hrs, but just 16 hrs. That would represent 122.25 subscribers.
I get to pick then between my total subscription number being 229 or 270 instead of the reported 148.
October 9th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
Microsoft has announced that the Office 2007 beta will end soon. You can read this on activewin.com. Let me summarize the key points:
- The Office Preview Site will close on October 25, 2006. That means, Office 2007 Beta 2 and Beta 2 Technical Refresh cannot be downloaded anymore starting October 25.
- Microsoft Customer Service and Support will begin providing technical support for Office 2007 on October 28, 2006.
- The formal beta testing phase will end on October 30, 2006.
- There will be no further beta releases beyond Beta 2 Technical Refresh.
- If you buy Office 2007 in its released version, you will have to uninstall all beta client applications, and then install the released version. This should be straightforward and you shouldn’t lose any settings or data in the process.
- All Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh Client applications will expire on March 31, 2007. All B2TR Server applications will expire on May 15, 2007. That means after those dates, Office 2007 Beta will not be usable. If you want to keep using Office 2007, you will have to purchase it.
October 9th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
Office 2007 has been the most open Office release ever. Never before has any comparable amount of information about an Office release been made available so long before its release. More importantly, never before have the Office teams given the public so much insight into their design, development and testing philosophies and processes, as well as responded this actively to comments and critique. The main communication medium has been a collection of blogs (a full list is due in a later post). Among all of them however, one blog stands out. It has been by far the most active one, as well as the most informative one: Jensen Harris - An Office User Interface Blog.
The title is not very exciting, and could easily be mistaken to be a blog by an Office user. I personally like to think of it as the “Office UI Bible” or the “Ribbon UI Bible”. Jensen’s blog is the definite resource and word on the new Ribbon UI. Jensen is the program manager in charge of the Office UI team. You want to know why Office 2007 has a new UI, why the colors of the three Office UI themes are the way they are, or are simply interested in the design and development process of the Ribbon from the first sketches to the final look? Jensen’s blog answers all those questions. It is a must-read for everyone interested in UI design, a should-read for everyone developing add-ins for Office and a recommended-read for everyone. The number of posts though has been so voluminous, for several months e.g. there was a new post daily, that it is difficult for someone just joining the Office 2007 frenzy to find the pieces he or she is interested in. With this post, I’ll attempt to provide an index to the most important posts on Jensen’s blog. Whenever I have a post that talks about a particular category, you can get to it by following the link behind the category title itself. You will also see many references to the Office UI Bible in my posts going forward. Please let me know if any of the links are wrong.
Update: Jensen Harris adopted my list in this post as the official categorization of his blog.
Why a new UI for Office 2007?
Overview of the new UI
Ribbon UI Elements
The size of the Ribbon, screen real estate, ribbon scaling and minimization
Migrating to Office 2007
UI Themes
Keyboard control of the Ribbon
New fonts for Office 2007
Customizing Office 2007 (Add-ins, RibbonX)
Note that most examples shown in the following posts do not work in B2TR or the RTM version.
From first sketches to the final design
Design Tenets
Design Ponderings
An inside look into UI design, development and testing at Microsoft
Office Themes
New things in Office 12 involving the new UI
Miscellaneous
The Office 2007 UI team
October 5th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
My post about the changes in Outlook 2007’s HTML rendering capabilities featured a section titled “Quick Links” on the top. It contained the two links you would want to have handy when you have already read the post and are using it as a reference.
Is that section a good idea? Should I include a Quick Links section in all posts (if appropriate)? Or should I just forget about it and not do it?
Let me know what you think. Post a comment 
October 5th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
Quick Links
Outlook 2007 is full of new things. Some of them are very obvious, some of them are predominantly “under the hood” and can be easily overlooked by users. A good example for the latter one are many of the IMAP improvements in 2007, which I will discuss in an upcoming blog post. One of the very obvious changes though is the new email editor for Outlook. Gone is the native Outlook editor that didn’t even have the ability to show you spelling errors as you typed (those red squiggles). Gone are also the days when you could use Word as your email editor. In Outlook 2007, you get one built-in editor, that ’s it.And that built-in editor is Word. Well…not really. The Office teams realized that there was no point in maintaining two editors for plain text, HTML and Rich Text: one simple one (Outlook built-in) and one very powerful one (Word). Therefore they decided to not develop the Outlook built-in editor any further, but to use Word for 2007. However, the existing Word integration wasn’t really a great solution either. It required that Word is installed and it seemed to me that it took forever to load Word whenever I wanted to write an email. Therefore, Microsoft packaged a stripped-down version of Word 2007 into a DLL that ships with Outlook 2007. This means, Word 2007 is not required for the Outlook editor to work. With this approach, a user doesn’t even notice that a reduced version of Word is used for writing emails, but the user notices that the editor is significantly better than the 2003 built-in one (e.g. it has those red squiggles).By integrating Word in this way into Outlook, Outlook also is able to use the text and HTML rendering capabilities of Word. This means that all emails, RSS posts and other email-like items are displayed using this special Word DLL. Internet Explorer is hence no longer used by Outlook to display HTML content. This change alone increases email security in Outlook immensely. To further increase security and do as much as only possible to prevent Outlook from becoming a security risk to a user, WordMail supports a specifically designed subset of HTML and CSS. Any HTML or CSS that could be potentially lead to an exploit, is simply not supported at all by Outlook. Naturally, some of the HTML and CSS features that are not supported by Outlook 2007 made that list not due to security features, but due to Microsoft not being able to implement all of them (lots of browsers, e.g. very notably IE6, don’t support HTML and CSS to the full extent either).
This brings me to the actual topic of this post. As Outlook only supports a specific subset of HTML and CSS only, many HTML newsletters and emails will no display as intended in Outlook 2007. Some of the features not supported are:
- Animated GIFs
- HTML forms
- Applets
- Macromedia Flash
- HTML Frames
- CSS floats
Microsoft has published an MSDN Article detailing the HTML and CSS rendering capabilities in Outlook 2007.
In addition, and almost more importantly, Microsoft has made available a validator tool that can determine whether an existing HTML document uses unsupported elements or not. The validator tool can be used with Visual Studio 2005, SharePoint Designer 2007, Expression Web, Dreamweaver MX 2004 or Dreamweaver 8. A second MSDN article provides walk-throughs for using the tool with these programs and also has the link for downloading the tool.
Outlook 2007 will be released soon (=within the next several months). Now is the best time to take a look at all your HTML newsletters and emails and ensure that they will render great in Outlook 2007.
Update: Joe Hardy did a great job pointing out the real sore spots in the HTML/CSS capabilities of Outlook 2007.
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