I just got renewed as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for OneNote for another year.
Due to my new job, I haven’t been very active recently. Hopefully, I will have more time going forward to be more active again!

Just a quick note that the forums are now integrated into the main layout of the website. See it for yourself: http://pschmid.net/office2007/forums

As usual, any feedback is appreciated.

Happy new year to everyone

2006 was an eventful year for me and this site. The best summary I can give is that this site went from 0 visitors to an average of 1,000 a day, my blog went from 0 readers to more than 200 and I became an MVP.

What can you expect from this site and myself in 2007?

• A new release of RibbonCustomizer, V0.9, that doesn’t use activation anymore will be out the latest by Tuesday. This is one release short of the next big one that will allow you to customize groups (adding/removing of individual commands). The next big one will be available early this year. After that, it’ll be up to you to tell me what you’d like to see when.
• Lots more content about customizing Office 2007, RibbonX and OneNote. January should be a busy month for that especially. Stay tuned!
• And much more…

Patrick Schmid

I have been rather quiet this month, mainly because I have kept myself busy with other things:

1. A new version of RibbonCustomizer, V0.9, is due out soon. It features quite a few changes (including the end of activation). You can read more about the upcoming changes and discuss them in my announcement post in my forums.
2. I’ve started a company. My company is called “pschmid.net Limited” and is a British private company limited by shares with registered office in London, but residence in Germany. Or in other words, this is a German company using a British corporate structure (possible due to the European Union). The company is so brand-new that I haven’t even received the certificate of incorporation yet (due in the mail tomorrow though). Once I get my documents, I’ll get started on all the formal German requirements for setting up a corporation (you can expect a future post about how start-up hostile Germany is….).
3. I have been working on a few upcoming RibbonX-related posts. There should be a lot of those in January.
4. And not to forget, I am on Christmas vacation and taking it slower

I just launched a completely overhauled website design. It was time for a redesign. The old design had become a mess to maintain, and was hard to navigate. The new design takes into account that the site has grown substantially since I launched it earlier this year. If you find any broken links, errors, not so great looking items, please post a comment so that I can fix them!

So what’s new? The new navigation bar directly under the page title gives you direct access to the main components of the site:

• Home: The new main page does not count my blog posts in full anymore. Instead, I only show excerpts of each blog post. This should make the page faster to load and easier to take in. On the left hand side, you can quickly get to my most popular blog posts and subscribe to my blog.
• Blog: My blog is the most popular item on my page. The new design features better blog navigation via the left bar.
• Forums: The second interactive component of my page are my forums. When you click on the forums link, you’ll be sent to the same forums page as before. Integrating the new design into the forums will happen in the near future.
• Office 2007: The most changes happened in the Office 2007 section. Navigating the Office 2007 section should now be vastly improved, and I hope the new organization of the content will make this section popular.
• Customize: Customizing Office 2007’s Ribbon User Interface is the primary topic of my site. The Customize section will give you an overview as to how and what can be customized.
• RibbonX:My site now features a RibbonX Portal! I would like to make this the top location to go to for everything RibbonX. If you have any content that you would like to have integrated/linked to from my RibbonX Portal, please post it in the RibbonX Portal forum. Over the next few weeks, I’ll add a lot of content of my own to it.
• OneNote: As a OneNote MVP, I need a section dedicated to OneNote. Content-wise, nothing is really different there. I don’t expect to add much to it in the coming weeks, as I will be focusing on my RibbonCustomizer add-in and the RibbonX Portal.
• Eng. 1: If you are a student in my Engineering 1 class, this is where you should go.
• Research: A quick overview of my published papers. When I have time, I’ll update it with more content.

In addition to all of this, my site now has a Google search box on almost every page. So if you are looking for something on my page, but are not sure where it is, give the search box a try.

Go check out my new site and post your comments about it!