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RSS feed reader blues? Get your feed in Microsoft Outlook and Office 365

ICYMI, Google Reader, Google Voice App for Blackberry, Google Cloud Connect, and Snapseed Desktop are shutting down. Hilarity ensued on the Internet with the melt down on social media over the change. As Danny Sullivan noted here, “Google should have done better by Google Reader & Google users than to bury its closure in a “spring cleaning” post.”

All the talk about RSS Readers reminded me of how important it is to listen and respond (this from 2011 via TechCrunch).

But I digress.

If you’re impacted by this announcement, have no fear: there are options, many great options.

First off, Good advice from Sara Hevans (@prsarahevans) on how to backup your Google Reader account http://aol.it/Wq3UkJ

Once you’ve backed up, you’ll need a new reader.

With all these options, you may already have an option on your desktop: you can also use Outlook in Microsoft Office to subscribe to an RSS feed as noted here.

So if you’re looking for RSS subscription and management? our own Office 365 Home Premium has that: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/cc511379.aspx

Quick links:

Tags: Microsoft, RSS, Outlook

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Posted: Information on preparations for daylight saving time changes and Microsoft Office 365

My friends over in the Office 365 team have provided some guidance on their community site about preparing for daylight saving time changes around the world

If the country or region where your organization or some of your users reside has changed their policy of recognizing daylight saving time, or changed the local time offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), you need may need to update Windows, Exchange, Outlook, or other programs to accommodate these changes.

Even if your time zone hasn’t changed, if you interact with other computers or users globally, your computer needs to be able to do accurate date and time calculations for events elsewhere in the world.

Installing the time zone updates as soon as possible minimizes the number of Outlook and Exchange meetings or calendar events that are scheduled during the transition from the old to the new time and dates.

More info available in their post.

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, RSS, DST, Russia

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Get Outlook 2010 SP1 for displaying two separate time zones in the Calendar

Want another reason to install Outlook 2010 SP1?

In Outlook, you can display two separate time zones in the Calendar. This allows you to see your local time zone and the time zone of a city that you often travel to. When you travel to that other time zone, you can use the Swap Time Zones option to change the position of the time bar in the Calendar. Using the Swap Time Zones option in Outlook 2010 results in unexpected behavior.

This issue is fixed in Outlook 2010 SP1 and Microsoft recommends that customers download and install this service pack to avoid this problem. Customer who have not yet installed Outlook 2010 SP1 can find a work around for this issue in Outlook 2010 in the KB Article 2507003 Using Outlook 2010 Swap Time Zones to switch from non-DST to DST Time Zone does not enable DST in Windows.

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, RSS, DST, Russia, Outlook

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More thoughts on The Microsoft Garage Science Fair

A shout out to Steve Clayton’s post last week, looking at "What’s hot at Microsoft’s Science Fair?" as he covered The Microsoft Garage Science Fair

"It’s fair time at Microsoft – Tech Fest is on the horizon and our Product Fair follows a little later in the year. I’ll be following (and blogging) about each of them and giving you some insight in to what goes down at these events.

"Today was Science Fair at The Commons and I was one of the judges so I got an extensive tour of what’s on offer (and a white lab coat) and then toured again with Josh Lowensohn of CNET who has just posted his views on the event. Science Fair is run by the folks behind The Garage at Microsoft  which I covered in a recent post. In a nutshell, it’s hobbyist development inside Microsoft.

"So what did we see at Science Fair today that I can tell you about?"

Well, there was lot’s that I can’t comment on from the Fair, but I was happy to see Steve’s coverage, specifically with references to the .NET Gadgeteer from the folks over in MSR. Essentially it’s what I envision to be the next iteration of the popular Lego Mindstorms that my kids use today, only enabled with  .NET Micro Framework, allowing you to program in C# and use the tools in Visual Studio. I agree with Steve in that one of the most interesting things was how the team had integrated one of their devices with the cloud services in Azure

I enjoyed getting to see the details on The Microsoft Biology Initiative (MBI), an effort in MSR to bring new technology and tools to the area of bioinformatics and biology. MBF provides an extension to the .NET Framework to Genomics research, with connections to web services such as NCBI BLAST.

A few other projects of interest:

"IM-an-Expert", as noted in Ryen’s papers, a system that takes in questions via IM and routes them automatically to nominated "experts" for an answer.

The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework provides sample code in C++, C#, and VB.NET to demonstrate frequently-asked, tested or used coding scenarios based on the feedback we get in the MSDN forums. Follow the All-in-One Code blog posts here from Jialiang Ge and the team for free code samples form the Microsoft Community team.

Last, I’m a fan of Microsoft Office Labs’ Ribbon Hero, the game for Office 2007 and Office 2010 suite to help you learn how to use all of the features and functionality that you might not know exists in the applications in the suite. My favourite this time around was learning how to do a dop cap at the beginning of a paragraph without invoking the "font" menu command.  You can read more about Ribbon Hero in this post on ZDNet by Christopher Dawson, noting it as a "brilliant training tool from Office Labs." I couldn’t agree more…

"If all this sounds a bit dorky, it is. But the countless people who wile away the hours on WOW, Dungeons and Dragons, and Farmville (all arguably dorky in their own way) will buy into this in a heartbeat. Better yet, Microsoft has actually done their research on the way people learn in the context of gaming and included real thought to the pedagogy of applications training: short, relevant tasks, immediate feedback and reinforcement, and enough difficulty to be challenging with enough supports to be successful. It even adapts the difficulty of the challenges to the speed with which a user completes them.

"And to answer my question about the value proposition of Office 2010 versus Office 2007, the truly diabolical folks at Microsoft have included several challenges highlighting the new features in 2010. Users of 2007 can see these challenges and a brief description of the new feature, but can’t complete the challenge until they download the 2010 beta (and later, pay for a downloaded upgrade). Office Labs is, of course, tracking these downloads to determine both the effectiveness of the teaser challenges and how compelling the new features are for end users."

Additional links of interest:

 

Tags: articles, what I read, blogs, Microsoft, The Garage, Office 2010, innovation.

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Update available for Microsoft Office OneNote for Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iOS

Remember the new release of Microsoft Office OneNote for Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iOS?

Benoit Barabe reminded me of the  1.0.1 update released which addresses the error 400 some users experienced. Still US only for now, but everyone who has 1.0 should get the free upgrade to 1.0.1.

Tags: Apple, what I read, iPad, Microsoft, travel tips, Windows Phone 7, what I read, OneNote.

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OneNote on Windows Phone 7, OneNote on Apple iPhone

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