Steve’s blog

Create TFS Work Items directly from Outlook Emails

Stephen Kearns — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:36:50 GMT

This is a great little productivity tool for teams actively using Work Items to track dev activities in TFS. Used it at a recent customer (thx Dilip!) and found it helpful.

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/srlteam/archive/2007/03/04/Team-System-Outlook-2007-Addin-_2D00_-v1.0.aspx

technical; TFS; work items

Office 2010 Technical Preview Announced Today

Stephen Kearns — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:14:10 GMT

Hi All – I was at the Microsoft Technical Preview Press Event this morning to participate in a panel discussion with members of the press. Session was hosted by Jason Brommet and the good folks at High Road communications.

ITWorld Canada picked up the event and some of the partner discussion:

http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Daily-News/f83346b9-5007-43c5-b3f0-cd10ccd5b45d.html

Here were a few quick hits on stuff that jumped out at me that I’m going to really enjoy in the new version.

Outlook
1. Convert voicemail to text (when hooked up to exchange)
2. You can mark a given conversation thread to ignore further updates
3. When you receive invites, body of message includes a calendar preview
4. Mouse-over emails/presence jelly-beans pops up a little contact-preview
5. New pane listing recent contacts you’ve interacted with (quick click to IM or email)
6. Quick-steps – kind of like a section on the ribbon where you can stick in some canned/customized macros – e.g. Reply with Invite – takes an email you’re on and creates invite with all the people on the email as invitees. Nice!
PowerPoint
- video as “first class citizen” – basic video editing and effects tools built right in
- more powerful image editing
- Record your PowerPoint presentation without having to go out to a 3rd party tool like Camtasia
- You can broadcast your presentation (pops up a provider list, including Windows Live for individual consumer audience)
Excel
1. Sparklines looks interesting – visualization/charting right inside a spreadsheet cell – may seem small, but when you’re pouring over volumes of data, the ability to visually highlight key points so person consuming the information can spot it quickly is really valuable
2. Slicers – ability to surface up your data filters on table or pivot tables as a little persistent dialog/window and see what filters have been applied, apply new ones, deselect.
Word
1. Backstage (across all apps) – surfaces lots of great doc properties/tools – e.g. integrates print dialog with print-preview
2. Ability to minimize the ribbon

You can see more screenshot info here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/2010office/imageGallery.aspx

Looking forward to seeing many of the other good stuff coming down the pipe including the web versions - “Office Anywhere” later this summer and the SharePoint side of Office 14 in the fall.

VSTS – Setting Permissions on Work Items?

Stephen Kearns — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:11:00 GMT

Is it possible? I was thinking the answer was no – but I poked around and ran across this forum entry which outlines how you do it – basically, the short version is TFS allows you to apply permission (or deny permissions) to a specific Node in the Area Path Tree.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/de-DE/tfsworkitemtracking/thread/280095b2-974e-469e-b879-9ec9f1bacfb0

Office 2007 Feature - “My SharePoint Sites” – Cool but Mysterious

Stephen Kearns — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:41:00 GMT

Hi All,

Not sure if you’ve noticed this or not, but starting with Office 2007, I noticed in my Office Save dialogs an option started to appear called “My SharePoint Sites”:

I’ve mentioned it to a few other people. I find the functionality pretty useful – the scenario I use the most is when I get attachments from folks via email and want to quickly dump the attachment on our SharePoint project portal (a.k.a. the imason client area). Big time saver.

But the part that has remained mysterious to me is how you add sites to the list. I’m trying to track the info down – the first useful hit that I got was this blog post [1] about where “My SharePoint Sites” comes from. Apparently you have to enable your SharePoint “My Site” (which I’ve done) to get things rolling. Then the first time any Office Client App runs each day, it updates the list of Sites automatically… Doesn’t totally answer my question though, b/c I have access to a whole bunch of SharePoint sites that I don’t see in the list so I’m still left wondering why some appear and some done. The post refers to “Member Groups” - I’m curious about what the technical definition of this is – does this mean the sites where I’m a Site Collection Admin? Sites where I have “Full control”?

[1] http://paulliebrand.com/2007/11/29/office-2007-and-my-sharepoint-sites/

I’m going to play around with it some more and try and find the answer – if anyone out there has already figured it out, LMK.

[UPDATE – MAY 2009]

So I think the mystery is resolved – and the answer isn’t what I expected… The list is comprised of any site where there is a security group with the word “Members” in it. So if your site doesn’t have a security group with the word “Members” you won’t see it in the list (for example, we have a lot of sites with the “All People” group). So your site admin needs to create a security group with the word “members” in it and add you to that group - then it will start to show up (see note above – may not appear for 24 hours). Not very intuitive, but works for now. (maybe something they’ll resolve in the next version?)

Toronto Restaurants – Great French Bistro - Le Select

Stephen Kearns — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:18:35 GMT

Had the chance to try out a new resto this weekend that I was really impressed with. On a friend’s recommendation, 4 of us were headed for the first time to check out Le Select (http://www.leselect.com) over on Wellington, just west of Spadina. Saturday at 8:00pm and the place was packed right out (good sign). So much so that our table was late (a bit frustrating) but the staff were very accommodating and handled the situation expertly (seating at the bar, served bread, comp’d our sparkling water, frequent updates on the table)

Once we were seated, the evening proceeded without hiccups and the overall impression was smashing. Reminded me of really great casual dining experiences I was spoiled on in NYC.

Menu was outstanding – felt like I could eat there for weeks non-stop without the need to repeat.

Food came out great – 4 dishes, 4 very happy customers.

Wine list is award-winning but didn’t have the chance to really dig into it (next time!)

Pace was slow and relaxed which suited us just fine.

Service was attentive, affable and helpful. Nice finish: three of us had said no to dessert, but one of us was wrestling with the dessert question and ended up saying no – server picked up on this and brought over a small plate of biscotti and chocolates for the table.

NH Note: spacious patio space in front and in back. :-)