I have been using Office 2010 for about a week now and here are some first impressions of Outlook 2010.

Installation

The installation was a breeze. You have the option to run 2010 along side 2007 as long as you use the 32 bit version of 2010. I opted for the 64 bit version so I had to uninstall all of my Office 2007 applications before beginning the installation. Following the installation I launched Outlook and it picked up all of my 2007 settings including the 5 PST files that I use for filing my email.

Just in time for your summer viewing pleasure Microsoft is unveiling some of the new workloads for SharePoint 2010. Head over to the newly revamped Microsoft SharePoint Product site and catch Tom Rizzo, Paul Andrew and Richard Riley as they demonstrate just a few of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2010. Each video has a different audience. General information an technical overview from Tom, IT Pro and Administration from Richard and Developer considerations from Paul.

I found this great video explaining Azure.

What is Windows Azure?

http://blog.smarx.com/posts/what-is-windows-azure-a-hand-drawn-video

I love the hand drawn approach to teaching. Just goes to show that the simplest teaching techniques are sometimes the most powerful. The key to his success IMO is the 5 hours he spent up front. Clear, concise and clever. Very memorable. Enjoy!

I just found a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that posts updates to Twitter when you publish a new post to your blog. Twitter Notify lets you format the tweet and prompts you when you publish a post.

I love BEING organized…I hate GETTING organized. I made a promise to myself (dare I say a resolution) in January that each month I would take one step closer to getting myself organized. Actually this was a good time for me because I have been planning on updating my home computer infrastructure so it made sense that I would also get my home office and electronic files all backed up and secure. My first step in this process was to read and really absorb the book Take Back Your Life! Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to get organized and stay organized.

At Catapult we recently implemented Unified Communications all the way to our phones. I love the functionality and reach provided by the UC solution. I love getting voice mail in my Inbox. I have to be more careful about my Communicator Status, but that is easy. We needed an easy way to enable calling and lookup inside the company. We already had People search so I decided to add the ability to click the displayed phone number to call the found person. It just requires adding a hyperlink with the TEL: prefix.

As Microsoft Gold Partner and National Systems Integrator (NSI) Catapult enters in all kinds of contests for recognition with Microsoft. Most recently we were awarded the Partner of the Year award for Custom Development Solutions, Web Development.

We are also competing in a Windows 7 video contest. You can bop over to Digital Forum TV and check us out. I love the pace and message of the video. Looks and feels like a Microsoft production, but we did it ourselves! If you like it, sign in with your Live ID and rate the video.

The Trial Licensing issue that was introduced by SharePoint SP2 has been resolved by the product team. If you are affected (or wish to avoid the problem) you can install the fix before or after you deploy SharePoint SP2. The details are available on the SharePoint Team Blog.

The Adventure Works Travel site and 10 Hands-On labs have been released to the SharePoint community. These developer oriented labs are available from The MSDN Code Gallery in the SharePoint on the Web Project. The kit comes with an installer for the AWT site with all the bells and whistles.

Heather Kostes, Business Group Lead from Microsoft interviewed me for the Microsoft MVP Program at Tech•Ed 2009. Of course I blathered on about Social Networking and Search. I love SharePoint because I enjoy showing clients how to use the tools they have to build business value. (I think that message came through…:)

Anyway, it was a fun interview. It’s posted on the Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog