Last but not least, let’s look at what’s new in Outlook 2010.

While the ribbon introduced in Office 2007 is still present, in Outlook 2010, it’s evolved into a cleaner and easier-to-use interface.

A new view in the inbox pane has been created called the conversation view. With it, messages are sorted not just by date, but by conversation. When you start a dialog with one or more people, any subsequent replies to that thread are automatically added to the conversation view for that topic.

The conversation view not only helps keep your inbox clean by allowing you to easily expand or collapse an email thread, but you can act on all messages in the conversation by categorizing them, moving messages in the conversation automatically to a new folder, or applying additional rules.

For long email threads, the clean-up conversation feature helps by automatically deleting redundant replies and keeping only the messages you need.

MailTips is another new feature that provide information to the user before he or she sends a message. For example, you may have a MailTip to warn users when they are sending an email to outside the organization or sending to a large audience. MailTips are not enforced rules, but they do provide some guidance to users before they send a message, and with Exchange 2010 custom mail tips can be created on the server and seen by clients when they apply.

You can also define custom, or frequently used actions, called Quick Steps. For example, you could have a quick step to CC your manager, schedule a meeting, or reply and then delete the message.

If you receive a meeting invitation that conflicts with another appointment, Outlook automatically brings up your calendar, making it easy to find a time that you are available and reschedule.

That wraps up my preview of the new features in Microsoft Office 2010. I’m looking forward to this new version of Office. You can currently download an preview a beta version of these products, or, if you want to wait, it should be released this summer.

I use PowerPoint a lot and found 2007 to be a vast improvement over 2003, so let’s see what’s new in PowerPoint 2010.

In PowerPoint 2010, multimedia integration has been vastly improved upon. When importing photos or image files into your presentation, the effects features that were added in PowerPoint 2007 offer a range of thumbnail previews for the effects. If you mouse over a thumbnail, the image in the presentation updates dynamically to show exactly how the image will look if you apply the effect you’re considering.

There are also many new slide transitions available that you can insert between slides, including a 3D pan and fade and a really neat ripple effect, just to name a couple.

The animation painter allows you to easily apply animation effects from an existing object to another, making it very simple to reuse animations and keep things looking consistent.

You can also embed and edit video files directly in PowerPoint, making it easy to trim content and add video triggers that let you overlay text captions and call-outs. The familiar style effects that you can apply to other art objects can also be applied to videos too.

As with the other applications in Office 2010, the Backstage view has been redesigned, giving you more options when you’re ready to save your file. From here you can compress media files, add rights-management, and explore new ways to publish your presentations.

The Broadcast Slide Show feature, in conjunction with SharePoint, allows you to publish your presentations and then email a link so that others can easily view your presentation through a web browser – end-users do not even need to have PowerPoint installed.

I have been fortunate to be able to telecommute, which gives me more flexibility with my hours to be available for my kids and still meet deadlines for work. I also avoid a long commute to and from work, which gives me more time with my kids. Since my kids aren’t in school full time, I have had to enlist the help of others during the day so I can keep semi-regular hours and have quiet while on conference calls. I take breaks from work to take my daughter to preschool so I can see what she is doing in school. Also, I take breaks to feed and put my infant son down for naps. When necessary, I make up for this time by working before they wake up in the morning or at night after they go to bed.

I have a separate room in the house that is a dedicated office, so I am able to close the door and focus fully on work. In my office, I have three computers and a laptop. This may seem excessive, but the type of work I do requires a lot of disk space and RAM. One computer is a Hyper-V computer running Windows Server 2008 R2. On this computer, I create all my virtual machines. Even though this computer has 8 GB of RAM many times the RAM is almost fully utilized by the virtual machines. That is why I have another desktop computer. I use this computer for other work applications and overflow from the Hyper-V machine. For the most part, I create my documents, such as PowerPoint presentations and demonstration scripts, on the laptop. I set up the laptop next to the Hyper-V computer, so I can write down demonstration steps while performing the steps on the Hyper-V computer. The third desktop computer is mostly for my husband and kids. I don’t want them to use the other computers and inadvertently delete or change my documents. I also use it for my digital photos; I don’t want them to get mixed in with my work.

In addition to my computers, I have an iPhone, so I can still get e-mails when I am not in my office. I have an all-in-one printer that has a scanner. I also have a fax machine, although I rarely need to use it. Finally, I have two external hard drives that I use to back up my data.

When I first started looking into Fast Track Data Warehouse, I wasn’t clear how it worked. After delving into it a little more, I gained a clearer understanding. Fast Track Data Warehouse is a partnership between Microsoft and several partners to create an optimized system for SQL Server 2008. The Microsoft partners for Fast Track Data Warehouse are HP, Dell, EMC, Bull and IBM. With Fast Track Data Warehouse, you need to review each of these vendors offering and choose the vendor you wish to use. All the necessary hardware is purchased from this one vendor, so you don’t need to decide which hardware will be best for your SQL Server 2008 configuration. Then, the vendor installs the operating system on the system you chose. Once you receive the system, you need to install the system into your rack. Then you must install SQL Server.

Fast Track Data Warehouse allows you to scale out your SQL Server infrastructure. You can also scale up by using Fast Track Data Warehouse with Parallel Data Warehouse, which allows you to arrange your SQL Server servers in a hub-and-spoke architecture.