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.

In my last post I reviewed some the format cmdlets. Now I will play with the Out-Gridview cmdlet.
Windows PowerShell 2.0 provides a few new tools that help to treat you more like a human than a machine. For example, by using the Out-Gridview cmdlet after retrieving a list of items, you can have the output is pipelined to a separate window (Graphic 24).
Get-Service | Out-Gridview

From this window, the list can be sorted by clicking the column header. However, this is output from the command, not the objects themselves, preventing any manipulation directly from this window. For example, you cannot right-click an item here to get a context menu to appear in order to stop or start a service.

The PowerShell grid also includes a rudimentary filtering function, showing only those services whose returned data includes a specified keyword. Simply type that keyword in the text box labeled Search. After entering the keyword, the grid filters out any items that do not include that keyword in at least one of the columns.

If you want to limit the filter to a specific column, type the column name followed by a colon, and then the filter string, reducing the results to four services on the computer in this example.

In my next post we get into variables and types.

In my last post I talked about the format cmdlets. Now I will continue to examine the format cmdlets.
Using the Format-Table cmdlet with no property names specified to format the output of the Get-Process command, provides exactly the same output returned without performing any formatting. The reason is that processes are usually displayed in a tabular format, as are most Windows PowerShell objects.
The displayed properties can be controlled by any of the format cmdlets by leveraging the property parameter. In this example, the format of the table displays with three specific properties.
Get-Service m* | Format-Table -Property Status, Name, ServiceType

Before I show an example of a more advanced formatting command, let’s look at some sorting. The Sort-Object cmdlet sorts objects in ascending or descending order based on the values of properties of the object.
You can specify a single property or multiple properties (for a multi-key sort) and you can select a case-sensitive or case-insensitive sort. You can also direct Sort-Object to display only the objects with a unique value for a particular property. This command displays a sort of services by status.
Get-Service m* | Sort-Object Status

You can also perform advanced formatting by combining formatting commands and adding some grouping. This command sorts the service list by status, before passing the output to the format-table command, which groups the output by status. In the displayed output the stopped and running services are grouped together, and under each status is a table containing the name and display name of each service.
Get-Service m* | Sort-Object Status | Format-Table –Group Status -Property Name, DisplayName

In my next post we will look at the Output commands.

In my last post I wrapped up the format cmdlets. Now I will take a look at the output cmdlets.
Windows PowerShell provides several cmdlets that let you control data output directly. These cmdlets share two important characteristics.
First, they generally transform data to some form of text. They do this because they output the data to system components that require text input. This means they need to represent the objects as text. Therefore, the text is formatted as you see it in the Windows PowerShell console window.
Second, these cmdlets use the Windows PowerShell verb Out because they send information out from Windows PowerShell to somewhere else. The Out-Host cmdlet is no exception: the host window display is outside of Windows PowerShell. This is important because when data is sent out of Windows PowerShell, it is actually removed. Because of this, any output cmdlets needs to be put at the end of the pipeline, otherwise the data is sent out of Windows PowerShell and any subsequent commands will have nothing to process.
The Output cmdlets are Out-Default, Out-File, Out-GridView, Out-Host, Out-Null, Out-Printer, and Out-String.
Output can be sent to a file by using the Out-File cmdlet. The following command line sends a list of services to the file C:\temp\serviceslist.txt:
Get-Service | Out-File -FilePath C:\temp\serviceslist.txt

The results of using the Out-File cmdlet may not be what you expect if you are used to traditional output redirection. You must be aware of the context in which the Out-File cmdlet operates to understand its behavior.
By default, the Out-File cmdlet creates a Unicode file. This is the best default in the long run, but it means that tools that expect ASCII files will not work correctly with the default output format. The Out-file formats file contents to look like console output, causing the output to be truncated just as it is in a console window in most circumstances.
The Out-Null cmdlet is designed to immediately discard any input it receives, which is useful for discarding unnecessary data obtained as a side-effect of running a command. When entering the following command (Graphic 22), the command results stating that the directory was created are not delivered.
New-Item -Path C:\ -Name test -Type Directory | Out-Null

The Out-Printer cmdlet routes the output to the specified printer. The Out-String cmdlet converts the objects that Windows PowerShell manages into an array of strings. By default, Out-String accumulates the strings and returns them as a single string, but you can use the stream parameter to direct Out-String to return one string at a time. This cmdlet lets you search and manipulate string output as you would in traditional shells when object manipulation is less convenient.

In my next post we will look at the Out-Gridview cmdlet.

I hadn’t used my SQL Azure is several weeks and was surprised when I was unable to add new databases and play around anymore. I had received some e-mails regarding SQL Azure but hadn’t bothered to read them yet. Afraid I would have to pay to continue to use my account, I looked at the options to continue with SQL Azure. I was pleased to find out there is a special introductory offer available on the Microsoft Online Customer Portal. This offer allows you to use SQL Azure free up to a certain usage each month. If you go over that amount, you only pay for the amount of time you use it past the free usage amount. This is great because I can continue to try out SQL Azure without putting a lot of money into it right now.