Info Worker

A great little add on for Exchange 2007 and Visio 2007 which will help automatically graphical representations of your Exchange 2007 site topology, including sites, servers, and connections for an organization. It looks like it will be very handy tool for consultants doing an Exchange health check to automate some of the documentation process of the existing environment.

Here is the "official" description from the download site:
The Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Connector makes it easy for Exchange administrators to visualize, explore, and communicate complex information. Instead of viewing single user data at a time, administrators can create data-connected Visio diagrams that display data at a glance and dramatically increase productivity.
The Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Connector is an add-in for Microsoft Office Visio 2007 that you can use to diagram a Microsoft Exchange Server site topology, including sites, servers, and connections for an organization.

Download it from here.

Check it out the announcement here.

You can check out the Mac site here.

If I had a Mac, I would try it out to see what it is like, but hopefully some others can try it out and leave comments here? That would be great, because I'm curious how well it integrates with everything.

To make a rash generalization, there are definitely three groups of people when it comes to Office 2007. You could almost consider these the "#1 - Hate", "#2 - Accepts", and "#3 - Loves" Office 2007 ribbon acceptance spectrum.

#1. Longtime, hardcare Office users that have tricked out their setup so they can do practically everything with use of their keyboard and macros, right Charlie? For these users, most if not all of their macros break and they have to relearn/redo their way of life. I know Office 2007 lost some of these users to OpenOffice and other platforms due to the lack of a 'classic' or 'legacy' mode. These are the kind of users you don't want to lose, however, because they can be very vocal and very loyal if you treat them right.

#2. Middle of the road users that have used Office versions in the past but aren't opposed to change and don't have any specific needs that are broken by the move to Office 2007. There are a lot of people in this category. They may grumble or be annoyed with the changes at first but eventually figure things out and tend not to go back to the older Office suites. I find myself as a member of this group.

#3. Users that have never used earlier Office versions. They tend to pick up on the ribbon and the user interface right away. The uptake or initial learning curve seems to be less than the earlier suites.

Why am I going on and on about this? Well, there is a cool product out there by a fellow MVP that adds the ability, as close as possible, to get a 'legacy' mode in Office 2007. It is a program called Ribbon Customizer. The free version is all you need to do this. If you want to go crazy with ribbon modifications, grab the professional version.

It might not win back all the people in group #1, because it can't fix broken macros, but people who want the look and feel of Office 2003 as much as possible will love this program.

Note: I don't own or use this program but I have installed it a few times for friends and others that wanted the "Office 2003 feel", so this is definitely not a sponsored post or anything like that. I just post about stuff I think is cool or useful. Nothing more, nothing less.

I'm excited (to say the least) about what I have seen of Silverlight 2.0, but Silverlight 1.0 is still a good release and this update makes it a little better. It is mainly bug fixes and performance improvements, but I always like to stay up to date on any browser-related plug-in, especially Flash and other known infection vectors.