AjaxWindows! - A demonstration of what AJAX can do.

I stumbled across a very cool demonstration of the future of web applications. It's called ajaxWindows, and is a windows clone that you use in your browser. It has the layout that a windows user would be accustomed to, complete with recycling bin, my computer etc. It can sync the contents with your local computer, and store files in your gmail account! It uses ajaxWrite for writing office documents, and has a couple of other widgets and gadgets included. If you like that, it's not the only online operating system out there, have a look at this roundup of some more. With Silverlight, an ever expanding .Net framework, and all other technologies moving forward, the future is looking exciting.

The .adm file cpao12.adm is not in a valid format and must be replaced. Details: A string is expected at line 56.

The group policy templates for Office 2007 are a great help to system administrators, however upon installing them and setting the default template path for our workgroup – I received that error. (with the path to file before cpao12.adm)

A workaround courtesy of Felix on mcse.ms, edit cpao12.adm in notepad, and change every value of the following:

VALUEON !!L_true

VALUEOFF !!L_false

To

VALUEON NUMERIC 1
  

VALUEOFF NUMERIC 0

Do a replace all on that, and then while you are there, fix up outlk12.adm, changing:

KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

VALUEON NUMERIC 1    

VALUEOFF NUMERIC 0    

VALUENAME PromoteErrorsAsWarnings    

EXPLAIN !!L_PromotingerrorsaswarningsExplain    

END POLICY

To

KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

VALUENAME PromoteErrorsAsWarnings    

VALUEON NUMERIC 1    

VALUEOFF NUMERIC 0    

EXPLAIN !!L_PromotingerrorsaswarningsExplain    

END POLICY

There should be one instance of that (though there is a lot of outlook security keynames,
 so search for 'PromoteErrorsAsWarnings'. 

Office 2007 Customization Tool: APPEXTENSIONWARNINGS setting error

In my efforts to deploy office 2007 to my workplace, I used the Office 2007 Customization tool, which is available by running Setup.Exe (on the disk) with /admin switch applied.

I went through and spent alot of time considering each and every setting and selecting what I thought was best, then went to save my hard work and received this error:

I had no idea where this error came from, and a google search returned nothing.

So I experimented saving at regular intervals, and found that the error seems to be coming from the 'Office security settings' section, in the bottom box whenever I enabled 'Microsoft Office Excel - Application Add-ins warning options' it seems to crash. I just did not configure a setting from this and all seems to have gone well.

I'd say its a program bug, best to steer clear of that setting.

Deploying WSS 3.0 Web Parts easily to a production server with VSEWSS

There are a lot of pages on the internet which describe building and deploying Windows Sharepoint Services web parts. With the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows Sharepoint Services, creating a basic web parts is a breeze, it's a simple case of starting a new project from the web part template. Then by pressing f5 it creates the necessary files and deploys them. This is great for your development server, but what about when you want to deploy them to a remote server? It gets a little more complicated it would seem. I found a trick today that makes things a whole lot easier. The f5 button, creates a number of files in the \bin\Debug folder for the web part project, one of these is a script, which it uses for deploying the web part. Open this script, and find the section that says: set DefaultWebUrl=http://localhost/ set DefaultSiteUrl=http://localhost Change this to the site URL of your WSS deployment, and then copy all of the files in the bin\Debug folder over to that server, run the script, and it will open a command window outlaying the progress. Once it's completed, you should be able to open your WSS page and simply add the part to the page!

How to convert Flash EXE's to SWF files for embedding to web pages

I found a useful tool to convert flash EXE files (like the ones linked in my previous post), to SWF files, for easy embedding into HTML files. Northcode make a free tool, just run it, choose your exe file and it will save a SWF file in the same folder. To embed the file into a HTML page, rename the SWF file and add this code to your page:

<object height="400" width="600">
<param name="movie" value="FlashFile.swf">
<embed src="FlashFile.swf" height="400" width="600"></embed>
</object>

Getting used to Office 2007 menus

The new Office 2007 interface is a major overhaul over previous versions, and in my opinion, it's great. It's designed to maximize productivity, and to reflect the changes in todays hardware, particularly that of the rise in popularity of widescreen monitors. It's designed to have the things related to what you are doing right NOW to be in front of you, just one click away, rather than having to go through the same 3 click process multiple times. Still, the biggest criticism I hear of it is that it is different, no one likes change at first, especially from a product that has stayed the same for over 10 years. Once you get used to the new interface, chances are you'll see the productivity gains, however at first, it can be a slow down. Here's a tool I found on Microsoft's website, aimed at helping with the transition. The guides to the 2007 office system interface, has flash files (and executable flash files for offline use) which show you an office 2003 menu, and let you click in it just as you used to, after selecting something, it will then show an animation of how to do this in office 2007. Neat! If after using that you still are fed up with the interface, there's always the add in tool, which gives you office 2003 menu in office 2007, however this isn't the ideal solution - as it costs money (has a time limited trial though if you wish to test it), and doesn't train you in the new changes, it just covers them up. My advice is to use the flash guides, and take the step, you'll see that it was worth it.