SQL Server backup and recovery tools allow for the greatest versatility in recovering your Office Project Server 2007 deployment after a failure. SQL Server tools have the following advantages:

Using the Full Recovery model for SQL Server databases allows for recovery to the point of failure in the event of a database loss.

Office Project Server 2007 and related databases can be synchronized by using transaction log marking. This allows for database consistency during database recovery.

SQL Server tools have the following disadvantage:

SQL Server procedures can be complex and require a good knowledge of SQL Server itself and SQL Server databases. We recommend a trained SQL Server database administrator be responsible for these procedures.

Which should I use?
Which backup method to use depends on the requirements of your organization and the availability of trained resources to manage the process. SQL Server tools offer the most versatile options for recovery, but they are more complex to use. SharePoint Products and Technologies tools are simple to use, but only allow recovery to the last full or differential backup, meaning there will generally be some data loss. SharePoint Products and Technologies tools also require the system to backed up during a period of inactivity to ensure data consistency across databases.

Use SharePoint Products and Technologies tools if:

You have a deployment which is not in use for several hours, usually at night, when backups can be performed.

You can tolerate data loss of up to twenty-four hours (the time since the last daily backup).

Your organization does not have trained SQL Server database administrators or IT personnel who can manage the processes of using SQL Server tools.

Project: StickySorter

StickySorter is an Office Labs sponsored spare-time project by two Microsoft employees, Julie and Sumit. The idea sprung from the need for project teams all over the world to gather and organize data using a collaborative process known as affinity diagramming. Since its inception, StickySorter has evolved into a desktop application so anyone can use it to collaborate and organize ideas electronically, using a familiar sticky note interface.

Using StickySorter you can:

Effectively organize ideas into named groups which can be easily manipulated and rearranged.
Create custom views of data imported from spreadsheets or entered directly in the application.
Improve virtual brainstorming with features for navigating, searching, and arranging notes.
Collaborate across geographic boundaries by using StickySorter with Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

StickySorter was inspired by a real problem we encountered at work: Julie’s team was conducting a large study with researchers all over the world. They needed to sift through hundreds of research observations and organize them into groups using a process known as affinity diagramming. Affinity diagramming typically involves a team of people gathering in a room, writing down individual ideas or observations on sticky notes, placing the notes on a wall or whiteboard, and then arranging the notes into meaningful groups. The trouble was that the researchers on Julie’s team had already recorded their observations in Excel. Using sticky notes would mean they would need to manually copy all their observations onto notes, and then, after completing the affinity diagram, retype the observations and groups back into Excel. Furthermore, using sticky notes would require all the researchers on the team to be in the same room in order to participate.

Julie knew her team was far from alone in their frustration. Affinity diagramming is a process commonly used in many disciplines such as user research, product planning, and design. Inspired by this widespread need, we developed StickySorter as a means to bring affinity diagramming—and information organization in general—into the age of digital information and distributed teams. We developed a prototype, and after several iterations, arrived at StickySorter v1, which Julie’s team used to conduct many affinity diagramming sessions throughout their project.

StickySorter might have ended there, but other folks at Microsoft began hearing about the application and requesting to use it in their own projects. Until this point, we had been working on StickySorter as a side project on evenings and weekends. To release StickySorter to a larger audience, we knew we were going to need some help. That’s where the good folks of Office Labs came in: they offered us support in taking StickySorter from the original v1 prototype to the more complete and polished version that you can download today. Many thanks to Joe Coplen (Developer), Natasha Desai (Program Manager), and Nina Shih (Designer) for all their help in making that happen!

On Friday, ClickStream Technologies published a study claiming that “use of free productivity applications such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Docs and OpenOffice remains low, while Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Office is in use by over 50% of adult U.S. internet users and shows no signs of declining popularity.”
The 5-year-old technology metrics company reported that a mere 1% of U.S. adult Internet users used Google Docs, based on its study of 2,400 U.S. adult Internet users who agreed to install the company’s data-collection software.

However, the study has come into question this week because two former Microsoft employees are involved in the company that fielded the study.
In 2006, Google published a report claiming that the risk of click fraud is overstated by click-fraud auditing companies. Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, posted at length about problems with click-fraud statistics from such companies.

On Sunday, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web spam team, took issue with ClickStream’s findings in a blog post. He suggested that the sample size is low, that the tech-savvy, affluent sort who use Google Docs are probably underrepresented in the ClickStream study because they “are probably less likely to agree to click-monitoring in exchange for cash and prizes,” and that the high proportion of female respondents (more than 65%) doesn’t agree with the overall percentage of female Internet users (52%) and thus suggests sampling errors.

Cutts said that Compete estimated that Google Docs received 4.4 million visitors in September, which he said is slightly less than 2.4% of the U.S. online population.

In a comment on Cutts’ blog, Roy Schestowitz, a doctoral candidate in medical biophysics at Manchester University, free software advocate, and co-editor of BoycottNovell.com, linked to a post on his site that offered an additional explanation for the findings: Two of ClickStream’s employees, CEO and co-founder Cameron Turner and senior research analyst Kim Anderson, used to work at Microsoft.

It’s a pretty simple concept. Say I have a veterinary practice and you run a pet store. I ask you to put a link to my vet business site on your pet store site and, in exchange, offer to put a link to your pet store site on my vet business site. This works well because we have complementary, noncompetitive businesses that target the same audience: pet owners.

These reciprocal links help drive traffic from my site to your site and vice versa. They also help us boost our rankings in search engines. This is because — generally speaking — search engines look at the number of links to your site from other sites when listing sites in search results.

How to get started with link exchanges

You have several ways to set up link exchanges.

Do it manually. The upside of this method is that it’s free and you can be assured that your links reside only on sites you deem worthy. The downside is that it takes a lot of work. It typically goes like this: You search the Web to find good sites that are complementary to yours, and then place a link to the site on your site. Next, you send a personalized e-mail to the site’s owner or webmaster asking them to reciprocate. You might also suggest where you think your link should reside on their site, and provide some wording that they could use.
Use link-management software. To avoid the drudgery of reviewing sites to find potential link partners, you can purchase software that does that — and more. iBusinessPromoter is one example, and has a free trial version you can download.
Join an automated link-exchange program. You can pay to have your site automatically included on all the Web sites of program members. A filtering option is typically available to exclude your site from link exchanges you don’t want. Check out LinksMaster.com for an example of this type of program.
Pay someone else to create your links. A number of companies specialize in finding and managing linking services, dramatically minimizing your involvement. LinkStrategy.com is one such service.

When the future is worrisome, people retreat to comfort — and that means home, family, and friends. In the coming months, more Americans will be spending their leisure time at home rather than going out. Fortunately, there are ways almost every entrepreneur can take advantage of this trend.

Can your product or service help people spend more time with their friends and families, or make that time a better experience?

If you sell housewares, for instance, marketing messages that show your products being used by a happy family playing board games or watching movies at home together can make your product more appealing.

If you own a housecleaning service, your ads should convey how spending a little bit of money on your company’s services gives parents time to spend on what’s really important — family time.

If you own a catering service, maybe now is the time to focus less on corporate events and more on intimate affairs. Use your marketing materials to show how your company can make that family gathering truly special.

If you own a beauty salon, offer a mother-daughter special. Mom’s more likely to get that pedicure if she feels like it’s also a bonding experience with her teenager.

Whatever your business, consider offering family discounts, or four items for the price of three, or “bring a friend” specials. If customers feel like your company offers a way to give their family or friends a hard-earned treat, you’ll assuage a little of their guilt about spending money — and they’re more likely to spend it with you.

Imagine you are cast away on a deserted island. You managed to save a fishing pole, a hoe and a barrel of corn seed. You need time to build a raft to escape, but you face a dilemma. Each day you face starvation and have two choices. The first choice is to go fishing, and assume you will catch enough fish to eat for a day. They may be tasty or not, maybe filling or not, but they will (barely) meet your nutrition needs. Or, you could start a farm, and since you have plenty of seed, at the end of the season, you will have food for a year. If you choose to fish, you have to fish all day every day and never have time to build the raft. Of course, you will not starve. If you decide to plant the crop, the yield is too far into the future for you to prevent starvation, but if implemented, you will have months of time to build a raft after the crop is ready.

The trick, of course, is to figure out how to plant the crop and reap the long term benefits rather than get locked into barely surviving by fishing every day. In the test world, we face the same dilemma. Having automation running is the equivalent of farming - there is little payoff today, and the amount of work necessary to build and maintain a viable automation system is very large. The most obvious alternative is manual testing, which is the equivalent of fishing. If I chose this path, each time a new build of OneNote was ready to test, I would need to run all my manual test cases again to verify nothing broke. If I have more than 8 hours of tests and get a new version to test daily, you can see how quickly I would get behind. My last estimate of how long a test pass would take for one of my features was 31 days - clearly, since we get builds much more often than once per month, I’d be in trouble very quickly if I relied on manual testing.

Fishing for bugs is a short term success - maybe you will catch the “great white shark” types of bugs, but you may also get distracted with the little fish. You won’t know until the end of the day, and even then, you won’t know what you missed. Farming is steadier - you know the expected yield, you will go through the crop daily with your hoe looking for weeds, but you will also know exactly how ripe the crop is every day and know when to expect the yield.

Obviously, the task at hand is to find more efficient ways to test which give me a high yield (to “farm” for bugs, rather than “fish,” if you will). I have a few more resources than Robinson Crusoe, though, but if I get caught up in the excitement or short term benefits of “fishing,” I might overlook them.

To read the rest of this entertaining and informative blog, click the link above.

On October 23, Office Labs, EE and UX Central hosted Seattle’s Interaction Design Association (IxDA) meeting on Microsoft’s Redmond, WA campus. We had great attendance of about 100 people who enjoyed delicious food, great conversations, and interesting speakers. The speakers were well received and the enthusiastic audience wouldn’t let them leave until well after the event.

The topics that were explored in the presentations were all about games:

Mark Long, founder and co-CEO of Zombie Studios illustrated parallels between story telling in cinema and games and described how to create immersive experience through narrative.

George Amaya, a user researcher at Microsoft Game Studios talked about his research into party and social games (yes, drinking helps to make the game better).

Daniel Cook, author of LostGarden.com talked about application design for saving a princess.

How can we help?

Over the next several months we’ll be rolling out to you as much timely information about job skills as we can. We’ll cover honing your skills so you excel at the job you already have or have in mind, as well as tips for finding and landing the job you want. We’ll serve up everything from resume templates and training courses to clever (sometimes even extreme) job search strategies—including ones we’ve used ourselves.

If you’re hiring, we’ll also provide or point you to resources that can help you make sure you hire the right people the first time.

It won’t all be grim–even in the midst of a job crunch we have to laugh (sometimes ruefully) and celebrate. So we’ll do what we can to keep it light, too.

This will be an ongoing project–one in which many of us here at Office Online will take part. We’ll ask for your feedback as we go, so we can tailor what we deliver to the situations you actually face. I.e., reality.

For starters, what, in your experience, is the most frustrating thing about looking for work?

To help small businesses prioritize and navigate the social media landscape, marketing expert John Jantsch and Microsoft Office Live Small Business (http://www.smallbusiness.officelive.com) have created a free eBook titled “Let’s Talk: Social Media for Small Businesses,” available for download at http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/socialmedia/.

Determining what new social media tools should be used by small businesses can be a daunting task for time-strapped entrepreneurs. However, as millions of consumers continue to incorporate these tools into their daily lives, it’s clear that social media is no passing fad. In fact, as individuals are embracing social media more than ever, so too are small businesses. According to the latest study by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners Inc., over the next 12 months about 500,000 small businesses will use social networking as a resource for advertising and promotional activities.

The book offers the following tips:

• A Web site is priority one. Social media tools can enhance and extend a small business’s Web presence and ultimately drive more visitors back to its Web site. If the business already has Web site, its content should be up to date and give visitors a clear call to action, such as who to contact or how to get more information. If the business doesn’t have a Web site, tools such as Office Live Small Business (http://www.smallbusiness.officelive.com) can help get one started for free.

• Bet on blogging. Blogging is the doorway to other social marketing and where businesses can likely get excellent return for the time invested. Why? Because search engines love blog content. Creating frequent, keyword-rich posts can help a business show up more frequently in search results, as well as convey the personality behind the business. A business can provide a range of content such as tips and information on its products and services, industry trends, customer profiles and more. Customers can then comment, allowing businesses to engage them in conversation and deepen relationships.

Click the above link to read more.

GOALS
After completing this course you will be able to:

Create and decorate a newsletter.
Create mailing labels for your envelopes.
Create some holiday decorations.

ABOUT THIS COURSE
This course includes:

Three self-paced lessons and three practice sessions for hands-on experience.
A short test at the end of each lesson; tests are not scored.
A Quick Reference Card you can take away from the course.

COURSE TEXT
The holidays are always a busy time of year. This time, get organized and let Word help you out.

Learn how to create and decorate fantastic newsletters that you can send in a mass mailing to your friends; run a mail merge to create labels for your envelopes; and have some fun making holiday decorations that you can get the whole family involved in.

To learn more about this course, read the overview in the center of this page or the table of contents in the left column. Then click Next to start the first lesson.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN
This course contains details on using mail merge to create labels; for more information about mail merge, see Use mail merge for mass mailings and more.

Many people try to keep in touch with friends and family during the holiday season. Writing a holiday newsletter is often a chore, but it can be fun if you use Word to lay it out, decorate it, and add pictures or family photos. You can also save time by using a ready-made template.