Huge list of free Microsoft software is now available. There is something for everyone, developer tools, screen savers, themes, games, tools for debugging and even Office Account 2007!

Video created by the people at GMail on why to use it. Still it's better than lying you your customers.

Next week I plan to take the dive and install Vista on my work laptop. Few reasons for it
1) I finish my current project Tuesday so I have a little bit of extra time next week while I shuffle to a new project.
2) My current work requires me to use .Net 1.1 and thus VS 2003 while going forward I see no more VS 2003 in my life ;)

And then I saw this post today about how SP2 for SQL Server 2005 should be out Monday which means proper Vista support (from what memory serves SP 1 doesn't have it). Must be sign to do it :)

Last week I posted about the floating panels option, well there is another option for panels, that being: hiddenPanel

This setting causes the application not to show at all. Interesting ideas around this...

Debugging is not a tool, it's a methodology. Saw it on a blog yesterday, but I didn't think to copy down the name :(

If you one of the South Africans out there who classifies themselves as presently disadvantaged while discussing the current employement policies from govt while drinking coffee at a shop in Nelson Mandela Square at 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon, then you also likely will complain about the road name changes. Well it appears if all is not lost for you, Live Local hasn't updated it's references to street names ;)

Found this very true. Reposted from Noah Coad's blog: A good friend will tell you what you want to hear. A true friend will always tell the truth. A good friend seeks to talk with you about your problems. A true friend seeks to help you with your problems. A good friend will be there for you all through school. A true friend will be there till the day you die. A good friend will bail you out of prison. A true friend will be sitting next to you saying "damn that was fun!". A good friend brings a bottle of wine to your party. A true friend comes early to help you cook and stays late to help you clean. A good friend hates it when you call after they've gone to bed. A true friend asks you why you took so long to call. A good friend wonders about your romantic history. A true friend could blackmail you with it. A good friend thinks the friendship is over when you have an argument. A true friend calls you after you had a fight. A good friend, when visiting, acts like a guest. A true friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself. A good friend has never seen you cry. A true friend has shoulders soggy from your tears. A good friend doesn't know your parents' first names. A true friend has their phone numbers in his address book. A good friend expects you to always be there for them. A true friend expects to always be there for you. A good friend is someone you enjoy hanging out with. A [true] friend is someone you need. (Neil Diamond, Heartlight)

So if you are bored and have 5min to spare you can run through the which office application are you quiz. I ended up being Excel...go figure?!

I ended up typing this over MSN to a few people today (don't ask why) and I thought this is entirely possible and amazingly easy to customize MSCRM to do this (hell half a days work at most). The sales vibe is partly inspired by the Microsoft CRM Demo Days happening between the 13th and 15th Feb at Village Walk which we are involved in. I haven't posted this to the Information Worker blog since some people may not appriate my style of humour. New MSCRM ad: Are you a hitman, assassin, or garden variety serial killer? Do you spend too much time trying to plan murders? Do you have problems identifing the right match of critiea for your next murder? Well fear no more, with MSCRM 3.0 you can easily track all your potential victums with details specific to each of them and then using the powerful scheduling system easily plan that murder to be home in time to watch Friends or wash your mother. And wait, if you order in the next 15min we will preload your MSCRM installation with all your family members details!!! Order now!

You know what is really great about SharePoint 2007 (which www.informationworker.co.za runs on) vs Drupal which this site runs on? I can type my content up in Word 2007 or copy and past from Outlook to Word 2007 and publish directly (Office button -> Publish -> Blog) and I get full rich text editing on it, the ability to save it and work on it later, the ability to spell check. Here I need to login to the site, navigate to create content, navigate to create blog and type away. If I need to do a link I need to the <a href> tags (hell to get that to appear I had to &lt; to the the angle brackets). The expierence is just that much better.

I know there are add-ons for Drupal that give me rich editing but that requires more work to install them :(

I have seen some users post that it is possible to use Word 2007 to publish to Drupal, but for the life of me I can not figure out how to. There is no compatible format listed in the blog providers or under other.

Once again SharePoint 2007 + Word 2007 means the user does not need to know about any of the things like Drupal modules or special blog providers. It is simplier, better (?), faster ;)