Office 2010 RC – Activation Issues

So, I installed Office 2010 RC this morning… Really looking forward to seeing what has changed / become more stable.

 

When starting Outlook, I then got a message indicating that I needed to Activate the Product. No Problem, I simply clicked ‘Activate over the internet’, and waited for the success message as before…

 

Two errors:

 

– Firstly, I got an ‘Unexpected Error has Occured’ message.

Not a very useful message, but it turns out that the power in our server room had gone down, and hence I had no internet connection.

Easily solved, I just popped in next door to Microsoft, hooked up, and tried again.

This is when I ran into error 2.

 

– When activating over the internet, I got a message indicating that the key I had used had been activated too many times, and I needed to use another key or call the contact centre.

Again, no big deal right. Simply get a key from connect, go to File –> Help, and change the product key (as every MS article indicates you can do)

Well, that link simply isn’t there on my install!

 

So, to change a product key, I had to go to Add/Remove Programs. Change the Office 2010 install. And then I got the option to change the product key.

Ran through that wizard, and everything is working 100% now.

Business Intelligence – ala Microsoft 2010 – Part I

For those that haven’t heard all the news yet … this year is going to see some of the most exciting product launches from Microsoft; particularly in the Business Intelligence space.

Now, Business Intelligence is a far bigger
concept than simply a sexy front end tool, or a super quick ETL tool. Rather it is that sum of the parts that creates a magic whole, and hopefully helps business people grow their businesses.

To support this, the Microsoft Business Intelligence picture includes three main products, all of which are getting new versions in 2010; namely

• Office 2010
• Sharepoint 2010
• SQL Server 2008 R2

I’ve had the opportunity of playing with all of these products in pre-Beta and now in Beta releases, and have seen them improve with each new release. The key new features in each of these products that have got me the most interested include:

1. Excel Slicers for Pivot Tables
   1. No more horrible unrelated drop down lists in Excel. Slicers really open up your data in an intuitive and ‘touch-ready’ way.
2. Reporting Services Map Control
   1. Wonderful method to display geographical information, within the context of Reporting Services. No custom code. No messy data connections. Flexible, and very useful.
3. Master Data Services
   1. One of the features that gets very little attention in the SQL space; but has great potential to help businesses manage their critical business data. No more messy Excel spread sheets, or phone calls to IT to update that mapping table.
4. Decomposition Tree
   1. Still one of the most powerful visualisations for performing root cause analysis. Available within PerformancePoint Services. (Would love to see it introduced into Excel as well…)
5. Powerpivot
   
   1. No Microsoft Business Intelligence blog would be complete without a reference to this wonderful in-memory tool. A plug-in into Excel 2010 as a fully-fledged modelling tool, as well as a Sharepoint feature allowing for online access and sharing. A must have for every financial manager J

These are just a handful of the vast array of features that are coming from Microsoft this year. I would encourage you to download the public betas and start becoming familiar with these products.

Sharepoint 2010 – download

Office 2010 – download

SQL 2008 R2 – download