I’ve braved running Office 2007 Beta 2 as my primary mail client ever since it came out, and I’ve been looking forward to this tech refresh for a while. It has been a bit of a bumpy ride, but some of the office features (like the to-do pane and categories) have made me stick with it.

Now, I’m almost happy with B2TR. Some of things that are fixed:

– The performance and reliability are much improved. Switching folders in Outlook is pretty much instant now (as it used to be in Outlook 2003).
– A minimized ribbon stays minimized (especially welcome in Outlook new mail messages).
– When minimized, you can still gain access to the menu contents and then it hides again. Perhaps if we just renamed the ribbon menus back to File, Edit etc. I’d be totally happy :)
– Double clicking the “Office” button (top left) closes the window.
– Fluffier look and feel.

Now, if only the Exchange monkeys at work would run up a couple of Exchange 2007 servers… :)

I’ve just enabled search autodiscovery on my site and it was remarkably easy to do. Navigating to an enabled site in IE7 results in the search box glowing orange – a check of the drop down box shows that my site’s search engine is now listed:

To enable it for your site, pay a vist to http://www.enhanceie.com/IE/SearchBuilder.asp first. This will generate the XML search description file for you.

Then, in the header of each page, add a relative link to this XML file. For example:

<link title=”alexlomas.com” rel=”search” type=”application/opensearchdescription+xml” href=”http://www.alexlomas.com/provider.xml“>

You can find more information on IE7’s search autodiscovery at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/07/527266…

And, as it’s all an open standard, I assume it’ll work with Firefox once they release v2.

This is a typical “Ooooh look, I’m using Microsoft’s new Live Writer software” post. Except it’s not quite.

I found that I had a problem in using though. When I tried to add the blog in, it would detect the blog type correctly, but give me an “Invalid Login” error. Now, I now that my login definitely works, because I use it. The logs didn’t show up any failed login attempts either.

Then I found that Movable Type has a separate password for API access, which was disabled. Gah! If you have the same problem with Windows Live Writer and Movable Type, follow these instructions:

Log into Movable Type.
Click on your username in the top navigational menu to go to your profile.
Scroll down to the bottom where you see API Password.
Input a password of your choice and save. For security reasons, it should be different from your normal author password.
Use this new password in live writer.

You can get Windows Live Writer from Microsoft.