Yes, the Office 12 NDA is lifted

An update on the earlier confusion about the Office NDA.

Robert Scoble has the definitive answer. Robert has left several comments in response to my earlier post, and he wrote this summary on his own site:

I checked with the folks who know over on Office 12. Here’s the deal:

Press (which include bloggers) are allowed to write about client apps – specifically Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, Visio, Project, OneNote and InfoPath. Products still under NDA include Groove and all our server products.

MVPs might be getting other rules, but here’s the person in charge: Sandhya Thodla. sthodla@microsoft.com. Anyone else trying to make NDA rules up should be sent to Sandhya. If you aren’t clear on any of this, please ask Sandhya before writing about Office 12.
Is that clear enough?

By the way, Frank Shaw is president of Waggener Edstrom in charge of the Microsoft account. Translation: if he says something is OK, it’s OK.

Thanks, Robert!

More Office 12 NDA confusion

[Update: I think we finally have a definitive answer. See this follow-up post.]

Frank Shaw is Executive Vice President and Worldwide Account Director of Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. Frank is President of Microsoft Accounts, Worldwide and has been a leader in the successful effort to help Microsoft forge great relationships with bloggers.

On Thursday, I wrote Frank an e-mail asking for confirmation of a report I read on another blog. He got back to me within minutes confirming that the report was true. I posted an entry here noting that bloggers like me are now free to write about the client applications in Office 12.

But hold the phone! It seems that not everyone at Microsoft got the memo. Earlier today, Patrick Schmid posted a comment on that item, throwing some cold water on my report:

An official MS post in the beta 1 newsgroups classified the above statement as rumor. The NDA has not been lifted. It is still in effect.

I can neither confirm nor deny that such a newsgroup post exists. If I did, it would be a violation of the NDA. I’ve sent an e-mail to Frank and to a spokesperson for the beta program, asking if they can please agree on a policy statement that everyone at Microsoft can stand behind.

In the meantime, I’ll hold off posting any of my thoughts on the Office 12 beta.

Frustrating, isn’t it?

No more veil of secrecy over Office 12

Josh at Windows Connected says he heard from Microsoft that it’s now OK to write about Office 12 Beta 1 client applications.

I checked in with Frank Shaw at Waggener-Edstrom, Microsoft’s PR agency, and he confirms that it’s true. Anyone on the Office 12 beta program is free to write about and publicly discuss any of the client applications in the suite. (Server components of Office 12 are still under NDA, however.)

This is great news. I’ve got a backlog of interesting stuff to write about and will start posting it tomorrow.

Sanitizing Word documents

A new document from the National Security Agency is getting a lot of link love, thanks to a recent mention by Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.

Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF, which has a publication date of December 13, 2005, covers an important topic, and the authors do a good job of getting across their primary message: If you plan to publish a document originally created in Word, you have to look very carefully for sensitive information that you don’t want to reveal. When you find it, you have to delete it, permanently, not just hide it or cover it up.

So far, so good. But I was taken aback by this statement:

The following steps were tested with MS Word 2000 and Acrobat 5.0 and 6.0. Other recent versions should work similarly.

“Should work similarly”? That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence. If you’re going to go to the trouble of producing a definitive set of guidelines for such a crucial subject, why use only one seven-year-old version of Word? How long could it have taken to test these procedures with Word 2002 (from Office XP) and Word 2003 (from Office 2003)? And why not give it a run-through with Acrobat 7.0, the current version?

More coverage of Office 12

Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Monitor has posted his first impressions of Office 12 Beta 1.

Unfortunately, because of the terms of the NDA I signed as an Office 12 beta tester, I place myself in serious danger of losing access to future builds of Office 12 if I do anything more than repeat what Joe wrote.

I’m growing increasingly frustrated with Microsoft’s stand on this issue. A dozen Microsoft bloggers are writing extensively about all the products in the Office family, and members of the press and analyst community are writing, apparently with no restrictions, on their experiences.

I’d love to tell you about my experiences with Office 12. But as a member of the beta test community, I can’t.

Scoble said he was going to talk to the Office group about this a month ago. The silence from Redmond is deafening.

The phony metadata scare

Gartner Group is out trying to stir up some controversy from a meaningless issue. eWeek explains:

A feature expected in the next version of Windows that will allow users to tag documents and other files with “metadata” could lead to embarrassing information disclosures if companies are not careful, according to research from Gartner Inc.

[…]

Gartner’s research note, “Plan to deal with metadata issues with Windows Vista,” published Wednesday, takes Microsoft to task for not designing security into the upcoming versions of Windows, code-named Vista, and Microsoft Office.

Those programs make it easy to attach keywords to documents, but they don’t make it clear that the keywords and other metadata can be viewed by anyone.

Sheesh, what planet have these guys been living on? Metadata issues have been around for years. (This long Knowledge Base article covers the nine-old Word 97.) Any company that hasn’t put policies and procedures in place to minimize the risk of sensitive data leaking out into the world just hasn’t been paying attention.

Gartner was trying to take advantage of a slow news week to try to manufacture a controversy where none should exist.

By the way, I read somewhere that Office 12 actually has some tools built in that allow you automatically scan document files for metadata, comments, deleted text, and other stray bits of data that can inadvertently reveal information you would prefer to leave private.

PC Magazine and PC World both got to write about these Office 12 features and even show screenshots. Unfortunately, I can’t do that because of an NDA agreement I signed. I wrote this a few weeks ago:

As I pointed out yesterday, the terms of the Office 12 confidentiality agreement prohibit me from discussing any aspect of the product. This information blackout applies to everyone except Microsoft employees, apparently.

And selected media outlets, too. Different rules apply to a handful of people and publications, most of them still in the dead-tree business.

Scoble agrees:

I’ll talk to the team about that. I think NDAs are often too restrictive and are ultimately counterproductive.

Hope they return your calls this week.

Update: Bruce Schneier had some interesting thoughts on the subject back in November.

Entering Double Beta Land

Yesterday, Microsoft released the December Customer Technology Preview (CTP) release of Windows Vista. I’ve just installed it on my test computer, and so far it’s the best build I’ve seen. Setup went without a hitch, I’ve established user accounts, connected to the network, installed a few programs, and confirmed that IE7 works.

I also installed Office 12 on this computer. Alas, that’s all I can say on that subject.

I’ll keep adding things for the rest of this week. If all goes well, I’ll start using Windows Vista and Office 12 for everyday work beginning next week.

Scoble can talk about Office 12, but I can’t

Scoble had this to say today:

I’ve been using Office 12 for the past few days and, I can’t go back. The Excel pivot table feature alone is worth paying hundreds of dollars. Alone.

And tables are finally really cool. PowerPoint is actually something I’ll use again. Creating a chart there is sure a lot nicer than I’ve been able to do on any Web site.

Steve also hasn’t been paying attention to our secret weapon: workflow. Try to stick that in your Linux server and smoke it!

And now I see there’s new extensibility in OneNote 12.

I’m a card-carrying member of the Web 2.0 Working Group, but there isn’t anything as cool as OneNote coming out yet. Sorry. Not even close.

I’d love to say the same, except I can’t. As I pointed out yesterday, the terms of the Office 12 confidentiality agreement prohibit me from discussing any aspect of the product. This information blackout applies to everyone except Microsoft employees, apparently.

Now, I know some very senior members of the Office group read this blog, so this is addressed to them: Loosen up! Give us a chance to give you some feedback in public. Sure, you’ll hear a few criticisms, some of which might make you want to change the product. You’ll also get a priceless boost in public awareness of a product that has the potential to be very, very popular.

Double Beta Land

For the past week or so I’ve had my head down building the outlines for Windows Vista Inside Out and Special Edition Using Office 12. Experience has taught me that the only way to write an excellent book about a new version of Office or Windows is to live with it – “dogfooding,” as the ‘Softies say. So, for the next nine months or so, I’ll be living not just in Beta Land but in Double Beta Land.

Running a beta over a beta? Am I crazy? Well, yes. What’s going to make life here even crazier is that the nondisclosure agreements associated with both programs are very different. The Windows Vista team says I can write about and show screen shots of anything in the product. The Office team says I’m skating on thin ice just telling you that I’m in the Office 12 beta program. I can work around that restriction by limiting my posts to things I read on other, publicly available sites, but still … I wish the Office team would relax those rules.

So, expect to read lots of stuff about Windows Vista in the coming months, and a lot less about Office.

A useful Office 2003 troubleshooting tool

If you use Office 2003, you should know about the Office 2003 Local Installation Source Tool. You may never need to use it, but if you do run into a problem with the Local Installation Source (LIS), it can save you hours of frustration. (If you use Office XP or Office 2000, see the note at the end of this post.)

A brief explanation: When you install Office 2003, all of the setup files are copied to your hard drive in a hidden folder called Msocache. This uses about 400MB of space but allows you to repair your Office installation or add new features without having to track down the original CD.

The problem occurs if the Msocache folder gets corrupted, or if you delete it the wrong way (using Windows Explorer), or if the disk on which it’s located becomes unavailable for any reason. Yesterday, I bumped into this issue when I tried to export a list of addresses from Outlook. As part of the process, Outlook wanted to install a converter, but the LIS was nowhere to be found – it had originally been on an external drive that I had reformatted for use on another computer. The result? I received a string of error messages , most in the format “Error 1327. Invalid Drive: f:\” and was unable to complete the export, even when I made the Office CD available.

The LIS Tool fixed the problem. I was able to find a copy of the Msocache folder on another computer, copy it to my C: drive, and use the tool to point Office to the new location. You can also use it to enable or disable LIS.

A bit esoteric, but extremely handy.

(Note: If you get an error 1327 with Office 2000, see Knowledge Base article 217666. To resolve this problem with Office XP, see Knowledge Base article 290356.)