Microsoft has relaunched their Microsoft Office Labs website with a completely new redesign using the Silverlight development platform.
Milo Riano walks us through the transition and options of availability in his recent article about the change.
There’s quite a bit of interesting tools available from the site that you can use to increase your productivity in Office or just give yourself some new tools to help make Office a little bit more than it is currently.

I just saw this commercial while watching TV tonight. Do you think it’s really this easy? Or, do kids just pick up things related to technology much easier and faster than us older people realize?
Who’s using Windows Live Photo Gallery. What do you think? Is it this easy?

I’m visiting Orlando, FL this week with my family and enjoying the magic that is Walt Disney World.
Awhile back I wrote about using Microsoft Office Live Small Business as a potential business solution for smaller companies, but wasn’t sure how people were really using it or what their results were.
Fitting with my current travel, I saw this case study about how a travel agency has used Microsoft Office Live Small Business as a resource to communication and service their clients. The example is made-up, but the suggestions and solutions are very real. I’ve got 7 years of employment …read more

Starting up a company? Microsoft BizSpark can help
If you’ve a small start-up company with less than $1M in revenue and haven’t been around for more than 3 years, you may be able to get some assistance pushing your endeavors into the future by grabbing some help from Microsoft.
They have launched a service to help small businesses start using some of their new Windows Azure and Mesh services without any type of barrier to entry. Not too bad of a gig I might say.
You can grab more information at www.microsoft.com/bizspark and www.microsoftstartupzone.com if you’re interested.
BizSpark …read more

If you haven’t heard, Microsoft is now letting you earn money by using Microsoft Live Search instead of Google (or any other search site for that matter).
The only catch is that you also can’t be the type of person that uses Firefox (or any other browser except Internet Explorer) as their browser of choice.
To earn value for your searches and join the SearchPerks! promotion you must have Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher to participate. Copy this URL and paste it into Internet Explorer:
http://www.getsearchperks.com
Sign up for SearchPerks! and start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web …read more

Microsoft Office Live Small Business now has over one million users. Is that much of an accomplishment nowadays with so many people on the web?
I also wonder how many people are actually using the service.
Do you use Microsoft Office Live Small Business?
I’ve got an account but I don’t use for it anything. I’m not really sure why I don’t. It may be because I’ve got Office 2007 Ultimate and don’t need anything else? Anything I do online I don’t think I really need what’s being offered by the service. My clients haven’t really had a need for it …read more

It seems the more questions I have about a variety of Microsoft topics, the less helpful Microsoft Help is actually becoming to me.
It’s been quite awhile (since broadband Internet?) that I’ve relied on the built-in Help information for a Microsoft product. More often than not I usually type the error message into a Google Search and find the answer that way.
I’m not too concerned about the in-software help not being as robust as it could be, and directing more people to the web for full-details and advanced user questions. I don’t think though that Microsoft should be pleased with …read more

Have you heard about the Mojave Experiment?
Welcome to the "Mojave Experiment." What do people think of Windows Vista when they don’t know it’s Windows Vista? We disguised Windows Vista as codename "Mojave," the "next Microsoft OS," so regular people who’ve never used Windows Vista could see what it can do – and decide for themselves.
I LOVE IT! How much perception of what people think about Windows Vista is because of what they’ve read or heard from the media about the product. Much of the critique has come from bloggers and other individuals in the tech community that haven’t enjoyed …read more

Was it a case of bad planning, low expectations or just a complete oversight? Did anyone think about how popular Microsoft’s Photosynth application from Microsoft Live Labs was actually going to be?
When I talked about Photosynth back in May I barely gave it any thought at all.
Perhaps the most famous of them is the Photosynth application. This takes a collection of images from the same place and stitches them together into a sort of 3D virtual image of the location.

I thought the technology itself sounded like it would be interesting, but I didn’t really think it would gain much …read more

I believe I’ve now tried to watch videos on the NBCOlympics website more times than the number of medals that the United States has won so far in the games.
I thought I was getting closer this morning as I was back at the office and wanted to have some live video playing on the computer next to me. Everything seemed to install fine until I got the message above.
I’ve exceeded the number of attempts allowed to access live Olympic video? Hmmm, it’s surely only been attempts because I’ve yet to actually succeed at watching live video from the site. …read more