Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Office 2007 is getting a lot of kudos today thanks to a post by Anil. When I first saw the ribbon I was like, Barf… however that was a long time ago, and it has improved a hell of a lot. In fact I'm surprised at the number of improvements they've continued to make during the “beta” period.
Today I find that the Ribbon really unlocks much of the hidden power of Office. It helps you make your documents really look professional, which was almost impossible to do before (unless you used Mac Office for charting and such). Of of my favorite features is just the fact that the WordMail toolbars don’t get screwed up any longer.
Anyhoo, one of the best things the team has done is the Send a Smile Tool. Every product should have a Send a Smile tool. I’ve started to use it whenever I find something I like or something that frustrates me. It’s a really amazing way of capturing user feedback without requiring the user to go to a web site and get lost in user feedback hell.
Jensen Harris also gets my vote for best MSFT blog. Back in the day, Jensen was actually the Lead PM for the Mac version of Outlook (when it was developed by the Outlook Team, and before there was Entourage or Exchange support in Entourage). It’s great to see the kind of positive impact he’s having on both the product and the image of Office.