These are a look at the new Office 2007 icons. I have a copy of build 4228 of Office
and had a little look into the files with XN
Resource Editor. I found some other interesting things as well, including a few
PNG’s, AVI’s, some WSDL web services, javascript and the icons for all the different
filetypes! I am currently extracting these as .ico files and will post shortly…

I have to say that the icons are very nice and a big improvement on the Office 2003
icons. The only new one I don't have are Visio, Infopath and Money. You can see
pictures of these on Long’s
blog.

Here are the Word file icons:

Here are the Excel file icons:

Today I moved ScottSavage.Net onto the DasBlog platform. This was done mainly to embrace
such modern things as comments, trackbacks, multiple feeds, categorys, pingbacks etc.
These features are things that I wanted to code into my custom solution, however I
just never got the time…

Anyway this site design will make it easier for me to update my site and hopefully
provide you guys with features you will use and love! I will be migrating all the
old content across ASAP, it is just quite a big process (SQL Server -> .XML conversion).
One more script to write I guess!

• It is difficult for IT staff to understand what management need.

• Management has changing needs and should be empowered by tools.

• Management does not have the sufficient IT skills to manipulate a powerful interface.

Now of course there are some companies where these statements may not hold true, but
they do in my (limited) experience. Indeed what manager has time to sit down and prepare
a detailed breakdown of every statistic they will need? What manager has time to learn
a new interface and regularly tweak their statistics? What manager works closely with
their IT team on a day to day basis? The only answer to those questions is the Microsoft
development team. Products like BizTalk and Scorecard Manager cannot be implemented
successfully unless a massive re-training and business analysis effort is put in place.
With Microsoft not offering a large scale consulting divison this means partners need
to fill the gap. This is a very tough gap to fill. Can it ever be filled by a budget
product? Companies would be looking to cut costs wherever possible, and small companies
rarely have the cash (or time) for a detailed business analysis.

So what is the solution then? Software that ‘learns’ how the business works by itself?
Integrated tutorials similar to Vista’s new guided
help functionality? I think it is part of a wider management shift towards seeing
IT as a source of competitive advantage rather than just a business overhead. One
day smart managers will wake up and say “hey my companies value is locked up in one
massive database, maybe the guy who has the keys can help me unlock it?”. I would
love to see this go mainstream, who knows how long it will take (maybe as long as
it takes to create the killer business analysis UI?).