PJ Hough, Corporate Vice President of Program Management, Microsoft Office Division

Welcome to the Office Next blog.  I'm really excited to kick off this conversation and connect you with the engineers who are building future releases of Office-here, they'll discuss the improvements we make, the designs we choose and the data and feedback that inform our decisions.

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A common problem with email searches is that they can return too many results. For example, entering someone’s name may return matches where the name appears in parts of the message’s body even though you meant to look for messages from that person. It can be also hard to enter other criteria to help narrow your search, such as whether it has an attachment or that it has a particular category applied. Wouldn’t it be great if you could specify these parameters easily and get a better set of results - finding what you want even faster? Outlook 2010 makes it easy!

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This is a quick post to lay out the limits in Access 2007 and make a little clearer how the application works and how it scales. The first table below shows the limits of the database engine itself. Access Database Limits Access database (*.mdb or *.accdb) file size 2 gigabytes, including all objects in the database (data, forms, reports, indices, macros, modules, etc.) Total number of concurrent users 255. Note that the practical limit will likely be lower than this based on database design. Table...

In last week’s post, I talked at a high-level about some engine-level changes we’ve made to Access. This week, I’ll talk about changes to the security model that sits on top of that engine, and crosses into the UI as well. Starting next week, I’ll be going into the UI changes and all the other new stuff we’ve done in the product. Fewer modal prompts on boot (by default) and disabled mode In Access 11 based on the configuration of the machine when a user opened a database, he or she encountered 3...

Outlook is the premier communications tool to stay connected with colleagues, friends, and family. Your email messages, even from multiple accounts, are in one place. Connections and communication also happen on websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live. Through these sites, you find new contacts and reconnect with old ones. You can share who you are, what you think, what you are doing, and what you like or don’t like. So, it makes sense that you can now add your friends...

Hello Office 2010 beta users! My name is Michael Affronti and I'm a Program Manager on the Outlook product team here in Redmond. We now have the opportunity to talk with all of you about Outlook 2010 and the amazing features we've been hard at work on over the last two years! Over the next couple months we'll be revealing a bunch of the changes and updates in Outlook 2010 right here on the Outlook Team Blog. Let's start with your Inbox in Outlook 2010. For a long, long time your Inbox has been a...

There are a couple big announcements happening today for the Access community. In partnership with Channel 9 we are launching a new show called The Access Show . It will feature Ryan McMinn, myself and others from the team. We will talk in-depth about what is new in Access 2010 and share feedback from the community. Additionally, at the SharePoint Developers Conference we are disclosing more details about Access Services. Access Services is a new SharePoint 2010 feature that allows users to create...

Work is no longer 9-5, nor confined to a single location. People are out and about more than ever and need to be able to access their documents and data whenever and wherever they are. As we shared at SharePoint Conference in November, we've been working hard on new SharePoint mobile apps so you can access your information from a variety of devices.

Today, I'm excited to share an update on the progress we've made -from the new native apps and how SharePoint document access appears in the native Windows Phone Office Hub to investments in cross-device access across multiple browsers and a new backend feature called "Device Channels."

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It’s been a while since we’ve fired up the Q&A section. We’ve received a bunch of great questions the past few weeks about what features will be available with Microsoft Office 365, and I wanted to share the answers broadly. For those of you with further questions or who want the nitty gritty details, check out our Office 365 Service Descriptions . These documents cover each of the services in Office 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and Office Professional...

If your document is just a little bit longer than one page, how can you shrink it to fit?

We've seen customer questions asking where this feature is in Word 2010.

Answer: It's in the command well. And you can pluck it from there and add it to the ribbon.

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