29 May 2004

Anyone planning a migration to Access 2003, needs to take a look at this when its released! Joe reports: We announced this week the Microsoft Office Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit which will be available around the time that Office 2003 SP1 is released this summer. In marketing-speak: the Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit is a set of tools and documentation designed to help organizations discover, evaluate and convert their Access databases as part of the upgrade process. Sounds useful? You bet! Companies considering moving to a new version ... Companies considering moving to a new version of Office have not had good tools to help them understand the how to manage Access solutions. This toolkit will help IT understand what type of Access databases they have out there and will provide guidance as to what might be done with them – upgrade, migrate to SQL server, keep as is. 5:19:15 PM      comment [] RSS Extended Attributes I blogged here and here about my ideas for the future of RSS and similar XML based technologies and how I use them myself.  I then came across some stuff on RSS extended attributes, and the support for them in NewsGator and outlook 2003.  So I built a little demo, here’s how:   First I took a copy of my RSS feed and put it here I edited it to add a private namespace <rss version="2.0" xmlns:steve="http://example.org/cool"> Then I added an extended attribute Technology to about half of the entries in the feed, for some I set the technology to DATA, and for others to DESKTOP, like this <steve:Technology>Desktop</steve:Technology> Look at the actual RSS file for more details If you want you can subscribe to this feed for your own demo, but its not very impressive, so I encourage you to build your own! Next in NewsGator, select the folder you want and pick Options Then go to the render tab and the column mappings dialog. Add a new namespace, in my case its prefix is Steve and its URI is http://example.org/cool The add a column, name Technology, Type Text and Xpath originalItem/item/steve:Technology Then create a folder under your RSS root folder called Steve Richards Test Blog In Outlook click on the new folder and right click on the column headings and pick customize.  Add a new custom column called Technology.  Fields -> User Defined Fields In Folder -> New Field Then subscribe to my feed, it should get delivered into the customised folder The custom attribute should then be displayed for the feed items as they arrive, you can sort, group by etc on this attribute Here's what it looked like in outlook in the end  Now that was a lot of work for not much gain, but that’s how it is with hand crafted demo’s.  If the RSS feeds were already created, and the client side UI a bit more integrated, (i.e. no separate NewsGator and Outlook configuration), and the UI already understood the most common extended attribute sets then you can see that the experience would be pretty rich.   I guess this is exactly where MS want to take us with WinFS and the Longhorn shell, so its worth thinking around the concepts now.    The examples for how to use this stuff that immediately spring to mind are RSS feeds for:   Documents libraries Film reviews Book reviews Scheduled events Price lists  Poking around the web I found the following:   A proposal of an extended attribute set for scheduled events A simpler proposal for events There are quite a few standard attributes to play with as well, not sure if they work the same though, if at all as they don’t have a namespace This is where I got the idea from 12:39:45 AM      comment []

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