Another chance to watch Garage Series Live!

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Five shows into the series, we've looked at what your options are, what's changed and what's new with the new Office. We threw skydiver Fully Sik out of a plane to test if Office 365 ProPlus could be installed during 90 seconds of free fall; we took a look at the new Office telemetry to help you optimize your Office configuration; and we've explored identity and data access with the new user-based Office and caught up with Zero Day and Trojan Horse Sci-Fi author and industry renowned cyber-security expert, Mark Russinovich on the security model for online services. We even performed the great race of Office installs.

We've received a lot of your questions along the way so, for our sixth show, we changed gears to present a live 60-minute episode of the Garage Series Live! on real world adoption tips and tricks with live Q&A. If you missed the show you can see it again here.

For one, our guests. We were joined by friends from our early Office adopters program: Marvin Correa from Sephora, Patrick Wirtz from Walsh Group and Sebastian Stein from HhpBerlin. Journalist, author and blogger Paul Thurrott from winsupersite and our Lead Test and Deployment engineers, John Hoegger and Jefferson Criddle also joined in the conversation. This was one of the first times that we've had early adopters of Office 365 latest technologies, as we have only really been in market with them for a little over a month. Paul, Patrick, Marvin and Sebastian were awesome to work with and brought a wealth of adoption experience to the show. They were all looking to deal with the trends of users bringing in their own devices, multiple devices per user, high demand for touch capabilities with the introduction of tablets, evolving mobility requirements, providing Office services to seasonal workers and improving communication services across Windows and non-Windows devices.

Paul challenged himself and our hosts to have him appear as a skydiver or in a clown suit in an earlier winsupersite.com post. This was to pay homage to our first ever XStream install, where we install Office within 90 seconds of free fall. You can see the result, which provided one of the more comic moments of the show and our favorite tweet:

"World, I can die now. For I have seen everything. @thurrott+jumpsuit@office garage" -Travis Lowdermilk

Paul also arranged for a special recording of Windows Weekly where he quizzes Leo Laporte to see if he can provide the right answers to the most commonly misunderstood questions about the new Office as a service with Office 365 ProPlus. We didn't quite capture the true outcome as we introduced Paul on the show, so watch to see how Leo really scores out of 5.

If you caught the show or watch it now, you'll see that we ended with a lightning trivia round to challenge the knowledge of our guests in an East versus West coast trivia fight. Part of the fun of live broadcasting was that because we were running overtime we didn't manage to declare the winner of the competition - the East couch. Congratulations Paul, John and Patrick!

We have a bigger special in store, where we subject co-host Yoni Kirsh to high-G aerobatics in Australia to see whether Office can install before he loses his lunch. Join us next episode to see what happens.

Be sure to mark your calendar for new episodes and learn more at www.microsoft.com/garage where you can discover additional resources and check out the complete archive of all previous Garage Series shows.

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Review: Convert almost any entertainment file to another format with free Adapter

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Adapter With so many devices and so many OSs, you may be done with fun if you can't convert an entertainment file format. Adapter converts audio, image video, and even game files to keep the good times rolling.

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Just think for a moment how many devices and operating systems you use in a day. Now you may jump from a Windows PC to a Mac (or vice versa). Or use an iPhone or Blackberry?  Or maybe you use an Android or Kindle Fire? The fact is that with so many systems, being able to do quick efficient no-fuss file conversions to suit the platform you are on has become an absolute-must. This is why Adapter should be on your shortlist of apps to install on your system.

Adapter is made by the same company that brought out the awesome iExplorer, and it comes in PC and Mac editions. The interface of the PC version I tested is straightforward and intuitive, and adding files is as simple as drag-and-drop with your mouse. There are no long complicated user manuals to memorize, no complicated audio codecs to install, no screen resolutions to remember in advance. Adapter is a good example of software that allows you to just add the source file and click the button to go.

After choosing the type of file and loading the source file, a range of options present themselves to you including the output file format, destination folder and more.

The software has numerous different functions. It can handle video (including DVD files and Flash), images (including animated GIFs) and audio (including iPhone ringtones). It can even convert files for games consoles such as the Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo Wii. To begin, just choose your format at the top (video, audio, image) then either press the "add" button or drag the file into the main area with your mouse, and drop. Then in the top toolbar, choose the file format you want to convert to, check that the other options are as you want them. You can more or less keep them as they are, with the possible exception of the output directory. I wouldn't recommend fiddling with the default settings unless you know what you are doing. Then press the "start" button and wait for the file to be converted.

On the whole, Adapter converts files really fast, unless of course you are converting a huge video file which will take slightly longer. But if you are converting say an MP3 file or a YouTube video, then it doesn't take very long at all.

Adapter also lets you edit an MP3 file and convert it into an m4r file, so you can send it to iTunes as an iPhone ringtone. When you have dragged the source audio file into Adapter, look to your right and use the sliders to choose the size of file you want converted into the ringtone. Then choose m4r as the output format and away you go again. You can even tell Adapter to send the completed file directly to iTunes on your computer.

If you are using Adapter to make an iPhone ringtone, you can use this cropping tool to get the right length of file.

The final feature Adapter offers is a lightweight browser which you can use to go to YouTube and download videos directly to your Adapter installation. From there you can download as a video or extract the audio. Even though Adapter told me that the browser was "outdated" and "no longer supported," it still worked perfectly fine.

The only real con that was readily apparent was that trying to convert MP4 files resulted in the app crashing. It seems as if Adapter doesn't like converting MP4 files at all. The developer maintains however that this should not happen, and was unable to replicate the problem.

If you were planning to use Adapter for converting MP4's, and you encounter the same problem as I did, there's an easy fix: Use SUPER instead, which converts MP4 files to AVI in a flash.

There are lots of file converters on the market, some good, many bad. Adapter definitely firmly falls into the good column and is worth using, especially considering that it is free. You can't argue with that.

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You always want to know another shortcut (video)

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AppId is over the quota

Shortcuts are like jokes in a comedy club: they’re great when you hear them, but can’t remember them the next day. So, let’s try to refresh your memory—or give you some new memories—of 3 nifty shortcuts to move around and find your stuff in the Excel.

I did this, and a few more videos, for the Small Business Group. You can find more videos, plus many more helpful tidbits at the Microsoft Business Hub.

--Doug Thomas

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Adobe Presenter Appiness… Again with another example!

August 28, 2012

After the two wonderful posts by Pooja and Allen, I thought of creating one more eLearning module explaining the new features of Adobe Captivate 6. The question was, how do I make it interesting? My job became easier with enhanced Adobe Presenter 8. So I’ve used the features of Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Presenter to create this course… go ahead and view it on your iPad! Want to know how I achieved this? Read through the post… step-by-step…

Experience the course here: http://my.adobeconnect.com/cp6new2/

Step 1: Modify the Master Slides – An important part of this course is the consistent look and feel for the course screens. So, I created a background image using Adobe Photoshop and imported the JPEG into the Master Slide. This allowed me to have the same background image for all the screens. Next, I modified the text placeholders for fill/stroke and font settings.

Step 2: Create the Slides – If you observe the course, there is a slide listing the key new features (Menu), there are slides explaining each feature and then there are question slides. For the Menu slide, I created thumbnails of the features and used the Text Box to add the headers. For the content slides, I created the images using Adobe Photoshop, and used the ‘Character’ feature of Adobe Presenter 8 to give the human touch to the slide, and added the feature description. By the way, if you have not used the built-in characters yet, please do try them… they are an amazing set of human and animated characters! For the questions slides, I used Multiple-choice and True/False question types. As of now, only these two types of questions are supported in Adobe Presenter Mobile App.

Step 3: Add Audio and Animate – For the Menu Slide, I first added the animations from PowerPoint, and later recorded the audio. The enhanced UI for recording the audio makes it so easy to record and sync animations… Try it out! Same steps were applied for content slides as well. Did you know that we can view the slide notes during recording? So I don’t have to worry on missing out on those technical jargons

Step 4: Enable reporting and Publish – Now that the course is ready, I need to enable the reporting right? Did that through Manage Quiz > Reporting. In this case the distribution channel I’m using is Adobe Connect so enabled the reporting for Adobe Connect. Then, published it to Adobe Connect to view it on my iPad.

Hope you liked this course, please let me know your thoughts through the comments!

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