Microsoft Office 2010 beta and Outlook 2010 review

I had hopes for Outlook 2010 and its conversation view to improves the tracking of e-mail conversations. The problem is that it is just based on the email subject and I often have multiple different conversations but with the same subject. I really hope Microsoft makes this works better before the final release or this feature will be a big fail.
Who replied to who? Outlook 2010 makes it even easier to tell who replied to who inside of a conversation. Click on any individual message inside of a conversation to see a dotted line that shows which messages it replies to. This can be useful when a reply comes into a conversation that actually responded directly to an earlier message in the conversation.
Reply and Reply All are smarter too, and will always reply to the latest message in the conversation. If you happen to open an older message in the conversation and hit Reply – say a flagged mail from the ToDo Bar, for example – Outlook 2010 has you covered with a new clickable warning will appear that allows you to instantly jump to the latest message in the conversation.
The new Clean Up feature seems to be disabled but if it works it will be great. “enable you to save valuable inbox space by turning dozens of e-mails into just a few conversations using the Clean Up feature”
It just need to be smart enough to handle that many make inline comments on previous emails in the history.
One good thing is that I can now make a custom follow up flag if I select multiple emails.
Search has been improved! This is big for me as it fails too often to find correctly in Outlook 2007. I also see that performance is much better.
Final and official release of Office 2010 is slated for the first half of 2010.
Download for Office 2010 Beta.

FLEXnet Licensing Side-by-Side Hotfix for Autodesk products

This hotfix repairs a problem that occurs during the side-by-side installation of two different licensing products. During the installation of stand-alone licensing products with previously installed network licensing products, the following error occurs indicating that the installation failed: 1: 5 2: Failed to load FNP_ACT_Installer.dll. 3: 126

Knowledge Base document: FLEXnet Licensing Side-by-Side Hotfix

This applies to most all Autodesk 2010 products from AutoCAD 2010 to Revit Architecture 2010.

SmartPurger 3.0 for AutoCAD scripting now with 64-bit support

Finally SmartPurger 3.0 is released with a refreshed look and available as 32-bit and 64-bit application making it possible to use together with AutoCAD 32-bit and 64-bit on both Windows 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems.

Many customer uses SmartPurger because of its ease to purge different objects within drawings/DWG files to make them smaller.

Others uses SmartPurger to process scripts (SCR or LSP) on thousands of drawings unattended over night or weekend as it does not halt for dialog boxes or corrupted drawings.

The free trial without license file is fully functional except that you can only batch process 3 drawings per session to give you the chance to confirm that the program works as expected. When you purchase you can use SmartPurger with no limitations.

Contact us for a license to activate the time limited fully functional version for free.

Microsoft SyncToy updated for Windows 7

Microsoft’s freeware SyncToy 2.1 is available now.

Major new features and improvements in SyncToy 2.1:

• Dynamic Drive Letter Assignment: Drive letter reassignment will now be detected and updated in the folder pair definition.
• True Folder Sync: Folder creates, renames and deletes are now synchronized for all SyncToy actions.
• Exclusion Filtering Based on Name: File exclusion based on name with exact or fuzzy matching.
• Filtering Based on File Attributes: The ability to exclude files based on one or more file attributes (Read-Only, System, Hidden).
• Unattended Folder Pair Execution: Addressed issues related to running scheduled folder pairs while logged off.
• Folder Pairs With Shared Endpoints: Ability for folder pairs associated with the same or different instances of SyncToy to share end-points.
• Command line enhancements: Added the ability to manage folder pairs via the command line interface.
• Re-Architect Sync Engine: The SyncToy engine has been rearchitected to provide scalability and the ability to add significant enhancements in future releases.
• Sync engine is also more robust insomuch that many single, file level errors are skipped without affecting the entire sync operation.
• Sync Encrypted Files: Sync of Encrypted files works when local folder and files are encrypted, which addresses the common scenario involving sync between local, encrypted laptop PC folder and remote, unencrypted desktop PC folder.
• 64-Bit Support: SyncToy now has a native 64-bit build (x64 only) for 64-bit versions of Windows.
• Folder pair rename
• Sub-folder Exclusion Enhancements: Descendents created under excluded sub-folders are automatically excluded. Usability improvements for the sub-folder exclusion dialog.
• Folder Pair Metadata Moved: Folder pair metadata removed from MyDocuments to resolve any issues with server-based folder pair re-direction setup.
• Setup Improvements: Integrated setup with single self-extracting archive file and no extra downloads if you already have .NET Framework 2.0 installed. Enabled silent install for the SyncToy Installer file.

AutoCAD Automation Tools 3.0 released

AutoCAD Automation Tools 3.0 makes it easy to find and replace attribute values on multiple drawings in an automated way. Bricscad 10 is also a new supported platform.

Here is a short description about the program.

Multiple drawings can be automatically created from a typical drawing or updated based on a control file that can be created with an Excel template. Make the changes in Excel and let the program do all the work for you. This is a real time saver if you need to make adjustments on hundreds or thousands of drawings.

Optionally an AutoLISP file (*.lsp;*.vlx;*.fas) can be loaded for each drawing. Each drawing can use a separate AutoLISP file if needed. This gives you almost unlimited flexibility when it comes to what task you want to automate.

Example of usages: Add a stamp block; insert a title blog; update text in the title block; insert text, block or xref; change text or attribute values and more. Change all external references (xrefs) from absolute paths to relative paths for archive purpose. Find and replace attribute or text values.

Free trial is available from the AutoCAD Automation Tools website.

Close License Borrowed Dialog boxes automatically freeware

Do you use a borrowed license and want to prevent the "License Borrowed" message from showing up every single time i start AutoCAD?

The license on this machine has been borrowed from a license server. You can continue to use this product during the borrow period without a connection to the license server. The borrow period for this license expires on: … To access the product again after the license expires, you must reconnect to a license server.

With this freeware CloseLicenseBorrowedDialogs for AutoCAD and verticals it is possible. It will automatically close this dialog box for you.

Tip: It is possible to get it started together with AutoCAD if you create a BAT, CMD or VBS file and use calls like this:
start "" "C:\jtb\CloseLicenseBorrowedDialogs.exe"
start "" "C:\Program\AutoCAD 2010\acad.exe" /p MyProfile

Other languages supported upon request.

Available as a freeware AutoCAD App on Autodesk Exchange Apps for AutoCAD 2012 and newer.

Symboldatei auswählen Dialog automatisch geschlossen

German AutoCAD is also supported now in CloseShapeDialog. Dialog boxes named “Symboldatei auswählen” are also closed as well as “Select Shape File”. Freeware available here.

Other languages supported upon request.

Autodesk Sponsors McGraw-Hill Construction BIM SmartMarket Reports

For those that want to start with BIM this report is worth reading. I did read through it quickly and it seems like the report is valid and correct also according to my experience in this field.

Some advices. To BIM is not an on and off switch. You don’t need to reach 100% BIM at once. Don’t BIM too fast, if internal and external processes don’t follow you might get in trouble and find that BIM is more a problem than a solver.

The report is a summary of a survey that was given to approximately 3,000 architects, engineers, contractors, and business owners across the United States and Canada. See the results of BIM adoption, usage, impact and infrastructure, and review case studies and interviews.

Download the PDF: McGraw-Hill SmartMarket Report: The Business Value of BIM

McGraw_Hill Construction has an ongoing survey to gather some of these requirements from the design community.  If you haven’t done so already, please participate in the online survey – it only takes a few minutes.