Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh (B2TR)

The much awaited TR is here. I was getting quite sick of killing my Outlook process everytime I woke my computer from a hibernate.

I downloaded the Office 2007 TR (about 400 mb), this afternoon. I then went ahead and installed it. The installation process was nothing more than accepting the licensing agreement and clicking next. The entire update however took about 60 minutes on my 4200rpm hard drive (I know!) and it required a restart.

I made the mistake of opening OneNote in the middle of the update and that apparently cancelled the update instead of killing OneNote. I then killed the OneNote process using the task manager and then restarted the update process (60 min).

There have been some GUI changes and the most apparent one is the new icons! I love icons and for those who are dying for a preview, here it is-

Don’t they look cool? Anyways, one thing that the installer said while exiting was that I had at least one other product that needed the TR and I assumed this meant SharePoint Designer or Visio or something that isn’t part of the Office Professional suite. You can see how SharePoint Designer and Visio do not have new icons in the above graphic.

To confirm my theory, I went into my Control Panel and started the “Add/Remove Programs” application and checked the “Show Updates” box on the top. Take a look-

It looks like my initial guess was right even though I didn’t realize that Microsoft Project was not updated as well. Can someone confirm that the graphic above is displaying the old Project Icon and not the new one? In any case, I will download the TRs for these products later this weekend – especially SharePoint Designer which has a history of crashing on me at least 25 times a day.

Another new feature is the Splash screens. They now look different and have the letters B2TR engraved at the bottom right. Take a look at this Word 2007 splash screen-

The first thing I did after installing the TR is opening up Outlook to see if it still froze up on me eventually requiring me to kill its process. So far it has been behaving well and I feel like I can finally live happily ever after.