A friend told me recently about a program being offered by Microsoft called Microsoft Action Pack Subscriptions (MAPS). While I’m no fan of Microsoft, I thought this program was worth passing along.

As I understand it, the program allows registered members of the Microsoft Partner Program (the basic membership is free) to participate in the MAPS program for an annual subscription price of $299.

With that subscription you get a majority of the major Microsoft titles for internal business use, including:

• 10 licenses of Windows Vista
• 10 Office Enterprise 2007
• 10 Outlook 2007
• 10 Project Professional 2007
• 10 Visio Professional 2007
• One licence of Small Business Server 2008
• One SQL Server 2008
• One Exchange Server 2007

This is just a sample, the complete list of software titles is here.

One copy of Office Professional 2007 is $379 on Amazon so obviously a MAP subscription could save your company an exceptionally large amount of money. The caveat on the program is it’s intended, “For businesses whose primary function is to sell, service, support, or build solutions on the Microsoft platform, or to provide solutions based on Microsoft products and technologies to independent third-party customers.”

• Additional information and program registration can be found here.
• More information on program eligibility can be found at the “Download Program Details” link at the bottom of  https://partner.microsoft.com
• If you have questions about if your company qualifies you can also contact MS directly.

If you’ve used this program or have any insight on the details please let me know.

The newest publication of the Stanford Business Magazine has a must read article for anyone who has a profile at any of the popular business and social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook or Plaxo:

Facing Mean Streets of Information Highway by Connie Skipitares.

One of relatively easy way of monitoring your good name against the type of online identity theft mentioned in the article is to set up a Google Alert on your name. Unless you have an exceptionally unique name (like I guy I met once named Blender G. Shoulders in Tanner, Alabama) just throw in your city or state to the search query.

Feedburner (now assimilated into Google as we all will be one day) provides phenomenal RSS feed optimization services. If you’ve found this post you probably already know that.

Feedburner’s Headline Animator Email Snippet

One of their many great tools is the “Headline Animator” which is a snippet that rotates your blog feed’s five most recent blog post titles. It’s well suited to be included in custom email signatures as a clever means of promoting your blog to unsuspecting recipients.

Enter the villain: Outlook 2007

As I’ve already complained about in a prior post, Microsoft took a big step back in HTML customization capability with Outlook 2007. Besides the horrible decision to use Word to render HTML for Outlook, the handy option for “advanced” (HTML) editing is gone from Outlook’s custom signature feature. This presents a problem to those of us who want to add the snippet code produced by FeedBurner’s Headline Animator to our Outlook 2007 email signature. It’s not that pretty, but following is a step-by-step guide to forcing Outlook 2007 to comply with our wishes.

The easy annoying workaround

1. After you set up your blog feed in feedburner (http://feedburner.google.com), go to the “Publicize” tab, and select “Headline Animator”, “Create new…”, set your preferences, name the snippet, then hit “Activate.”

2. Now click on the name of your snippet that just appeared under “Headline Animator” in the left column. You’ll see your snippet rotating headlines from your feed. Select “Other (just gimme the code)” and click next to see a pop-up with your code. Uncheck “Include a ‘Grab this’ link” and copy the code to Note Pad. You will need to use Note Pad, not Word or Word Pad, for all your edits (or an HTML editor if you have one).

3. Download this template and open with Note Pad. Open side-by-side this template file and the other Note Pad file into which you pasted your FeedBurner code. Then modify the template with your feedburner links and either delete or modify the alt tag and contact info above the snippet.

4. Enable Windows to see hidden files/folders. A guide for doing this can be viewed here.

5. In your modified Note Pad template file, choose “Save as” then navigate to:

Windows Vista— C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures

Windows XP— C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures

6. First, select “All Files” in the “Save as type:” field, then name and save your signature with an .htm extension (e.g. “feedburnersiganture.htm”).

7. Now open Outlook 2007 and go to Tools -> Options -> Mail Format -> Signatures and you should see your new signature with the feedburner snippet as a signature option.

Now, recipients will see your snazzy rotating FeedBurner headlines in your signature. All recipients that is except those using Outlook 2007 who will only see your most recent title. That’s right, Outlook 2007 has one last punch to throw. Microsoft has disabled rotating gifs from rotating in Outlook 2007 and provided us with no option to enable them. If you’re hard up for something to do you can vote for Microsoft to change this policy at this Microsoft page.

The good news is that almost all other mail clients don’t have this restriction, and even when being displayed in Outlook 2007 your snippet will still dynamically update to display a static most recent post title so all is not lost.