I meant to blog about this earlier, but my vacation threw everything off.

One of the issues I care about most is security when creating Office-oriented solutions. Now, as anyone knows, the answer to this question, "What is a secure system?" depends on a lot of things, and not all of them technical. I have worked with CIO's who were strongly committed to the idea that obscurity=security. For me: obscurity!= security.

For Office, the ORK (Office Resource Kit for those of you who just came to the party) has a lot of really good information. It is mostly for admins, and if every person responsible for rolling out Office read the ORK material, there would be no crime, no poverty, and awful movies (can you say "Anaconda"?) would never be made again.

However, I found that the ORK content is not developer-focused, even though a lot of it is great use to developers. I was speaking at an Office conference last fall and I sat in Don Kiely's presentation on Office security. I asked him then if he would be interested in adapting that presentation to an article, adding some things and beefing up some aspects. He did a great job with it, and it is now live: "Security in Microsoft Office 2003 Editions".

 Rock thought for the day: So, I found out my Washburn guitar was made in 1978, the first year they came out with full rock electric guitars. This guitar has special significance because it was the guitar from the leader of the band I used to belong to. Yes, in my previous life, I was the soundman for a band that made it big: several world-wide top 10 hits. We did literally many hundreds of shows in smoky bars in a lot of corners around the nation leading up to the big contract with MCA. Good times. Check out the band here: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=&sql=11:3zsqoalabijv. We remain close personal friends to this day. I loved hearing the guitar scream when we would cover Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" and I would push everything to clipping for the final solo. I could sometimes shake the glasses off the tables with the sound alone.

Rock on.