RSSMicrosoft Releases Office 2003 Beta 2 Refresh
By Nate Mook | Published June 20, 2003, 8:10 PM
The long awaited refresh build of Office 2003 Beta 2 has been released to approximately 15,000 technical beta testers via BetaPlace. The update makes a number of improvements to the second beta and comes in the form of individual patches for each Office System application.
Microsoft chose to make a smaller initial release in order to evaluate the best method for distributing the refresh code to the over 600,000 Office 2003 beta users. The patches will eventually be available via Office Update for all users to download.
"Before making the patches available via Microsoft Office Online to everyone, the patches will be made available for download from www.betaplace.com for you folks," wrote Microsoft beta coordinator Sloan Crayton in a newsgroup posting. "Making this change means that the Office Update mechanism that I've been discussing with you folks will not be used in the initial availability."
The Beta 2 Technical Refresh includes patches for Office 2003, Publisher, FrontPage, OneNote and InfoPath. Microsoft has issued a new version of Visio 2003 as part of the refresh, the first such build available to Office beta testers. "A new newsgroup node has also been created in the o11oep newsgroup tree for Visio related issues," Microsoft said.
Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and Windows SharePoint Services have additionally been updated and will be available to testers as "full file downloads."
Although the Beta 2 refresh was not part of the initial Office roadmap, Redmond officials continue to maintain that Office System 2003 will be complete by late summer. Microsoft has yet to announce a firm ship date, however, and the company has remained mum on pricing details.
Hi:
I have the entire set of downloaded refresh files, however the file Bcminstl.exe a self extracting file containing the refresh for Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 is corrupted. I think it is the Cabinet file as it is expanded from the exe.
Does anyone have a copy that I could download>
Thanks,
Tony Green
Fort Worth, TX
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|You can get that file and the other components of the technical refresh through the following link:
http://forums.winoscentr...198&goto=nextnewest
If you have trouble with this go to www.winoscentral.com and look at messages from "Digital Dave".
John Wetzel
Weston, CT
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|Neowin has links to all the seperate updates on betaplace (so you still need login) and it downloaded 210kb/sec here.
Only changes so far are new icons, Outlook loads 5x faster and Outlook actually enforces the rules when you receive mail instead of manually running them.
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|Apart from the obvious program and document icons, there are a number of signifcant improvements to Outlook when running against an Exchange server. The algorithm to manage the offlihe has been improved with faster and correct syncing. Outlook previously had a nasty habit of not pushing new and changed items to public folders to the server. The new "prevew pane" (I can't remember what it's called and I'm at home on a Mac) refreshes faster when switching between items. The default sound scheme for reminders etc has changed to something more chime like and less "agressive" than the old. Speed improvements are numerous. I would recommend restarting the system after applying the patches. The updates screwed up the font cache on two of my systems causing problems displaying pdf files in Acrobat 5.05.
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|The download is not moving at all... I don't believe that they prepared adequately. I think that they posted on Friday for a reason.
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|word is the servers went down
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|I changed the settings on the d/l manager in the hopes of making it check more and over a longer period of time (since the servers are down), but the d/l manager lost my download list... BetaPlace is swamped/down, so I can't get the items back on.
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|I think i'm gonna wait a week or so before I try. I couldn't even get to Betaplace last night
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|It took me a long time this morning to get the download page up but then I queued everything in download manager, got about 30 mins into the download and it all crashed.
MS has now got:
Beta 2 Technical Refresh Downloads
We are sorry,
These downloads are temporarily unavailable and we are working to remedy the situation.
Thank you for your patience.
However all the queues in download manager carried on working and I've now got build 5329 running on my PC - with a the most noticable change being the program launch icons :)
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|What did they change with the program launch icons? Are they higher quality now?
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