Ed Brill

A short article pointing to an updated Microsoft tool to strip out "hidden" personal data in Office documents, such as comments, revisions, etc.  There's a reason I typically only distribute PDFs of presentations I do these days -- it's easier than remembering to try to clean up speaker notes or any of this other junk.
My favorite culprit is speaker notes.  I'll never forget the glee when I received a Microsoft presentation describing the then-forthcoming Exchange 2000 release.  It had a slide covering the new front-end/back-end server configuration.  The slide talked about the scalability improvements coming as a result of the new deployment option.  In the speaker notes, it said (paraphrased, it's been five years) -- "Note: We do not want to disclose that MAPI is not supported by the front-end server configuration."  If we had had blogs then, you all would have known about it right away.  Instead, all I could do was put that slide into my early days competitive presentations.
I also remember that there was a whole series of MS "Competitive Bulletins" issued in 1999, 2000, 2001.  Inevitably, when they would make their way to my inbox, the first thing I would check was the document properties, to see if they had been authored by Tony Walsh.  That led to an interesting encounter at DevCon 2000, where I was working a pedestal when Mr. Walsh approached.  He started asking me about whatever I was showing (probably the first go at iNotes Access for MS-Outlook), and I said something like "it actually does work, despite what you wrote in that paper."  Tony replied, "huh?  Do I know you?"  I guess that was the first time we had a little spy vs. spy thing going on... miss you, Tony-- hope retirement is working out well!
Link: What are you exposing in your Word, Excel, PowerPoint files? >