Recently in Office software Category

Box.net announced it is available as an integrated Google Apps service on the Google Apps Marketplace, Google's recently launched online storefront for Google Apps products and services. Google Apps customers can now access and share their Box.net content when logged into Google Apps, and Box.net customers can use Google Apps products within Box.net. Businesses can manage their project files, including product collateral, overview videos, various artwork and Google Docs, in a shared Box folder. From there, users can manage workflow with versioning, tasks, and commenting as well as using Google Docs to collaborate on their files. Finished work can then be published on a company-wide Google Site. Box.net also provides administration and reporting tools, including password management down to the file level, six levels of access permissions, and reports on user and file activity. Initially, Google Apps customers will be able to access, work with, and share their Box.net content with others inside of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Sites, as well as enter the Box.net Cloud Content Management platform through Google's universal navigation links. Additionally, when in Box.net, users can create a new Google Document or Spreadsheet, as well as select a file or a folder of files to send with Gmail, schedule a meeting and link to a specific file or folder with Google Calendar, or publish to Google Sites. http://www.box.net/

Sitecore announced the availability of a new version of its Web Content Management (CMS) software. Sitecore CMS 6.2 offers features including native RSS feeds, Microsoft Outlook based workflow management, drag and drop media and document management, authoring enhancements and  marketing Web forms. The forms tool aims to help non-technical users build rich interactive forms, configure campaigns and conversion goals and provides a suite of reports to better understand user behavior for usability analysis and optimization. The tool also allows marketers to capture incremental data from abandoned forms and track form dropout statistics. Outlook integration should allow users to receive workflow notifications from within Outlook in real-time, and take action on those workflow requests without ever having to log into the CMS. All workflow actions, status and version comparison information is provided to the user, and dynamically adjusts should a workflow state change. Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Media and Document Management: Drag and drop image uploads are now available. Files can be uploaded directly in the page editor and can be stored within Sitecore CMS. Files can also be edited with Microsoft Word, Photoshop and PowerPoint and version controlled automatically. Natively edit content inline using full Microsoft Word functionality with full support of rich content pages. http://www.sitecore.net/

Zoho has announced that Zoho Projects, the company’s online project management and team collaboration application is now integrated with Google Apps. The move brings Zoho Projects to Google Apps users, complete with unified login and embeddable gadget options. Zoho Projects for Google Apps will soon be available in the Google Solutions Marketplace. A highlight of the Google Apps and Zoho Projects integration is the unified login system. Once logged into Zoho Projects, users should be able to upload their files from Google Apps and attach them to their projects. From Zoho Projects, users can then open, view and edit those files in the corresponding Zoho applications, e.g., Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, etc. Additional highlights include: Calendar integration - Meetings, Tasks, and Project milestones from the Zoho Projects calendar can be added automatically to a Google calendar; Zoho Projects will be available as a Zoho Gadget that can be embedded in iGoogle, Gmail, Google Sites and other online applications that support OpenSocial; Zoho Projects is free for one project, so Google Apps users can try out the software. For additional projects, prices start at $12 per month. http://projects.zoho.com/google-apps

Lyquidity Solutions innovators in enterprise spreadsheet management and developers of ComplyXL, announce the availability of the Find Combinations add-in.  This add-in will work standalone or in conjunction with ComplyXL and should help to extend the enterprise spreadsheet controls provided by ComplyXL. ComplyXL provides the key framework used by organizations for version and audit controls as well as continuous monitoring of critical spreadsheets with instant notification of changes. The Find Combinations utility gives the ability to analyze the information within the spreadsheets and is available for free general download. Key benefits of Find Combinations include: the ability to: enter or select a target value; Combinations of cell values will be computed and tested against this number for a match; specify or select a maximum group size of combinations to try; see the addresses of the cells which total to the target value; select a range of values, with the ability to select multiple areas; find the combination of values in a specified cell range that total to a given value. The group size value allows you to control the maximum size of groups that will be tested. For example, although you are looking for combinations of numbers in a list of 100 values, you may know that the number of values to be added together never exceeds, say, 5. You can then specify 5 as the maximum group size and then no groups of 6 or higher will be tested. This is important, especially in large lists, because the number of potential combinations can be vast. There are 627 combinations of 2, 3, 4 and 5 numbers in a list 10. There are 2,369,885 combinations of the same groups in a list of 50 numbers and 7,937,339 combinations in a list of 100. On a 1.8Mz laptop working through these 7+ million numbers takes about 5 minutes  - or about 20,000 tests per second. http://www.lyquidity.com/

Microsoft Corp. announced that Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone. Starting today, tens of thousands of people will be invited to test Office and Visio as part of the Technical Preview program. Office 2010 and related products are designed to help people: Work anywhere with Office Web applications - the lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote - that provide access to documents from virtually anywhere and preserve the look and feel of a document regardless of device; Collaborate better with co-authoring in Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and Microsoft OneNote 2010, and advanced e-mail management and calendaring capabilities in Microsoft Outlook 2010, including the option for users to ”ignore” unwanted threads; Bring video and picture editing, broadcast capability in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, easy document preparation through the new Microsoft Office Backstage view, and new Sparklines in Microsoft Excel 2010 to visualize data and spot trends more quickly. Microsoft also announced that it is streamlining the number of Office editions from eight to five and enhancing each edition with additional applications and features. The company also announced that Office Web applications will be available in three ways: through Windows Live, where consumers will have access to Office Web applications at no cost; on-premises for all Office volume licensing customers including Office annuity customers; and via Microsoft Online Services, where customers will be able to purchase a subscription as part of a hosted offering. Microsoft also is preparing partners for the release of Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 through a number of new and refreshed readiness tools and training programs. All Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference attendees will receive invitations to participate in the Technical Preview program. Office 2010 and related products will be available in the first half of 2010. More information about Office 2010 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/Office2010

Zoho announced Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint which lets users work with Zoho online collaborative productivity applications to create, view, and edit files stored in Microsoft SharePoint. Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint is delivered as an add-on that installs on top of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and 2003. Once installed, Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint lets users working in Microsoft SharePoint view, edit, and create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Microsoft Office formats, but using Zoho online applications. When a user clicks on a file in Microsoft SharePoint, the options will include “Edit in Zoho Editor” and “View in Zoho Editor.” The Edit option opens the file for editing in a Zoho editor within Microsoft SharePoint - either Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, or Zoho Show, depending upon the file selected. The view option opens the file for viewing in appropriate Zoho applications within Microsoft SharePoint. The user must be connected to the Internet to access Zoho applications. Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint enables multiple users to work collaboratively on the same document at the same time, seeing each other's changes instantly. That same functionality is available in online Zoho applications. Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint is available today as a 30-day free trial version. After the trial period, users may buy an annual subscription for $24/user. A monthly subscription is also available for $3/user. http://www.zoho.com

Mark Logic Corporation released the MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel. This new offering provides users a free way to integrate Microsoft Office Excel 2007 with MarkLogic Server. Earlier this year, Mark Logic  delivered a Toolkit for Word and a Connector for SharePoint. Together, these offerings allow users to extend the functionality of Microsoft Office products and build applications leveraging the native document format, Office Open XML (OOXML). Distributed under an open source model, MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel comes with an Excel add-in that allows users to deploy information applications into Excel, comprehensive libraries for managing and manipulating Excel data, and a sample application that leverages best practices. The MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel offers greater search functionality, allowing organizations to search across their Excel files for worksheets, cells, and formulas. Search results can be imported directly into the workbooks that users are actively authoring. Workbooks, worksheets, formulas, and cells can be exported directly from active Excel documents to MarkLogic Server for immediate use by queries and applications. The Toolkit for Excel allows customers to easily create new Excel workbooks from existing XML documents. Users can now manipulate and re-use workbooks stored in the repository with a built-in XQuery library. For instance, a financial services firm can replace the manual process of cutting-and-pasting information from XBRL documents to create reports in Excel with an automated system. Utilizing Toolkit for Excel, this streamlined process extracts relevant sections of XBRL reports, combines them, and saves them as an Excel file. The Toolkit also allows users to add and edit multiple custom metadata documents across workbooks. This improves the ability for users to discover and reuse information contained in Excel spreadsheets. To download MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel, visit the Mark Logic Developer Workshop located at http://developer.marklogic.com/code/, http://www.marklogic.com

MindTouch announced a new Desktop Suite of productivity tools that provides one-click publishing from any Microsoft Windows application, improved drag and drop capabilities, in-place editing of Microsoft Office and rapid archiving of corporate assets in a searchable easy to share web-based environment. MindTouch's Desktop Suite of productivity tools enhances MindTouch 2009 to improve existing collaborative Intranets, interactive community extranets and documentation portals. The new Aurelia Reporter works with any Windows application and allows users to publish as MindTouch 2009 pages. As with all MindTouch 2009 pages the content is editable, indexed by a enterprise search engine, versioned, and able to be permissioned for specific users and groups from a web-browser. Now applications such as Microsoft Project, Visio, PowerPoint, Excel, Quickbooks, and many others can be quickly captured, archived, indexed by search and editable from the web-browser all while being versioned. Microsoft Word and Outlook Connectors provides users with one-click publishing from within Word and Outlook to MindTouch. The Outlook Connector enables publishing of full email conversation threads along with associated attachments. The Desktop Suite is available for commercial versions of MindTouch. http://www.mindtouch.com/

Microsoft announced the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The service pack includes major performance enhancements for Office applications, most notably Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. With SP2, Office 2007 now has built-in support for Open XML, ODF and PDF, along with the dozen or so other formats that were already supported in Office 2007. In addition to the support for additional file formats, SP2 also includes the Open XML Format External File Converter. This allows developers to make any third-party document format a first-class citizen in Office. This means Office will support most government-preferred formats, and can easily be made to support any others that come along. This release offers enhanced stability for Outlook, calendaring reliability, and more improvements to applications that run on both PCs and servers. Users should notice the improved performance and stability of Outlook, better charting functionality in Excel, and more control over the appearance of SmartArt graphics. On the server side, IT professionals will notice several enhancements to the security and performance of SharePoint Server 2007, including support for read-only content databases, improvements to forms-based authentication, and an STSADM command-line utility that enables administrators to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors. SharePoint Server will also feature better support for newer versions of the Firefox browser. Customers can download SP2 right away. In addition, Microsoft will release SP2 via Microsoft Update’s automatic update mechanism no sooner than three months from now, and with at least 30 days notice. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968170

Zoho has announced access and usability enhancements for mobile users of its suite of productivity applications. Until now, Zoho offered mobile access to only a few applications and did not do so in a consistent manner. Each application had a unique mobile access URL and interface. With today's announcement, all mobile-enabled Zoho applications may be accessed at one location, http://m.zoho.com, and they share a common look and feel.

The following applications are currently available at Zoho Mobile:

• Zoho Mail
• Zoho Calendar
• Zoho Writer
• Zoho Sheet
• Zoho Show
• Zoho Creator

Zoho also announced support for additional mobile platforms.  Previously, its mobile applications were available only on the iPhone and Windows Mobile, with limited functionality on the latter. Zoho Mobile is now available for:   

• iPhone
• Windows Mobile
• Blackberry
• Symbian
• Android

Palm access is anticipated in a future release.

The text of Zoho's announcement may be found on the company's blog.