Office software: June 2009 Archives

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