As this news item reminded us today, vendors are gearing up for the launch of Vista and Office 12. We are already seeing vendors announcing support for both in various ways, but this will continue to build to a deluge of announcements over the next 6 months. XPS (XML Paper Specification) is one of the new pieces of Vista and Office 12 that bears paying attention to. While it is not likely to displace Adobe’s PDF (certainly not in the near term at least), it will certainly be used instead of PDF for certain applications. What those applications will be is something worth thinking about. There is more info on XPS from Microsoft here, including links to the specification, developer blogs etc.
Category: Content creation and design (Page 55 of 60)
Technologies and strategies for authoring and editing, including word processors, structured editors, web and page layout and formatting, content conversion and migration, multichannel content, structured and unstructured data integration, and metadata creation.
Looks like Microsoft is adding blog posting support to Word 2007 in a way that not only does not screw up your HTML, but attempts to take advantage of Word features bloggers care about without other features getting in the way. This is more appealing than it may sound at first, and may be useful when building enterprise blog applications where Office is entrenched and familiar. It will be in Office 2007 Beta 2. Learn more from the developers.
Ed Dodds points us to a short but useful management-level writeup of OpenDocument vs. Office Open XML in Baseline magazine. By the way, if you don’t know Ed’s blog, Conmergence and you are interested in the broad application of XML to IT infrastucture, it is well worth bookmarking or adding to your RSS reader.
Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium noted and commented on a great discussion of DITA and DocBook by Norm Walsh, the guru of DocBook. Norm was a featured speaker at last week’s DITA 2006 conference. Norm’s discussion is readable and lucid, and if you have been wondering about this question for a while, Norm’s post is required reading.
Via Scott Abel, we learned about the formation of the OpenDocument Format Alliance. I went straight to the “about” page, which provides the current list of members. The right concentration of UnMicrosoft vendors are there–Sun, Novell, IBM, Corel, and RedHat. But there are a few interesting members, including the American Library Association and the Massachusetts High Technology Council (and yes, if you go to their Web page, that is indeed the unlikely romantic pairing of Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney chuckling in the picture on the upper left). The Mass High Tech Council caught my eye because they are a famously pro-growth organization that might not always get behind this kind of initiative. Perhaps they have suddenly realized that standards are good for growth? Or perhaps there are enough Massachusetts High Tech companies with an interest in ODF? Novell’s headquarters is in Massachusetts now, but they are not a member of the Council. But Sun has a big campus here, and they are a member. So that might explain it.
Scott’s article has a good roundup of related news coverage.
So I will be participating in Wednesday’s webinar with Idiom and Blast Radius, “DITA Directions: Topic-Oriented Single Source Publishing for the Web and Beyond.” Most of my presentation will be based on our upcoming white paper, Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies, which is subtitled, “Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).” The white paper focuses on two highly successful case studies of DITA in use at Adobe and Autodesk. Both of these companies have already produced tens of thousands of pages of documentation and Help using DITA. In both cases, the documentation is being simultaneously, or near simultaneously, released in more than 15 languages. The case studies are impressive and offer a lot of insight for other companies who are considering going down this path.
We continue to be struck by the rapid adoption of DITA across the product support marketplace, and are starting to see uses of DITA outside this specific application. We are hard pressed to come up with other document-management or content-management standards or technologies that have enjoyed such rapid adoption and widespread use. So one of my slides, sampled below, has a litle fun with Gartner’s now classic Hype Cycle chart. Has DITA avoided the Hype Cycle, where the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” is followed necessarily by a steep drop to a “Trough of Disillusionment”? Here we are in the midst of the hype over DITA (indeed, the standard was only formally published in May 2005), and the case studies show productive work being done in advance of the approved standard. Impressive, don’t you think?
Bob Doyle at CMSReview has once again generously devoted his time and resources to record and produce one of the events at our recent Boston conference. David Berlind from ZDNet, who has tracked the controversial Massachusetts decision to standardize on OASIS‘s ODF on Between the Lines (a blog you should subscribe to) in more detail than anyone, interviewed lobbyist Morgan Reed from the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) before a live audience at Gilbane Boston. ACT, who lobbies for small businesses, but also Microsoft, is against the Massachusetts decision – Morgan was gracious enough to submit to David’s penetrating skepticism. Bob Doyle says he keeps this interview on his video iPod! Bob says you should use the QuickTime player. Here is the full interview, or you can choose chapters below:
Frank Gilbane – the Background
The Debaters – Morgan Reed and David Berlind
Lobbyist for Microsoft (MS) and Small ISVs
How Much Money Spent Lobbying Open Formats?
MS to Mass: Do you respect IP?
MS Press Release: Mass ODF Plan has failed!
By 2007 only ODF-compliant applications?
Does Massachusetts have any leverage with OASIS?
What if MS OpenOffice was chosen as standard?
Do MS and Internet Explorer encourage non-standard HTML?
Structured blogging activity has accelerated, and has reached the important milestone where there is debate about whether it will amount to anything. If you are not familiar with structured blogging, the term itself should be enough to give you a good idea – think of structured editing, eForms, and blogging all mushed together. Structured editing has been around since the early 80s when companies like Datalogics, Texet, Arbortext, SoftQuad and others were developing SGML authoring and editing tools (I was involved in the Texet effort). The big problem then was the user interface. WYSIWYG was new, but the real issue was not that the tools were not graphical enough, it was that authors were not interested in tools that forced them A) to use a different tool, B) to use a tool that required them to do more work, and C) to use a tool that they were not convinced would provide significant benefits. Today many of us use eForm, HTML or XML tools and the interfaces are far superior, but A, B are still major hurdles to overcome. C is less of a problem, and maybe appealing applications based on ‘microformats’ will help even more. Perhaps the blogging tool plug-ins in the works will alleviate A and B, but winning the hearts of bloggers will not be easy. It will be far easier to do in the context of enterprise applications, but the difficulty should not be underestimated. I am a fan of structured blogging and authoring in general, but the concerns being raised are real. To catch-up on the pros and cons of structured blogging see posts from Bob Wyman, Charlie Wood, Paul Kedrosky,
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
