Writing for eWeek, Peter Galli brings us up to date on Massachusetts’ support for ODF.
Category: Content creation and design (Page 65 of 70)
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.
I could have sworn they already announced this, but in any case it was inevitable. The whole controversy is now simply not all that interesting. IT organizations need to understand the translation issues, but choosing one format over another is just not that big a deal. Many organizations have more complex issues to deal with, like integrating XML content from custom applications or other enterprise apps that don’t map to either ODF or Open XML directly. We have lots more background on this.
Since we have our conference on Content Technologies for Government in Washington this week I probably will not get to Tech-Ed which is at our new convention center here in Boston, even though it is less than 2 blocks away. But if I had the time, I would be there scouting out the new WinFS beta and the intriguing Project Orange, (which may be relevant to the previous post on Viper). Mary Jo Foley has a list of the top 10 things to watch for there. She and others have pointed to this post for some clues on Project Orange.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that talks between Adobe and Microsoft over the inclusion of PDF creation in the upcoming release of Office have broken down, and they speculate that Adobe will file an antitrust suit as a result. The issue is that MS was planning to include PDF creation for free, which is obviously a direct hit at Adobe’s Acrobat revenue. If you have been following Microsoft’s XPS (XML Paper Specification) development as we reported here, you won’t be too surprised.
It is too early to know exactly how this will play out, but anyone with applications or workflows that depend on heavy use of both Office and PDF needs to keep this on their radar!
UPDATE: Mary Jo Foley has more info on this.
One of the publications I find very useful and always relevant is Knowledge@Wharton, produced by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Check out this timely article, Microsoft’s Multiple Challenges: Is its Size a Benefit or a Burden?
Excerpt: “Microsoft announces that it will spend about $2 billion to fend off rivals such as Google and thwart Sony’s video game ambitions, and the company loses more than $30 billion in market capitalization in a day. Fair trade or overreaction?” My favorite quote? Wharton finance professor Andrew Metrick’s comment that “$2 billion to Microsoft is like a pimple on an elephant.”
Certainly true, but the investment demonstrates the range of rivals Microsoft faces in retaining its “titan” status for the long-term.
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.
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.
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