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excerpt: The trend in Office development is the migration of solutions away from in-application scripted processing toward more data-centric development. Of course this is a primary purpose of Open XML, and it is great to see the amount of activity in this area. We've seen customers scripting Word in a server environment to batch process / print documents or for other automation tasks. In reality Word isn't built to do that on a large scale, it is better to work directly against the document rather than via the application whenever possible.

The Open XML SDK unlocks a "whole nuther" environment for document processing, and gets you out of the business of scripting client apps on servers to do the work of a true server application (not to mention the licensing problems created by installing Office on a server).

comment:  Gray makes a very important point here.  The dominance of the desktop based MSOffice Productivity Environment was largely based the embedded logic driving "in-process" documents that was application and platform (Win32 API) specific.  Tear open any of these workgroup-workflow oriented compound documents and you find application specific scripts, macros, OLE, data bindings, security settings and other application specific settings.  These internal components are certain to break whenever these highly interactive and "live" compound documents are converted to another format, or application use.  This is how MSOffice documents and the business processes they represent become "bound" to the MSOffice Productivity Environment.

What Gray is pointing to here is that Microsoft is moving the legacy Productivity Environment to an MSWeb based center where OpenXML, Silverlight, CAML, XAML and a number of other .NET-WPF technologies become the workgroup drivers.  The key applications for the MS WebStack are Exchange/SharePoint/SQL Server.  To make this move, documents had to be separated from the legacy desktop Productivity Environment settings.

Note that OpenXML is the only document format supported by MS

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Google tests a service called Cloudboard, an online clipboard that should make it easy to copy data between Gmail, Google Docs and other Google services. The service is not publicly available yet, but there are many references to it.

lengthy comment from ~ge~

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ge Open-Web MS-WebStack Google unified-productivity

Moving the Point of Assembly
Kudos to Zoho. Their efforts remind me of the
early days of the Microsoft Productivity
Environment where core MSOffice editors expanded
their reach through DDE, OLE, rich copy/paste,
data binding, merged content and data, VBA
scripting and the infamous recorder, and a
developer API that meshed platform and
productivity apps so deeply into end user
information that the binding of business processes
to the MOPE is proving near impossible to break.
Even for years after the fact.

A business ecosystem for client/server was born
back in the early 90's, with Microsoft continuing
on to own entirely the client side of the
equation.

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ge zoho zdnet mope poa

.... "While i don't see Google or anyone else replacing the MSOffice productivity environment anytime soon, i do see Google challenging Microsoft wherever the Web comes into play. As for the future, that battle for desktop productivity will take place, just not with ChromeOS, Linux, or, the MacOS. What has to happen before the assault on the Microsoft's productivity empire can begin is that the business systems bound to the MSOffice productivity environment must transition to the Open Web, via SaaS or some other replacement. Or, the productivity environment itself must be re-purposed to the Open Web.

The tricky part will be that re-purposing play. ChromeOS is a blockbuster announcement. Not a declaration of war, but a shot across the bow that shouts; Google will defend the Open Web, and profitable business they have there. .....

~ge~

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ge chromeOS google google-wave

Michael Hickens has been writing about Google Wave and how it will forever change the Web. In a recent article he took on the incredible WebKit - HTML+ phenomenon, tying in the surge of WebKit marketshare at the edge of the Web with dramatic changes taking place across greater Web.
<br>

From Michaels article: .... "I recently described how Google's Wave, a collaboration tool based on the new HTML 5 standard, demonstrated the potential for Web applications to unglue Microsoft's hold on customers. My post quoted Gary Edwards, the former president of the Open Document Foundation, a first-hand witness to the failed attempt by Massachusetts to dump Microsoft and as experienced a hand at Microsoft-tilting as anyone I know......"
<br>
The year 1998 marked the end of the browser wars, the end of Netscape, and the beginning of Microsoft's anti-trust woes. It also marked the beginning of XML, and the end of HTML, with the W3C leaving HTML, CSS and SVG to rot. What a year.

<br>
Today we find the landscape considerably changed. Instead of a browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, ending with the triumph of an IE monopoly, today we have a browser race. And IE isn't a contender, having been pretty much abandoned by Microsoft once they had Netscape in the dirt.

<b>
The introduction of XML 1.0 in 1998 ushered in a new era of customized XML schema's for all kinds of data exchanges. The Web came alive with data flows from disparate databases and transaction systems that were never designed to talk to each other. The noise across the Web, private and public, was deafening.

<br>
There was however a few notable attempts to encode document based content in XML, with OpenOffice ODF and MSOffice OOXML taking center stage. Unlike the excitement and extraordinary Web capabilities that surrounded XML data schema work, XML documents veered away from the Web. By design, ODF and OOXML are incompatible with the language of the Web. But given the legacy of client/server dominance powerful "end-user-facing" desktop office

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openweb michael-hickens webkit ge HTML5 HTML+ CSS3 JavaScript google-wave iphone android

Digital Daily is carrying John Paczkowski's point-by-point twitter stream of the Google Apps Event. Fascinating stuff. Especially Dave Girouard's comments comparing Google Apps to MSOffice.

One highlight of the event seems to be the announcement of a Google OutLook integration app. Sounds like something similar to what Zimbra did a few years ago prior to the $350 million acquisition by Yahoo! Zimbra perfected an integration into desktop Outlook comparable to the Exchange - Outlook channel. If Google Apps Sync for Outlook integration is a s good as the event demo, they would still have to crack into MSOffice to compete with the MSOffice-SharePoint-MOSS integration channel.

Some interesting comments from Google Enterprise customers, Genentech, Morgans Hotel Group, and Avago

....... At an event in San Francisco, Google is expected to discuss the future of its productivity suite and some enhancements that may begin to close the gap with Microsoft (MSFT) Office, something the company desperately needs to do if it wants to make deeper inroads in the enterprise area. As Girouard himself admitted last week, Apps still has a ways to go. “Gmail is really the best email application in the world for consumers or business users, and we can prove that very well,” he said. “Calendar is also very good, and probably almost at the level of Gmail. But the word processing, spreadsheets and other products are much less mature. They’re a couple of years old at the most, and we still have a lot of work to do.”

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ge google-apps google-enterprise Cloud-Computing replace_or_re-purpose

A new report by research analyst, Forrester says that 80 percent of enterprise customers are using some version of Microsoft Office. This reflects the stranglehold Microsoft has on the office productivity market, despite increased awareness of alternatives such as Sun's OpenOffice.org suite, and the rise of web-hosted variants such as Google Docs.

I had a chance to comment on this brief lament regarding Microsoft's iron grip, desktop monopoly.

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ge MSOffice replace_or_re-purpose openWeb webkit

Michael Hickins has an interesting angle on the document wars:

<i>...... "By releasing a new service pack for Office that includes support for the open document format (ODF), Microsoft appears to be complying with European demands that it play well with others, while putting to rest accusations by IBM that it is still trying to maintain a monopoly over document formats. But forgive IBM for failing to cheer an apparent victory in its long-running document format war with Microsoft; IBM is busy attempting to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, probably because it’s now run out of excuses for failing to capture significant market share against Word and Excel....." </i>

I've got two comment below the article: <b>"Hoist on our own petard"</b>

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ge odf ooxml

We Tried. Did you?
I've got five years into ODF, one of only three original members to last that long. In the past year, we've been involved in five major proposal submissions to improve ODF compatibility with existing file formats and interoperability with existing applications. What else would you have us do?

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ge odf ooxml foundation cdf html+

Wow. i had no idea this existed until one of the attorney's working on the New York State <i>XML format</i> pilot study started asking questions based on this link. In particular he was interested in a further explanation for this particular clip:<br><br.

"..... "The hard truth is that ODF was not designed to meet the market requirements that stopped cold the implementation of ODF in Massachusetts. Those requirements are: compatibility with existing file formats, including MS binary documents; interoperability with existing applications, including MSOffice; and, able to work across the grand convergences of desktop, server, device and web systems. ....."

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cnet ge odf ooxml webkit html+

I wonder how i missed this? Incredibly, i have my own biographer and i didn't know it! The date line is September, 2008, I had turned off all my ODF-OOXML-OASIS searches and blog feeds back in October of 2007 when we moved the da Vinci plug-in to HTML+ using the W3C CDF model. Is it appropriate to send flowers to your secret biographer? Maybe i'll find some time and update his work. The gap between October 2007 and April of 2009 is filled with adventure and wonder. And WebKit!<br><br>

<i>"....One of the more interesting characters in the recent standards battles has been Gary Edwards: he was a member of the original ODF TC in 2002 which oversaw the creation of ODF 1.0 in 2005, but gradually became more concerned about large vendor dominance of the ODF TC frustrating what he saw as critical improvements in the area of interoperability. This compromised the ability of ODF to act as a universal format."</i><br><br>

<i>"....Edwards increasingly came to believe that the battleground had shifted, with the SharePoint threat increasingly needing to be the focus of open standards and FOSS attention, not just the standalone desktop applications: I think Edwards tends to see Office Open XML as a stalking horse for Microsoft to get its foot back in the door for back-end systems....."</i><br><br>

<i>"....Edwards and some colleagues split with some acrimony from the ODF effort in 2007, and subsequently see W3C's Compound Document Formats (CDF) as holding the best promise for interoperability. Edwards' public comments are an interesting reflection of an person evolving their opinion in the light of experience, events and changing opportunities...."</i><br><br>

<i>".... I have put together some interesting quotes from him which, I hope, fairly bring out some of the themes I see. As always, read the source to get more info: ..... "</i><br><br>

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odf rick-jelliffe ge ooxml html+ webkit foundation cdf

Interesting discussion at Business Insider. I disagree with the Eric Krangel somewhat in that Oracle does benefit from working with Google Apps. Check the comments section for my response.<br><br>

"If Google (GOOG) is going to get big companies to pay for its Google Apps service, plugging into other enterprise software is going to be helpful. So it's good news for Google that Oracle (ORCL) is willing to play along."<br><br>

"This morning the two companies announced a new collaboration between Google Apps and Oracle's Siebel customer care/CRM software. With the new "Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps," it's now easier to port data between Oracle and Google Apps spreadsheets..........."

That gives Google a new selling point as it deploys salespeople to the enterprise in its bid to convert Microsoft Office users into paying Google Apps customers.

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google-apps oracle business-insider oracle-google ge

OOXML vs. ODf: where next for interoperability?

Gary Edwards of the Open Document Foundation has a fascinating post on the important of Microsoft Office compatibility to the success of the ISO-approved Open Document formats.

Tim Anderson at the Register

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tim-anderson odf ooxml odf-foundation ge

The race is on. Google will win the consumer Web. Microsoft will win the business Web.

Sadly i don't think there is any way for Google to challenge Microsoft with regard for the privilege of transitioning existing MSOffice bound workgroup- workflow business processes to the Web. Even if Google Docs could match MSOffice feature to feature, cracking into existing MSOffice workgroups is impossibly hard. Anyone who doubts this ought to take a second look at the Massachusetts ODF Pilot Study, or the recently released Belgium Pilot results. Replacing MSOffice in a workgroup setting is simply too disruptive and costly because of the shared business process problem.

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ge webkit zdnet MSOffice Google-Docs Google Microsoft

Response to the InformationWeek article "Remaking Microsoft: Get Out of Web Search!". Covers "The Myth of Google Enterprise Search", and the refusal of Google to implement or recognize W3C Semantic Web technologies. This refusal protects Google's proprietary search and categorization algorithms, but it opens the door wide for Microsoft Office editors to totally exploit the end-user semantic interface opportunities. If Microsoft can pull this off, they will take "search" to the Enterprise and beyond into every high end discipline using MSOffice to edit Web ready documents (private and public use). Also a bit about WebKit as the most disruptive technology Microsoft has faced since the advent of the Web.

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webkit microsoft google search Cloud-Computing monopoly ge

Gary Edwards (URL) said: Mar. 05, 8:17 PM\n+1 Chrome! It's excellent, but not for the reasons most would insist are important. Neither is Chrome a disruptive technology. It's not. The real revolution is underneath Chrome in the open source WebKit engine. An engine shared with iPhone, Android, Safari, Palm Pre, Nokia, Iris, RiMM 's Blackberry Storm and KDE. Crossplatform WebKit IDE's now include QT, 280Atlas and Eclipse. \n\nIt is the Apple iPhone that put WebKit on the map, demonstrating a revolutionary document/application model capable of leveraging and pushing the Open Web to be competitive with proprietary initiatives from Adobe and Microsoft. \n\nThe WebKit engine is driving most of the smart devices at the edge of the Web, providing a consistent document rendering and application runtime layer that is highly visual, multi-dimensionally interactive, and fully competitive with the proprietary rich interactive application engines (RiA) provided by Adobe and Microsoft. Near 80% of these edge of the Web devices are based on WebKit.

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ge android chrome webkit-chromium google henry-blodget businessinsider

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application-specific burtongroup cdf crocker ge maryjo odf ooxml opendocument openxml pox

Microsoft starts rolling out more OOXML translators

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Sorry Shish, you're wrong about ODF 1.2

Try ODF 1.5 or ODF 2.0, maybe.

The metadata requirements for ODF 1.2 actually did include two way lossless translation capability. Unfortunately these features did not survive the final cut, and were not included in the April 2007 submission.

You might also want to check the February 23, 2007 metadata proposal from Florian Reuter. That also would have delivered the goods and perhaps put ODF that grand convergence category of usefulness across desktops, servers, devices and web systems currently the exclusive domains of MS-OOXML and CDF+. Florian had devised a means of using metadata to describe the presentation aspects of content and structural objects. Very revolutionary. And based on the simple notion that bold, font, margins etc. are simply metadata about content and style objects.

Where the train came off the track had to do with the concept of an XML ID means of linking metadata to content. Not that there was anything wrong with this mechanism. It's actually quite clever. What went wrong was that Sun insisted that only those elements approved and supported by OpenOffice would be allowed to make use of XML ID metadata. For independent developers, this is a serious constraint.

Because of this constraint, the metatdata sub committee started off with six elements supported by OOo that metadata could be appied to. IBM then came in and asked for eleven more elements having to do with charts and graphs. The OpenOffice crew decided they could support this, so in they went. Then an interesting question was posed, "How are independent developers supposed to submit elements for metadata consideration?"

IBM's Elias Torres beleived that we should not restrict the use of XML ID, letting the marketplace of developers have at it, and then revisit interoperability issues at a later date to sort things out. Sun opposed this wide open approach, clearly favoring (an

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cdf ge mary-jo metadata microsoft odf ooxml opendocument shish