Office pitched as a development platform
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Reinforcing its positioning of Office as not just an applications suite, but a development platform, Microsoft on Wednesday kicked off its first Office System Developer Conference.
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Responding to requests, Microsoft will sponsor open-source project to build translators between older office formats and Open XML.
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InfoWorld - A startup working in Microsoft's backyard is taking aim at the software giant's entrenched project management software with a new hosted service.
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Hoping to add some momentum to its Workplace platform strategy IBM has launched an online developer resource center that gives software developers ready access to tools to help create products and services that will exploit the platform.
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Take a look at how the new Office versions for Mac and Windows are rolling out, feature by feature.
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Macromedia promises to speed development of Internet applications with a new tool for its Flex platform. With Flex, enterprises can add interfaces to strategic applications, including visual
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the Windows application platform is to be fitted with "Fluent UI" ribbon capabilities now offered in Office 2007.The ribbon UI presents a new interface in Office 2007. "We usability-tested it massively, and fortunatel, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said during a keynote presentation the 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. "We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent UI quite a bit across a number of applications," he said. "It turns out it's a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality."The Fluent UI represented "a major risk that Microsoft took," Gates said. But the older interface with its dropdown menus was hiding so much functionality that the company was being asked for features that were already there but were concealed, he said.At the conference, Microsoft is promoting Office as a development platform with users able to write extensions. During Gates's presentation, third party applications were shown that extended Office with custom development, such as the MindJet MindManager planning application and FedEx's QuickShip for processing FedEx shipments from within Microsoft Outlook.During a subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience, Gates was asked to compare and contrast opportunities for developers working with platforms like Microsoft's with platforms like open source. Gates responded, "Our platform is a commercial platform where customers expect a very high level of service, a very high level of integration, but the nice thing about it is they are willing to pay for software."Free software has always been around, he said. "We've always had free software out there, it's not really a new thing. In fact, I'd say in some ways it's less of a factor than it's ever been," Gates said.Everyone has the same business model, he said: Software developers have free versions of their software, inexpensive software, and robust commercial versions of their software. "The commercial environment, I think, will always be the pre-eminent thing in terms of providing business productivity," said Gates.He advised those who want to develop free software to be careful which licensing model they choose and to select an option that does not restrict commercial versions of their software.Asked about Yahoo, which has rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition offer, Gates said the question was whether Yahoo should be a media company or focus on engineering. In an ad model, scale is needed, he said. Yahoo's engineering could be combined with what Microsoft has done, he said.Gates's overall presentation did not impress one attendee, who nonetheless was impressed with Gates himself."Bill is definitely a visionary, and he's one of the greatest men in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how much of that was just reading from a script," said Aaron Alanen, senior consultant at Sogeti."I did see in his questions later on that he really had some deeper knowledge," Alanen said.During Gates's presentation, he also played a tongue-in-cheek video about what he would do during his upcoming semi-retirement from Microsoft. Included were possibilities such as getting into politics, joining the rock band U2, and becoming a rapper or actor. Guests featured in the video included, among others, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bono from U2, and George Clooney.
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Updated OS includes software applications designed for business users.
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After years of holding out, IBM Corp. Monday has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Office software.
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Microsoft outlined a new feature that will be included in Office 2008 for Mac.
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MacCentral - Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said that it is looking for ways to work more closely with developers of the Open Office open source project, while at the same time, apparently reserving the right to sue them, according to a legal agreement between Microsoft and Open Office's major sponsor, Sun Microsystems Inc., made public this week.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft is inviting approximately 800 specially selected developers to attend the first-ever Microsoft Office System Developer Conference from Feb. 2 through Feb. 4 in Redmond, Wash.
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Assuming that Office Power Users think of themselves as mortals... Book review In addition to the legions of professional Visual Basic programmers, there are still more developers who use VBA and Microsoft Office for automation, customisation or the development of tailored office applications. Many of these are super-users rather full-time developers, but they have depended on VBA to extend and expand what it is they can do with Excel, Office, Access et al.â¦
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Microsoft did something right with its new Office for Mac 2008 suite.
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The development monoculture around the OpenOffice suite has, critics charge, become one of the project's own worst enemies. Now that IBM is taking the field, can that be changed in time to fend off Microsoft Office hegemony?
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Microsoft offered more than 60 governments the key to its Office desktop suite as the world's leading software maker faces growing competition from open-source rivals such as Linux.
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Microsoft showed off some features of the next version of Project, to the delight of the crowd gathered at the Microsoft Office Project Conference in Seattle.The audience applauded a new timeline view that will become available. Alice Steinglass, senior program manager for Microsoft Office Project, showed how users can cut and paste the timeline into other applications, such as a PowerPoint slide. Once pasted, users can alter individual components of the image, deleting sections and changing the font, for example.That&#39;s one feature that furthers Microsoft&#39;s goal of making Project not only easier to use for project managers but usable by more people in an organization. &quot;At the end of the day, the fundamental thesis here is that we are all project managers because we all manage work,&quot; said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft&#39;s CEO, addressing the audience on Tuesday. &quot;Whether my personal project management system happens to look more like a formal project or a task list that I might keep in something like Excel or Outlook, we need to make sure that we give rich tool sets to people at all levels of the food chain to help them do work management.&quot;A major user interface change to come within Project that Steinglass showed off is the icon ribbon at the top of the screen, similar to the one featured on many other Microsoft programs&#160;such as&#160;Word. Users can click on different tabs at the top and the icons available in the ribbon change. With the click of an icon, users can, for example,&#160;filter for incomplete tasks or group by resource name. These functions currently require several clicks in Project 2007.Future versions of Project will give customers an easier way to customize fields. The current method is complicated and will eventually be replaced with a blank column that users can simply start filling in with any information they want. As soon as they do, a new blank column automatically appears. If a user inputs a dollar figure in the column, the rest of the column automatically configures for dollars.Steinglass also showed off enhancements that will come to Web access to Projects. If a user makes changes to several time frames for completing tasks, the application won&#39;t automatically update the overall schedule, so as not to slow down performance. When a user is done making changes, a Calculate Changes button makes the alterations, highlighting every item that has changed. Users can hit Undo repeatedly to get rid of changes.Microsoft doesn&#39;t even have a name for the next version of Project, so there&#39;s no time frame for when these features will become available. Project 2007 began shipping earlier this year, and some Project 2003 users say they&#39;re waiting for the first Service Pack release before they&#39;ll move to the latest version.Microsoft executives expect that Web access will become important in the future. Practically every user of Project will take advantage of Web access, allowing partners and remote workers access to it from online, said Mike Angiulo, general manager of the Microsoft Project business unit. Ballmer wagered that in five years, about 50 percent of Project customers would use a fully hosted version, with the rest using an on-premise server.Microsoft may also do some work enabling more access to Project from Windows Mobile devices. While there is a need for access to Project from mobile phones, users won&#39;t want the full version, Ballmer said. &quot;What you want to do is say what aspects of the Project experience are people going to want to take on the phone,&quot; he said. For example, people may want to check on the status of a project and input information from their phones, he said.Some existing functions already available let people use their phones to change tasks within Outlook and those changes will be replicated on the Project server, said Angiulo.On Monday, Microsoft said that in two or three weeks it will announce the ship date for Service Pack 1 for Project 2007. When pressed for more details on Tuesday, Angiulo said that it&#39;s on the same schedule as the release date for Office 2007. He added that the final code is being tested, an indication that release is imminent.