Microsoft to share ots Office code
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Microsoft planned to announce Monday that it would give dozens of governments and international agencies access to the programming code in its Office desktop software, including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and e-mail programs.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O said on   Thursday it may offer a free, advertising-supported version of   its basic word processing and spreadsheet software, in an   apparent bid to fend off a nascent challenge from Google Inc.   GOOG.O in the business software market.
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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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Did Redmond try to pack standards groups? Microsoft's failed attempt to get its Office Open XML (OOXML) file format adopted by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) could land the software giant in hot water with the European Commission (EC).â¦
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Interested in trying out the free OpenOffice.org 2.0 office suite without having to install it on your computer?Now's your chance.That option became possible Tuesday when OpenOffice.org and online application vendor Ulteo launched a beta project that hosts OpenOffice.org 2.0 on Ulteo's Online Desktop infrastructure, giving users online access to the applications and up to 1GB of related data storage.In an announcement, the two groups said the project will be open to 15,000 beta users who will be able to access the applications using a Web browser on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.Beta users will also have access to the project's instant collaboration features, which will allow participants to invite other users to join them online in working on a document together in real time. Users can send invitations to others via e-mail, allowing access to documents in either read-only or full edit mode through a clickable link in the message."Now everyone can use OpenOffice.org from any connected PC, anytime, anywhere," Florian Effenberger, marketing project co-lead of OpenOffice.org, said in a statement. "You even can work together on documents online and collaborate with others. This especially is an interesting option for trainers and workgroups.""Ulteo is very proud to deliver OpenOffice.org to the community in a new, useful and exciting way: online and designed for collaboration," Thierry Koehrlen, CEO of Ulteo, said in a statement. "We expect that it will ... spread OpenOffice.org to even more users now that it is simpler than ever to try and? use it in a couple of clicks."Users can register for the beta program at Ulteo's Web site.
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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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Microsoft Corp.  unveiled plans  on Sunday to work with hardware manufacturers to deliver on the  company&#039;s ambitions to use its software to simplify how workers  communicate with one another.
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I_Love_Pocky! writes &quot;According to this article, Microsoft is going to give its source code for Office 2003 to more than 30 different world governements.
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BREAKING NEWS - Early this morning, Microsoft reported it had been notified that its Office Open XML format received a 74% positive vote in a preliminary ballot that could pave the way for its final ratification as an international standard.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is to offer the world a free word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program in yet another bid to upset the dominance of Microsoft's Office suite. The move sounds ambitious, but Microsoft is unlikely to be trembling in fear just yet --Â Lotus Symphony,Â as it will be known, is really just a re-packaging of the OpenOffice suite that has taken only fringe market share from Microsoft, since being taken under the wing of Sun seven years ago. IBM says it will contribute 35 programmers to the Symphony-cum-OpenOffice development effort, in a bid to spark new interest in a software suite that can trace its ancestry back to a suite called StarOffice, once owned by obscure German company, Star. IBM hopes its much larger corporate presence will generate more success this time. "IBM is very pleased to beÂ joining the OpenOffice.org community.Â We are very optimistic that IBM's contribution of technology and engineering resources will provide tangible benefits to the community membership and to users of OpenOffice.org technology around the world," said Mike Rhodin, of IBM's Lotus Division. "We welcome IBM's contributions to further enhancing the OpenOffice.org product. But equally important is IBM's future commitment to package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO ODF standard," said John McCreesh of OpenOffice. IBM has been here before. In 1995, it paid $3.5 billion for Lotus Development, complete with its suite of high-regarded office applications, only for those programs to fall of the map completely as it focused on selling the OS/2 groupware, Lotus Notes, in a nice twist itself once a creation of current Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie. OpenOfficeÂ has launched version 2.3 just of its suite bang on cue for IBM's endorsement. TechworldÂ is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Microsoft said on Friday that it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the OOXML (Office Open XML) file-format standards process.The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft&#39;s format and the possible standard.Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the OSP (Open Specification Promise). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then, Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company&#39;s Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to &quot;promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers.&quot;The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them as outlined in an article in Microsoft&#39;s Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML&#39;s rival file format, ODF (Open Document Format), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
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InfoWorld - After years of holding out, IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft&#39;s Office software.
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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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Key to the announcement is the fact that the systems share microcode, said Dianne McAdam, senior analyst at Data Mobility Group. &quot;That means that if I want to make a copy of a volume on the DS6000 I use the same commands as the DS8000.
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Microsoft on Thursday updated a security bulletin issued Tuesday to include the Mac version of its ubiquitous Office suite. Three Excel vulnerabilities that affect Windows also pose a risk to Office 2004 for Mac, and the company has issued a downloadable patch.
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Microsoft added Office Live Workspace, a&#160;program for uploading and sharing documents online, to a suite of services specifically geared for users at academic institutions on Monday.The company announced the integration of the service into its Microsoft Live@edu Suite at a symposium for higher-education customers on its Redmond, Washington, campus. Live@edu is a suite of Web-based services aimed at giving universities the basics for creating an online community. Microsoft launched the suite in March 2005 and said more than 400 schools are currently using it.In addition to Office Live Workspace integration, Microsoft also has increased e-mail storage of Live@edu from 2GB to 5GB, and added up to 1GB of password-protected online storage space. The company also has updated the suite with an IP address whitelisting service to ensure e-mails sent from university mail services don&#39;t get caught in a recipient&#39;s spam filter.On Oct. 1, Microsoft unveiled a beta-registration program for Office Live Workspace, a Web-based extension of Microsoft Office that lets people access, share, and collaborate on documents online. Microsoft is facing new competition in the market for office applications from rivals like Google that are offering free Web-based alternatives to Office, and so it is diversifying its own offerings in the space with more online services.People interested in the Office Live Workspace beta can sign up online. The service will be available for free later this year.
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The executive board of the INCITS standards body voted yesterday to approve the recommendation of Microsoft's Office Open XML standard to the International Standards Organization as Draft International Standard 29500, once concerns voiced by some of its members have been attached and adequately addressed by Microsoft. The vote was 12 yea, 3 nay, and one abstention - again by the IEEE.