Microsoft to share Office software source code with governments
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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 has agreed to make certain parts of its Windows source code available for distribution to developers under revised terms that European Commissioner for Competitiveness Neelie Kroes called "compatible with the open source business model."
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Ziff Davis - Government officials say Microsoft's move to share the source code for Office 2003 won't change anyone's mind about Microsoft or open source.
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FROM today, Microsoft is expanding a programme to give government organisations access to some of its tightly guarded software blueprints for the latest version of its Office software.
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IBM today joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft's Office software.
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The 2008 Microsoft Office System Developer Conference this week focuses on the company's Office application suite as an application development platform in and of itself.The event in San Jose, Calif. features a presentation by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and is the first time it has been held away from the company's Redmond, Wash. campus."We are holding the first open-to-the-public Office developer conference," said Chris Bryant, Microsoft senior product manager in the Office platform strategy group. When previously held in 2005 and 2006, the event was invitation-only."We decided it was time to reach out broadly," to the public, said Bryant. The company estimates that approximately 45 percent of developers worldwide do development work related to the Office platform, he said.At the event, Gates will give a keynote presentation featuring a guest from FedEx, David Zanca, senior vice president for e-commerce technologies, who will show how FedEx is extending Office with custom interfaces.?FedEx will launch FedEx QuickShip, an add-in for Microsoft Outlook. With the add-in, users can create a FedEx shipping order from within Outlook. The shipping form is pre-populated with contact information.Microsoft will make several announcements at the show. The company will launch version 2 of its OBA (Office Business Applications) Sample Kit for SAP, which lets developers build an Office business application that uses SAP as a back-end data source. Version 2 features compatibility with the newly released Visual Studio 2008 development toolset. Also, the company will offer OBA Sample Kit for PeopleSoft to connect to PeopleSoft data sources. Both the PeopleSoft and SAP kits are free.Another product, Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.1, a free download from MSDN that adds SharePoint project types to Visual Studio, Bryant said. Developers can build a Web part or a workflow. New project types are featured, including the ability to build a SharePoint site template from an existing SharePoint site. Developers can build an application on a SharePoint site and redeploy it to other SharePoint instances.The company will release to manufacturing its BizTalk Adapter Pack. "They are data source adapters for Oracle, SAP, and Siebel," for exposing those data sources as Web services and connecting them to SharePoint, said Bryant. The product, to be globally available March 1, presents a more unified data connectivity layer on top of different data sources, he said. This product is expected to cost $5,000 per processor.Another product on tap from Microsoft is OBA Component Library for Financial Services, also a free product. "It's a set of more than 100 standards-based components that allow developers to build Office business applications in the financial sector," said Bryant. New reference and sample applications will be offered in such spaces as insurance packaging and capital market packaging.?Microsoft will debut the Winter 2008 release of the online Office Office Live Small Business, which will be version 2 of the service. With this release, Microsoft will offer a base, free offering and then sell additional services, such as extra storage or mail boxes. A small business would get a Web site and the opportunity to have a domain name and a set of e-mail boxes, Bryant said."Customer feedback has essentially told [Microsoft] that the packaging options [were] not as granular as people want," said Bryant.The company will announce its Metro program for Unified Communications, which will have developer evangelists engaging ISV partners to build unified communications-enabled applications such as ones incorporating speech into applications. Microsoft will seek ISV partners for this program.FedEx also will show proof of concept applications to deepen its connection to Office, including a connection between FedEx Kinkos printing services and Microsoft Word. Users would be able to choose professional printing options and select a local FedEx Kinkos office where they could pick up their order.Also planned by FedEx is a link with SharePoint pertaining to shipping and an integration with Word in which the Office ribbon is customized for access to binding, stapling, and collating.
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Microsoft (Quote, Chart) has extended its Government Security Program (GSP) by offering government customers access to the source code of Microsoft Office 2003.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O is planning to  release a new version of its Office program for small  businesses that handles accounting and customer management  tasks, the world's largest software maker said on Friday.
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Massachusetts Monday proposed adding Microsoft-developed Open XML to its list of approved open documents formats.
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Microsoft Corp.  is planning to release a new version of its Office program for small businesses that handles accounting and customer management tasks, the world's largest software maker said on Friday.
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Microsoft is planning free online versions of its word processing and spreadsheet programs.
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Release makes use of technology from CodeWeavers to let customers run applications from Microsoft.
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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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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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ODF fans say, 'we're not simple, we're elegant' Microsoft has made technical information for its older binary Office document formats available for download following pressure from participants in the ongoing, somewhat fiery, standardisation debate.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Companies have completed the first phase of a Microsoft-sponsored project to create software that can convert Microsoft Word documents between Open XML and Open Document Format for Office Applications file formats. The Open XML Translator is now available for download in version 1.0 from SourceForge.net, a site that acts as an online repository for open-source projects. The software also can be found on Microsoft's Web site here and here. Microsoft funded the work on the translator, but did not contribute any code to the project, said Jason Matusow, senior director of intellectual property and interoperability at Microsoft. The company provided architectural guidance and management to the project, he said. A French company called CleverAge contributed the code and built most of the Open XML Translator, while Aztecsoft in India and Dialogika in Germany did the quality assurance and testing. The Open XML Translator allows Microsoft Word documents based on Open XML to be translated into ODF and vice versa, Matusow said. Once downloaded, it can be used as a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2007, the documents of which are based on Open XML. Developers also can build it into software they are developing. The Open XML Translator for Word documents is the first phase of the project. The team is currently working on translation between ODF and Open XML for spreadsheets written in Microsoft Excel 2007 and presentations developed in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, Matusow said. Much has been made of the fact that MicrosoftÂ did not provide native supportÂ in Microsoft Office 2007 for ODF, though it provides support for 30 other file formats and uses Open XML as the default document file format. Matusow defends that decision by saying Microsoft tries to meet its customers' wishes, and there was no customer demand for ODF -- largely supported by rivals IBM and Sun Microsystems -- when development on Office 2007 began. IBM and Sun both use ODF as the default file format in their own rivals to the Microsoft Office suite. "A standard is about a stack of paper -- market adoption is the ultimate driver of activity," Matusow said. "What gets built and used is the defining element. That's why we look at the customer discussion as being so important." However, government customers that may be required to use only industry-standard technologies in their IT infrastructure requested that Microsoft provide a way to translate between Open XML and ODF.Â ODF recently was approvedÂ by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as a global standard, while Open XML is awaiting approval. Matusow said the reason Microsoft let third parties be the primary creators and caretakers of the Open XML Translator is because of the input of government customers who wanted Microsoft to provide a free, open way to translate between ODF and Open XML -- one that was not strictly overseen by Microsoft but was more of a community effort. To its credit, Microsoft did try to include native support for another company's document format -- a standard implementation of Adobe Systems Inc.'s PDF -- in Office 2007, but Adobe balked at the idea and asked Microsoft to pull that support, which it did. Adobe recently submitted PDF to the ISO for global standardization, and Matusow said Microsoft would again be "open to conversation" with Adobe about including PDF as a native file format in a future version of Office.
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BOSTON -- A data format used in Microsoft Corp.'s prevalent Office software line has been approved as an international standard _ a move aimed at preserving access to documents created with the package for years to come.