Ms Office News & Articles

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas., Microsoft (news, site) demonstrated that the next version of Windows will run on non-Intel mobile hardware.

A useful new utility, GDocsOpen lets users launch any MS Office document on the desktop and work with it in Google Docs.

e-Spirit (news, site) released a new version of the FirstSpirit Web CMS in the spirit of better communication with office applications.

A challenging issue for many intranet managers is whether to use the Web CMS selected for the corporate website as the Web CMS for the intranet. In this column I have summarised just some of the issues that need to be considered.

It's just about the end of August and time for the gears to shift up one. This week, there have been a number of new releases that have focused principally on getting SharePoint 2010-ready. O3Spaces has also been busy, this time adding Linux support.

Long weekends are usually short on news, but not this time. Over the past few days, a new suite of mobile Office applications has just been unveiled, while SharePoint is not the only software to get records management, with IBM’s Lotus Domino platform getting a little records management love too.

What if you could combine the process and task management activities of a BPM system, a CRM system and a Knowledge Worker system into a single solution that integrates with the tools you use daily? 

Let's set aside all the SharePoint 2010 excitement for a minute and talk about the brand spanking new Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps (Don't know what  they are? See here.).

The need for browser-based productivity and office applications cannot be understated. Microsoft's investment here is witness to this. But is MS Office in your browser going to change your life? Or is Microsoft's move too little, too late? 

Tell us what you think.

Our poll will remain open until April 25, but there's no time like the present to cast your vote.

For a company that is known primarily for the desktop, new comments by CEO Steve Ballmer that 70% of Microsoft's employees are doing something "cloud-based or cloud-inspired" seems an odd shift in focus. But then, everyone is in a rush to the cloud these days. Why would Microsoft (news, site) be any different.

In August, KnowledgeTree (news, site) announced their support for the upcoming CMIS specification. Now with the release of v3.7 of their document managment system, they put their support into action.

Jive Software (news, site) continues to improved its Social Business Software Suite (SBS). Version 4.0 of SBS comes with a slew of new functionality and lots of improvements to existing features. 

The question becomes, as a company on a mission to become the critical, go-to platform for enterprises, is it enough to take on this existing challenger, SharePoint, and the upcoming SharePoint 2010?

It is now official. Microsoft and Nokia have formally announced a new, groundbreaking partnership that will see the creation of a set of productivity solutions designed specifically for a mobile workforce.

The partnership involves the design, development and marketing of a set of productivity, collaboration and communication solutions for Nokia smartphones, starting with the Nokia Eseries.

What are some of the solutions that will be included in this new mobile partnership?

• Create, edit, view and share Office documents including mobile-optimized versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
• Access to SharePoint based Intranets and Extranets
• IM, presence awareness, conferencing and collaboration using Microsoft Communicator Mobile
• Device Management with Microsoft Systems Center

Nokia is the largest smartphone provider with over 200 million customers worldwide, so it does make sense that Microsoft would choose to partner with them to push their mobile solutions to the world.

What is good to know is that there will be dedicated mobile teams within each company working on these mobile solutions and that they are not just an extension of existing product teams. We would expect this means a true effort to deliver truly mobile software.

Mobile solutions have a specific user experience that needs to be considered. Many vendors are already developing mobile-optimized versions of their applications, including business apps for the iPhone.

With explosive growth of the mobile workforce, Microsoft may be primed to take the lead thanks to their partnership. Of course it won't hurt Nokia either.

There's Zoho, Google Apps and soon Microsoft Office Online. Do we really need another online productivity suite? Maybe not. But have you heard of ThinkFree Online? It is also an online office productivity suite that includes word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software than can be used both off and online, and touch of collaboration to boot.

Let's take a look at how this suite sizes up.

Liferay (news, site) Portal Enterprise Edition 5.2 is now available, boosting the speed and feature-set found in the previously released Standard Edition, including benchmarked performance improvements.

In a continued effort to provide integrated solutions with Microsoft productivity tools, Mark Logic (news, site) is now offering a toolkit for Microsoft Excel.

Their first foray in Office Integration included a Toolkit for Word that allows you to add custom metadata to Word documents to improve search and analytics and create better XML-based applications. It also enables you to view Word documents from the MarkLogic server.

At the same as the Toolkit for Word announcement, the MOSS Connector for Mark Logic was also announced. This connector automatically mirrors content from MOSS to the MarkLogic XML Server and can also integrate MarkLogic functions via SharePoint workflows.

Now, with the addition of a Toolkit for Excel, the integration is almost complete. The toolkit offers a number of capabilities including:

• Enhanced Search: Search across Excel books for worksheets, cells and formulas from within the MarkLogic environment, add the search results to an active workbook and more.
  
• Creation and Manipulation of Excel Workbooks: Create new workbooks from existing XML documents, manipulate and re-use workbooks stored in the repository with a built-in XQuery library and never have to run Office to do it.
• Custom Metadata for Excel Documents: Add and edit custom metadata across Excel documents.

In addition, an Excel add-in is included that will help you deploy web applications from within Excel. A sample application is includes that demonstrates how to use the toolkit.

The Mark Logic Toolkit for Excel is distributed under open source licensing, as an Apache 2.0 license. You can download your copy from the Mark Logic Developer Workshop.