Ms Office News & Articles

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.

Google (news, site) is taking another step towards real competition with Microsoft in the productivity solutions department. They have announced Google Apps Directory Sync -- the ability to provision users and groups from your own internal directory services be it Active Directory, Lotus Domino or another LDAP solution with your Googe Apps accounts.

Document collaboration can be a headache. Hours can be spent sending out copies via email. Days lost waiting for revisions and edits to come back. And then additional hours combining all the changes into one homogenous document. TextFlow aims to minimize the pain of document collaboration with free online/offline collaboration software.

Atlassian has released the latest version of their Confluence enterprise wiki software, officially releasing their SharePoint Connector and a new Connector that will make many MS Office and Open Office users happy.

Microsoft may still be riding high from obtaining ISO certification for its OOXML specification in April, because they are now openly offering to support ODF in their Office 2007 productivity software. It’s a ploy, some open source camps are whispering. It’s about time, says others.