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Gary Edwards

Study Shows Office Alternatives Failing to Sway Microsoft Users -- Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine Online - 0 views

mcpmag.com/...g-to-sway-microsoft-users.aspx

forrester web-productivity-platform cloud-productivity workgroup-productivity MSOffice-productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 May 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 May 11
     
    Interesting report from Forrester on Desktop Productivity.  It seems everyone is asking about alternatives to MSOffice, but coming away empty handed.  Sounds like everyone would like to drop MSOffice, but find the alternatives wanting.  IMHO, the Web based alternatives are long on collaboration but short on productivity.   Compound Documents, Reports and Forms are the fuel that powers legacy workgroup productivity environments.  Web Productivity platforms have a long way to go before they can provide effective, worker facing authoring systems capable of replacing binding and messaging internals such as OLE, ODBC, MAPI, ActiveX, COM and DCOM.   There also seems to be considerable confusion about the difference between Web based authoring alternatives to MSOffice, and Web based Productivity Platforms.  MSOffice is the authoring system for desktop/WorkGroup productivity environments.  But having this authoring system wouldn't mean much if not for the workgroup connectivity and exchange platform behind it that makes highly productive digital business processes and systems possible. Linked Data, messaging, collaboration, and connectivity API's and HTML+ (HTML5, CSS3, JSON, Canvas/SVG, JavaScript) are  showing up everywhere.  But they are not exclusive to Web based authoring systems.  Any desktop authoring system should be able to take advantage of the emerging productivity platform.   So what's the problem with OpenOffice, Symphony, Zoho and gDocs?  OOo and Symphony can't speak language of the Web; HTML+.  Browser based Zoho and gDocs lack the completeness of a Web productivity environment capable of hosting the business processes currently bound to the Windows WorkGroup productivity environment.  There is no indication that the experts at Forrester understand what should be obvious.   excerpt: According to a new Forrester Research report, IT orgs are still choosing Microsoft Office over its competitors.   Two factors appear to be stumbling bloc
Gary Edwards

Open XML blogging in 2007 - Doug Mahugh - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...open-xml-blogging-in-2007.aspx

hypocrisy ODF odf-civil-war OOXML cloud-computing

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Dec 10
     
    At the height of the Document Wars, Doug Mahugh posted this year end, month to month, blow by blow list of blog assaults. I stumbled upon Doug's collection following up on a recent (December 20th, 2010) eMail comment from Karl.  Karl had been reading the infamous "Hypocrisy 101" blog written by Jesper Lundstocholm:  http://bit.ly/hgCVLV Recently i was researching cloud-computing, following the USA Federal Government dictate that cloud-computing initiatives should get top priority first-consideration for all government agency purchases.  The market is worth about $8 Billion, with Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps totally dominating contract decisions in the early going.  The loser looks to be IBM Lotus Notes since they seem to have held most of systems contracts. So what does this have to do with Hypocrisy 101? To stop Microsoft BPOS, IBM had to get a government mandate for ODF and NOT OOXML.  The reason is now clear.  Microsoft BPOS is dominating the early rounds of government cloud-computing contracts because BPOS is "compatible" with the legacy MSOffice desktop productivity environment.  Lotus symphony is not.  Nor is OpenOffice or any other ODF Office Suite.   This compatibility between BPOS and legacy MSOffice productivity environments means less disruption and re engineering of business process costs as governments make the generational shift from desktop "client/server" productivity to a Web productivity platform - otherwise known as "cloud-computing". IMHO, neither ODF or OOXML were designed for this cloud-computing :: Web productivity platform future.  The "Web" aspect of cloud-computing means that HTML-HTTP-JavaScript technologies will prevail in this new world of cloud-computing.  It's difficult, but not impossible, to convert ODF and OOXML to HTML+ (HTML5, CSS3, Canvas/SVG, JavaScript).  This broad difficulty means that cloud-computing does not have a highly compatible productivity authoring environment designed to meet the transition needs
Gary Edwards

XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web and XHTML - 0 views

quod.lib.umich.edu/...n-workflows-start-with-the-web

OpenWeb XML XHTML-CSS HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript IDML

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Challenges: Some Ugly Truths The challenges of building—and living with—an XML workflow are clear enough. The return on investment is a long-term proposition. Regardless of the benefits XML may provide, the starting reality is that it represents a very different way of doing things than the one we are familiar with. The Word Processing and Desktop Publishing paradigm, based on the promise of onscreen, WYSIWYG layout, is so dominant as to be practically inescapable. It has proven really hard to get from here to there, no matter how attractive XML might be on paper. A considerable amount of organizational effort and labour must be expended up front in order to realize the benefits. This is why XML is often referred to as an “investment”: you sink a bunch of time and money up front, and realize the benefits—greater flexibility, multiple output options, searching and indexing, and general futureproofing—later, over the long haul. It is not a short-term return proposition. And, of course, the returns you are able to realize from your XML investment are commensurate with what you put in up front: fine-grained, semantically rich tagging is going to give you more potential for searchability and recombination than a looser, more general-purpose approach, but it sure costs more. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the grand example of pouring enormous amounts of energy into the up-front tagging, with a very open-ended set of possibilities down the line. TEI helpfully defines a level to which most of us do not have to aspire.[5] But understanding this on a theoretical level is only part of the challenge. There are many practical issues that must be addressed. Software and labour are two of the most critical. How do you get the content into XML in the first place? Unfortunately, despite two decades of people doing SGML and XML, this remains an ugly question.
  • Practical Challenges In 2009, there is still no truly likeable—let alone standard—editing and authoring software for XML. For many (myself included), the high-water mark here was Adobe’s FrameMaker, substantially developed by the late 1990s. With no substantial market for it, it is relegated today mostly to the tech writing industry, unavailable for the Mac, and just far enough afield from the kinds of tools we use today that its adoption represents a significant hurdle. And FrameMaker was the best of the breed; most of the other software in decent circulation are programmers’ tools—the sort of things that, as Michael Tamblyn pointed out, encourage editors to drink at their desks. The labour question represents a stumbling block as well. The skill-sets and mind-sets that effective XML editors need have limited overlap with those needed by literary and more traditional production editors. The need to think of documents as machine-readable databases is not something that comes naturally to folks steeped in literary culture. In combination with the sheer time and effort that rich tagging requires, many publishers simply outsource the tagging to India, drawing a division of labour that spans oceans, to put it mildly. Once you have XML content, then what do you do with it? How do you produce books from it? Presumably, you need to be able to produce print output as well as digital formats. But while the latter are new enough to be generally XML-friendly (e-book formats being largely XML based, for instance), there aren’t any straightforward, standard ways of moving XML content into the kind of print production environments we are used to seeing. This isn’t to say that there aren’t ways of getting print—even very high-quality print—output from XML, just that most of them involve replacing your prepress staff with Java programmers.
  • Why does this have to be so hard? It’s not that XML is new, or immature, or untested. Remember that the basics have been around, and in production, since the early 1980s at least. But we have to take account of a substantial and long-running cultural disconnect between traditional editorial and production processes (the ones most of us know intimately) and the ways computing people have approached things. Interestingly, this cultural divide looked rather different in the 1970s, when publishers were looking at how to move to digital typesetting. Back then, printers and software developers could speak the same language. But that was before the ascendancy of the Desktop Publishing paradigm, which computerized the publishing industry while at the same time isolating it culturally. Those of us who learned how to do things the Quark way or the Adobe way had little in common with people who programmed databases or document-management systems. Desktop publishing technology isolated us in a smooth, self-contained universe of toolbars, grid lines, and laser proofs. So, now that the reasons to get with this program, XML, loom large, how can we bridge this long-standing divide?
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform The answer, I think, is right in front of you. The bridge is the Web, a technology and platform that is fundamentally based on XML, and which many publishers are by now comfortably familiar with. Perhaps not entirely comfortably, but at least most publishers are already working with the Web; they already either know or have on staff people who understand it and can work with it. The foundation of our argument is this: rather than looking at jumping to XML in its full, industrial complexity, which seems to be what the O'Reilly-backed StartWithXML initiative[6] is suggesting, publishers instead leverage existing tools and technologies—starting with the Web—as a means of getting XML workflows in place. This means making small investments and working with known tools rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on XML software and rarefied consultants. It means re-thinking how the existing pieces of the production toolchain fit together; re-thinking the existing roles of software components already in use. It means, fundamentally, taking the Web seriously as a content platform, rather than thinking of it as something you need to get content out to, somehow. If nothing else, the Web represents an opportunity to think about editorial and production from outside the shrink-wrapped Desktop Publishing paradigm.
  • Is the Web made of Real XML? At this point some predictable objections can be heard: wait a moment, the Web isn’t really made out of XML; the HTML that makes up most of the Web is at best the bastard child of SGML, and it is far too flaky/unstructured/underpowered to be taken seriously. We counter by arguing that although HTML on the Web exists in a staggering array of different incarnations, and that the majority of it is indeed an unstructured mess, this does not undermine the general principle that basic, ubiquitous Web technologies can make a solid platform for content management, editorial process, and production workflow.
  • With the advent of a published XML standard in the late 1990s came the W3C’s adoption of XHTML: the realization of the Web’s native content markup as a proper XML document type. Today, its acceptance is almost ubiquitous, even while the majority of actual content out there may not be strictly conforming. The more important point is that most contemporary Web software, from browsers to authoring tools to content management systems (from blogs to enterprise systems), are capable of working with clean, valid XHTML. Or, to put the argument the other way around, clean, valid XHTML content plays absolutely seamlessly with everything else on the Web.[7]
  • The objection which follows, then, will be that even if we grant that XHTML is a real XML document type, that it is underpowered for “serious” content because it is almost entirely presentation (formatting) oriented; it lacks any semantic depth. In XHTML, a paragraph is a paragraph is a paragraph, as opposed to a section or an epigraph or a summary.
  • n contrast, more “serious” XML document types like DocBook[8] or DITA-derived schemas[9] are capable of making semantic distinctions about content chunks at a fine level of granularity and with a high degree of specificity.
  • So there is an argument for recalling the 80:20 rule here. If XHTML can provide 80% of the value with just 20% of the investment, then what exactly is the business case for spending the other 80% to achieve that last 20% of value? We suspect the ratio is actually quite a bit steeper than 80:20 for most publishers.
  • IDML is a well thought-out XML standard that achieves two very different goals simultaneously: it preserves all of the information that InDesign needs to do what it does; and it is broken up in a way that makes it possible for mere mortals (or at least our Master of Publishing students) to work with it.
  • XHTML, on the other hand, is supported by a vast array of quotidian software, starting with the ubiquitous Web browser. For this very reason, XHTML is in fact employed as a component part of several more specialized document types (ONIX and ePub among them).
  • Why re-invent a general-purpose prose representation when XHTML already does the job?
  • It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of XHTML in the ePub standard for ebook content. An ePub file is, anatomically, a simply disguised zip archive. Inside the zip archive are a few standard component parts: there are specialized files that declare metadata about the book, and about the format of the book. And then there is the book’s content, represented in XHTML. An ePub book is a Web page in a wrapper.
  • To sum up the general argument: the Web as it already exists presents incredible value to publishers, as a platform for doing XML content management with existing (and often free) tools, and without having to go blindly into the unknown. At this point, we can offer a few design guidelines: prefer existing and/or ubiquitous tools over specialized ones wherever possible; prefer free software over proprietary systems where possible; prefer simple tools controlled and coordinated by human beings over fully automated (and therefore complex) systems; play to our strengths: use Web software for storing and managing content, use layout software for layout, and keep editors and production people in charge of their own domains.
  • Putting the Pieces Together: A Prototype
  • At the SFU Master of Publishing Program, we have been chipping away at this general line of thinking for a few years. Over that time, Web content management systems have been getting more and more sophisticated, all the while getting more streamlined and easier to use. (NB: if you have a blog, you have a Web content management system.) The Web is beginning to be recognized as a writing and editing environment used by millions of people. And the ways in which content is represented, stored, and exchanged online have become increasingly robust and standardized.
  • The missing piece of the puzzle has been print production: how can we move content from its malleable, fluid form on line into the kind of high-quality print production environments we’ve come to expect after two decades of Desktop Publishing?
  • Anyone who has tried to print Web content knows that the existing methods leave much to be desired (hyphenation and justification, for starters). In the absence of decent tools for this, most publishers quite naturally think of producing the print content first, and then think about how to get material onto the Web for various purposes. So we tend to export from Word, or from Adobe, as something of an afterthought.
  • While this sort of works, it isn’t elegant, and it completely ignores the considerable advantages of Web-based content management.
  • Content managed online is stored in one central location, accessible simultaneously to everyone in your firm, available anywhere you have an Internet connection, and usually exists in a much more fluid format than Word files. If only we could manage the editorial flow online, and then go to print formats at the end, instead of the other way around. At SFU, we made several attempts to make this work by way of the supposed “XML import” capabilities of various Desktop Publishing tools, without much success.[12]
  • In the winter of 2009, Adobe solved this part of the problem for us with the introduction of its Creative Suite 4. What CS4 offers is the option of a complete XML representation of an InDesign document: what Adobe calls IDML (InDesign Markup Language).
  • The IDML file format is—like ePub—a simply disguised zip archive that, when unpacked, reveals a cluster of XML files that represent all the different facets of an InDesign document: layout spreads, master pages, defined styles, colours, and of course, the content.
  • What this represented to us in concrete terms was the ability to take Web-based content and move it into InDesign in a straightforward way, thus bridging Web and print production environments using existing tools and skillsets, with a little added help from free software.
  • Such a workflow—beginning with the Web and exporting to print—is surely more in line with the way we will do business in the 21st century, where the Web is the default platform for reaching audiences, developing content, and putting the pieces together. It is time, we suggest, for publishers to re-orient their operations and start with the Web.
  • We would take clean XHTML content, transform it to IDML-marked content, and merge that with nicely designed templates in InDesign.
  • The result is an almost push-button publication workflow, which results in a nice, familiar InDesign document that fits straight into the way publishers actually do production.
  • Tracing the steps To begin with, we worked backwards, moving the book content back to clean XHTML.
  • The simplest method for this conversion—and if you want to create Web content, this is an excellent route—was to use Adobe’s “Export to Digital Editions” option, which creates an ePub file.
  • Recall that ePub is just XHTML in a wrapper, so within the ePub file was a relatively clean XHTML document. It was somewhat cleaner (that is, the XHTML tagging was simpler and less cluttered) than InDesign’s other Web-oriented exports, possibly because Digital Editions is a well understood target, compared with somebody’s website.
  • In order to achieve our target of clean XHTML, we needed to do some editing; the XHTML produced by InDesign’s “Digital Editions” export was presentation-oriented. For instance, bulleted list items were tagged as paragraphs, with a class attribute identifying them as list items. Using the search-and-replace function, we converted such structures to proper XHTML list and list-item elements. Our guiding principle was to make the XHTML as straightforward as possible, not dependent on any particular software to interpret it.
  • We broke the book’s content into individual chapter files; each chapter could then carry its own basic metadata, and the pages conveniently fit our Web content management system (which is actually just a wiki). We assembled a dynamically generated table of contents for the 12 chapters, and created a cover page. Essentially, the book was entirely Web-based at this point.
  • When the book chapters are viewed online, they are formatted via a CSS2 stylesheet that defines a main column for content as well as dedicating screen real estate for navigational elements. We then created a second template to render the content for exporting; this was essentially a bare-bones version of the book with no navigation and minimal styling. Pages (or even the entire book) can be exported (via the “Save As...” function in a Web browser) for use in either print production or ebook conversion. At this point, we required no skills beyond those of any decent Web designer.
  • Integrating with CS4 for Print Adobe’s IDML language defines elements specific to InDesign; there is nothing in the language that looks remotely like XHTML. So a mechanical transformation step is needed to convert the XHTML content into something InDesign can use. This is not as hard as it might seem.
  • Both XHTML and IDML are composed of straightforward, well-documented structures, and so transformation from one to the other is, as they say, “trivial.” We chose to use XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transforms) to do the work. XSLT is part of the overall XML specification, and thus is very well supported in a wide variety of tools. Our prototype used a scripting engine called xsltproc, a nearly ubiquitous piece of software that we found already installed as part of Mac OS X (contemporary Linux distributions also have this as a standard tool), though any XSLT processor would work.
  • In other words, we don’t need to buy InCopy, because we just replaced it with the Web. Our wiki is now plugged directly into our InDesign layout. It even automatically updates the InDesign document when the content changes. Credit is due at this point to Adobe: this integration is possible because of the open file format in the Creative Suite 4.
  • We wrote an XSLT transformation script[18] that converted the XHTML content from the Web into an InCopy ICML file. The script itself is less than 500 lines long, and was written and debugged over a period of about a week by amateurs (again, the people named at the start of this article). The script runs in a couple of seconds, and the resulting .icml file can then be “placed” directly into an InDesign template. The ICML file references an InDesign stylesheet, so the template file can be set up with a house-styled layout, master pages, and stylesheet definitions for paragraphs and character ranges.
  • The result is very simple and easy to use. Our demonstration requires that a production editor run the XSLT transformation script manually, but there is no reason why this couldn’t be built directly into the Web content management system so that exporting the content to print ran the transformation automatically. The resulting file would then be “placed” in InDesign and proofed.
  • It should be noted that the Book Publishing 1 proof-of-concept was artificially complex; we began with a book laid out in InDesign and ended up with a look-alike book laid out in InDesign. But next time—for instance, when we publish Book Publishing 2—we can begin the process with the content on the Web, and keep it there throughout the editorial process. The book’s content could potentially be written and edited entirely online, as Web content, and then automatically poured into an InDesign template at proof time. “Just in time,” as they say. This represents an entirely new way of thinking of book production. With a Web-first orientation, it makes little sense to think of the book as “in print” or “out of print”—the book is simply available, in the first place online; in the second place in derivative digital formats; and third, but really not much more difficult, in print-ready format, via the usual InDesign CS print production system publishers are already familiar with.
  • Creating Ebook Files Creating electronic versions from XHTML source is vastly simpler than trying to generate these out of the existing print process. The ePub version is extremely easy to generate; so is online marketing copy or excerpts for the Web, since the content begins life Web-native.
  • Since an ePub file is essentially XHTML content in a special wrapper, all that is required is that we properly “wrap” our XHTML content. Ideally, the content in an ePub file is broken into chapters (as ours was) and a table of contents file is generated in order to allow easy navigation within an ebook reader. We used Julian Smart’s free tool eCub[19] to simply and automatically generate the ePub wrapper and the table of contents. The only custom development we did was to create a CSS stylesheet for the ebook so that headings and paragraph indents looked the way we wanted. Starting with XHTML content, creating ePub is almost too easy.
  • today, we are able to put the process together using nothing but standard, relatively ubiquitous Web tools: the Web itself as an editing and content management environment, standard Web scripting tools for the conversion process, and the well-documented IDML file format to integrate the layout tool.
  • Our project demonstrates that Web technologies are indeed good enough to use in an XML-oriented workflow; more specialized and expensive options are not necessarily required. For massive-scale enterprise publishing, this approach may not offer enough flexibility, and the challenge of adding and extracting extra semantic richness may prove more trouble than it's worth.
  • But for smaller firms who are looking at the straightforward benefits of XML-based processes—single source publishing, online content and workflow management, open and accessible archive formats, greater online discoverability—here is a way forward.
  • Rather than a public-facing website, our system relies on the Web as a content management platform—of course a public face could easily be added.
  • The final piece of our puzzle, the ability to integrate print production, was made possible by Adobe's release of InDesign with an open XML file format. Since the Web's XHTML is also XML, is can be easily and confidently transformed to the InDesign format.
  • Furthermore, just to get technical for a moment, XHTML is extensible in a fairly straightforward way, through the common “class” attribute on each element. Web developers have long leveraged this kind of extensibility in the elaboration of “microformats” for semantic-web applications.[10] There is no reason why publishers shouldn’t think to use XHTML’s simple extensibility in a similar way for their own ends.
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. The important point though is that XHTML is a browser specific version of XML, and compatible with the Web Kit layout engine Miro wants to move NCP to. The concept of encoding an existing application-specific format in XML has been around since 1998, when XML was first introduced as a W3C standard, a "structured" subset of SGML. (HTML is also a subset of SGML). The multiplatform StarOffice productivity suite became "OpenOffice" when Sun purchased the company in 1998, and open sourced the code base. The OpenOffice developer team came out with a XML encoding of their existing document formats in 2000. The application specific encoding became an OASIS document format standard proposal in 2002 - also known as ODF. Microsoft followed OpenOffice with a XML encoding of their application-specific binary document formats, known as OOXML. Encoding the existing NCP format in XML, specifically targeting XHTML as a "universal pivot point", would put the NCP Outliner in the Web editor category, without breaking backwards compatibility. The trick is in the XSLT conversion process. But I think that is something much easier to handle then trying to
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. As an after thought, i was thinking that an alternative title to this article might have been, "Working with Web as the Center of Everything".
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. The important point though is that XHTML is a browser specific version of XML, and compatible with the Web Kit layout engine Miro wants to move NCP to. The concept of encoding an existing application-specific format in XML has been around since 1998, when XML was first introduced as a W3C standard, a "structured" subset of SGML. (HTML is also a subset of SGML). The multiplatform StarOffice productivity suite became "OpenOffice" when Sun purchased the company in 1998, and open sourced the code base. The OpenOffice developer team came out with a XML encoding of their existing document formats in 2000. The application specific encoding became an OASIS document format standard proposal in 2002 - also known as ODF. Microsoft followed OpenOffice with a XML encoding of their application-specific binary document formats, known as OOXML. Encoding the existing NCP format in XML, specifically targeting XHTML as a "universal pivot point", would put the NCP Outliner in the Web editor category, without breaking backwards compatibility. The trick is in the XSLT conversion process. But I think that is something much easier to handle then trying to
Gary Edwards

OASIS ODF: List Proposal Enhancement Vote Deadline on Wednesday | Gary Edwards - 0 views

lists.oasis-open.org/...msg00001.html

odf openxml oasis list-enhancement

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 09
     
    Thanks to Paul for digging this up. Who would have guessed that years later, these same issues hang like a dark shroud on the future of ODF? Note also that June 1st of 2007 was the cut off date for ODF 1.2 proposals and recommendations. The OpenFormula and Metadata SC's were rushing to make the cutoff. The List Enhancement proposal itself was just one of many enhancements submitted by Florian Reuter in November of 2006, designed to greatly improve ODF compatibility with MSOffice "ODF". By November of 2006, thanks largely to the Massachusetts Pilot Study, there were a number of ODF plug-ins for MSOffice. All were capable of producing perfectly compliant ISO 26300 ODF, but falling far short of public expectations of high fidelity interop with OpenOffice ODF. Sound familiar? Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before Microsoft was pressed into providing MSOffice ODF support. There was no doubt that they would face the exact same interop challenges as the many independent plug-in efforts. Hence the stepped up efforts by many at the OASIS ODF to "fix" ISO 26300! At the time of the List Enhancement Proposal, we had increasing evidence from the many pilot studies that ODF was impossible to implement in business and workgroup environments where the MSOffice productivity environment was the defining platform. ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice or the binary documents so critical to business processes bound to this environment. OpenXML was designed exactly to be compatible with these environments. Unless ODF fixed it's compatibility/interoperability problems there was no way for the independent plug-ins to provide a reasonable ODF implementation alternative to OpenXML. And even if Microsoft did produce an MSOffice ODF compliant with ISO 26300, these productivity environments would remain entirely locked. The world expected ODF to be compatible, interoperable, Web ready, and fully capable of cracking open the iron grip Mic
Gary Edwards

UseOffice. Net - A Modern Component to Accurately Convert Popular Office Formats - 1 views

www.sbwire.com/...sbwire-104408.htm

cloud-productivity desktop-productivity Document-Management-System

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 11
     
    Cloud based Productivity Platforms and Document Management Systems just got a huge "integration with legacy desktop productivity environments"  boot from UseOffice. Net - a powerful component for integration of converting functions to Web-server ASP.NET and desktop applications Windows Forms applications for the platform of Windows, including the following versions: 2000, XP, Vista, 2008 Server, Seven. Applications built on the basis of this component, allow the user to quickly, and most importantly - accurately convert the formats DOC, DOCX, RTF, PPT, PDF, HTML, XHTML various documents - reports, forms, invoices, articles, forms, presentations, web pages etc. The converted documents are fully preserve the visual characteristics of the original, including elements of the structure and format, such as tables, font styles, colors, page margins, etc. UseOffice. Net Supports the following areas of transformation: - DOC to: html, xml, rtf, txt, pdf, docx - DOCX to: html, xml, rtf, txt, pdf, doc - HTML to: doc, rtf, txt, pdf - XLS to: html, xml, txt, csv, rtf, pdf - RTF to: html, xml, txt, doc, pdf - PPT to: html, xml, rtf, pdf, jpg, bmp, gif - XLSX to: html, xml, txt, csv, rtf, pdf Integrate the components into an application quickly and easily - just add a couple lines of code. The component is written in C # and requires the set. NET Framework and Microsoft Office (any version from 2000, XP, 2003, 2007, 2010). The following development environments: C #, VB.Net, J #, C + +. NET, Delphi.NET, ColdFusion 8, ASP.NET, and many others ... Combining ease of use and quality conversion UseOffice. Net allows you to set page numbers in the final document, orientation and page size settings for images and more necessary in the conversion.
Gary Edwards

HTML5 data communications - 1 views

www.networkworld.com/...020911-html5-data.html

visual-document visually-immersive web-document HTML5 Web-Compound-Document

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 11 - No Cached
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 11
       
      Sounds like the core of a 1992 Windows Desktop Productivity "Compound Document" model.  Applications need to message, exchange and link data.  In 1992, the key technologies embedded in a compound document were DDE, OLE, ODBC, scripts and macros.  Later on, ActiveX and COM was added.  Today the MSOffice desktop productivity environment links into the MS-Live Productivity Cloud or the BPOS - SharePoint private cloud with a raft of WPF-SilverlightX stuff.  Good to see the Open Web fighting back with their own compound document model.
  • Cross-document messaging
Gary Edwards

Microsoft preps Office 365 document management tool for lawyers | Network World - 2 views

www.networkworld.com/...nagement-tool-for-lawyers.html

wordSDK Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The product apparently has a special search engine that can be accessed from within Outlook and Word, and it offers functionality to “track or pin” frequently used documents and “matters,” those issues related to managing a law practice. Emails can be dropped into the appropriate context from Outlook, and documents retain their metadata, permissions and version control as they’re stored and shared.
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 14
     
    "Microsoft has developed a document management add-on for Office 365 intended for lawyers, signaling a possible interest by the company in creating vertical-industry tools for the suite. Featured Resource Presented by Riverbed Technology 10 Common Problems APM Helps You Solve Practical advice for you to take full advantage of the benefits of APM and keep your IT environment Learn More Microsoft announced the product, called Matter Center for Office 365, Monday, saying it's in limited preview and available via a beta program to which customers can apply. The company provided few details about how the product works and what features it has, focusing instead on the fact that it is closely integrated with Office 365. Customers will be able to use Matter Center from within the suite's interface and components, like the Word and Excel apps, the SharePoint Online collaboration server and the OneDrive for Business cloud storage service. Matter Center has been designed to let lawyers and other legal professionals "easily find, organize and collaborate on files" within Office 365, instead of having to use a separate document management product. It remains unclear whether Matter Center will have all the security, compliance, retention and search functionality of full-featured document management products already used in legal settings."
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Aug 14
     
    Big barrier in that vertical market; law firms are required by Bar disciplinary rules to protect the confidentiality of client files. Unless Microsoft implements end to end encryption for Office 365 so that it's nigh impossible for the NSA et ilk to gain access to the plain text and rewrites its end user license to guarantee confidentiality of customer files, MSFT will get only the unwary law offices to use Office 365.
Gary Edwards

"A Strategy For Openness" : Report to the NYS Governor and Legislature (CIO/OFT) - 0 views

www.cio.ny.gov/...erecords-study.htm

john-cody nys odf openxml unified-productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Oct 09
     
    This is the report John Cody worked on.  I spent four months answering his questions but was unable to adequately explain to him the difference between an "Office Suite" and a workgroup-workflow centric "Productivity Environment".   John insists that it's entirely possible to rip-out-and-replace the MSOffice editors with the free OpenOffice Suite without disrupting important workflows and business processes.  I explained to him what happened in Massachussetts, including the 300 page pilot study report Sam wrote.  What he needs to do i think is pay close attention to the Burton Group coverage of what is now known as the SharePoint Foundation platform;  SharePoint 2010 having totally swallowed the MSOffice 2010, leaving the venerable desktop productivity office suite as an important end user interface into information rich business systems centered on the SharePoint "Unified Productivity" platform.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Watch - Business Applications - Convergence=Integration - 0 views

www.microsoft-watch.com/...convergence_integration.html

chains exchange hubs microsoft odf office ooxml opendocument openxml sharepoint xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Microsoft significantly increases cross-integration of features with the company's other software. Microsoft acquired most of the products making up its Dynamics product line, and what a motley crew. New products and versions bring the Dynamics line more into the Microsoft family, in part by convergence—or increased integration with the company's other software.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Thanks for the insightful commentary Joe. I see things a bit differently. Maybe my tin foil hat is wearing a bit tight these days, but i see MSOffice XML (MOOXML and the MOOXML binary InfoSet) as a very important aspect of how Microsoft integrates and leverages their desktop office monopoly power into server side and device systems. It is the combination of MOOXML and .NET that creates the integration mesh between desktop, server systems, and devices. Imagine every application or service participating in either a loosely coupled or carefully crafted information processing chain, being fluent in MOOXML, and able to process internal data structures and processing instructions unique to .NET. Enterprise systems and services from ORACLE, IBM and SAP will not have this same integration fluency. The design of ISO MOOXML is such that it would be impossible for <b>non Microsoft server and device systems</b> to match the quality and depth of integration with the 500 million desktops running MSOffice bound business processes. Given that MOOXML will probably succeed at getting ISO/IEC approval, removing the last "legal" barrier for this MOOXML Stack, were looking at a massive migration of MSOffice bound workgroup - workflow business processes to a new lockin point; The Exchange/SharePoint Hub. With the real estate industry, this migration to to E/S hosted applications only took six months to completely replace years of desktop productivity shrinkware dominance. The leap in productivity was spectacular. The downside of this migration is that the real estate industry is now tied into Microsoft at the critically important business process level. A binding that will perhaps last through the next fifteen years.
Gary Edwards

Amazing Stuff: ThinkFree Office Compatibility with MSOffice compared to OpenOffice Compatibility - 0 views

product.thinkfree.com/...compatibility

ThinkFree compatibility openoffice msoffice

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 09
     
    This is amazing stuff. With all the talk about OpenOffice ODF compatibility problems with existing MSOffice productivity environments and documents, this comparison is stunning. I stumbled across this Compatibility Comparison reading this article: ThinkFree Set to Launch The First Complete Android Office Suite. Documents To Go is currently the only provider of Word and Excel documents on Android. The ThinkFree Office comparisons to OpenOffice cover a number of familiar compatibility issues, with layout at the top of the list. ThinkFree Write 3.5 vs OpenOffice Writer 3.0 ".....When using a word processor to create documents, you really shouldn't have to worry about whether your client will be able to see the document as you intended." ".... However, if you use a low-cost solution like OpenOffice, you should be prepared for frustrations and disappointments....."
Gary Edwards

Sun-Oracle Merger Looks Bright for OpenOffice, MySQL - Reviews by PC Magazine - 3 views

www.pcmag.com/...0,2817,2358571,00.asp

OpenOffice ODF MySQL Oracle-Sun productivity-environment

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 10
     
    Like most people i've been looking for a clear statement from Oracle concerning the future of MySQL and OpenOffice.  Although the title is promising, this article is short on facts, long on speculation and actually raises more doubts than it answers questions.  Some of the "assumptions" made by the author, Samara Lynn, are incredible.  And apparently unfounded.  I'll highlight with diigo the hyperbole statements.  Maybe someone else has the answers?  And where was Phil Boutros? intro:  Although eclipsed by Apple's iPad announcement, Oracle announced yesterday its intentions with Sun products, now that the acquisition of Sun Microsystems is complete. The announcement, which was actually a planned webcast, reassured those worried over the fate of two open-source Sun products for small business: the database software, MySQL and the productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. The acquisition might make MySQL and OpenOffice.org even more competitive against costly Microsoft counterparts (SQL Server and Microsoft Office).
Gary Edwards

It's All Over But For The Shouting :: Xandros to Provide Enhanced Interoperability Between Standardized XML Document Formats - 0 views

www.marketwire.com/...release.do

iso odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Xandros, the leading provider of intuitive Linux solutions and cross platform interoperability tools, today announced it will join Microsoft and other companies to build and ship open source translators between documents stored in Ecma Office Open XML and Open Document Formats. The translators, being developed through the Open XML/ODF Translator project, will be made available to Xandros users via the Xandros Networks update facility. Every Xandros product that includes OpenOffice.org will be equipped with the translators. This announcement underscores the shared view of Xandros and Microsoft that competing office productivity applications should make it easy for customers to exchange files with one another and allow them to use their operating system and office productivity applications of choice. "This is good news for customers. Xandros and Microsoft share the view that competing office productivity applications should make it easy for customers to exchange files with one another," said Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft. "Mixed system environments are becoming more common, and we believe in delivering interoperability by design for the benefit of our customers. Our ongoing collaborative relationships with commercial open source companies like Xandros help us achieve that goal." "We are delighted to join forces with Microsoft and others to provide interoperability between standardized XML document formats," said Andreas Typaldos, Xandros CEO. "The work of the world is done using various document formats as well as operating systems, so it is vital to provide our customers with the means interoperate with ease in this diverse environment."
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    You have to read this!  Xandros is taking this interoperability garbage seriously!
Gary Edwards

Gray Matter : Office and SharePoint 2010 Highlights from SharePoint Conference - 0 views

blogs.technet.com/...rom-sharepoint-conference.aspx

MSOffice-productivity msoffice-2010 sharepoint unified-productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Oct 09
     
    If there were any doubts left as to how far along Microsoft is in their efforts to create a proprietary version of the Web for Office Productivity and Business Systems, the recent SharePoint Conference should put these doubts to rest.   excerpt:  InfoPath 2010 and InfoPath Forms Services ....... Forms capability in Office and SharePoint is maturing rapidly. With the inclusion of BCS in SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, InfoPath becomes even more powerful as a tool for aggregating, presenting and gathering information. Why? - People are now discovering how easy it is to bind BCS entities to a SharePoint list, and then present that list data to users in a rich InfoPath form. Because InfoPath does a great job of making complex data interaction simple for end users, it is becoming a critical component of LOB solutions managed in the SharePoint environment. Surfacing InfoPath solutions via the browser, InfoPath mobile forms, through Outlook, SharePoint Workspace or other interfaces makes the rich InfoPath experience portable and flexible. People on the floor certainly responded positively; InfoPath was a smashing success. Visit the InfoPath team blog to read about some of the solutions they were previewing. Below is an excerpt from the post:
Gary Edwards

The City of Heerenveen turns OpenOffice.org into a Web 2.0 enterprise environment. - Flock - 0 views

www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp

odf

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • “By migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org we had to take our productivity environment to a higher level, so that the migration would not be perceived as a mere replacement but as a genuine improvement. The OpenOffice.org user doesn’t need to leave the OpenOffice.org application or start another application. This effectively eliminates the borders between template management and document collaboration for teams, projects and departments. We are focused on the user and on the usability of the applications we use. With O3Spaces Workplace we’ve found a fully integrated document management, collaboration environment that till now couldn’t be found on the market”, says Hiemstra.
Gary Edwards

What's So Bad About Microsoft? - 0 views

www.kmfms.com/whatsbad.html

backwards-compatibility iso microsoft odf ooxml xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Backward Incompatibility Also contributing to Microsoft's goal of putting everybody on a perpetual upgrade cycle is the backward incompatibility in Microsoft's products. Once a small number of users adopt a new version of a Microsoft product all other users are pressured to upgrade lest they are unable to interact with files produced by the newer program. Dan Martinez summed up the situation created with the incompatibility in subsequent versions of Word when he said "while we're on the subject of file formats, let's pause for a moment in frank admiration of the way in which Microsoft brazenly built backward-incompatibility into its product. By initially making it virtually impossible to maintain a heterogenous environment of Word 95 and Word 97 systems, Microsoft offered its customers that most eloquent of arguments for upgrading: the delicate sound of a revolver being cocked somewhere just out of sight." (cited from the quote file) For a more detailed lament of how Microsoft likes to pressure its customers to keep buying the same product over and over by using backward incompatibility, see Zeid Nasser's page on 'Forced upgrading,' in the World of Word.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    The "Backwards Compatibility" issue is all the rage at ISO, with the September vote on MS OOXML just a month away.

    Microsoft and Sun (We've Been Had!) are arguing that ISO should approve MS OOXML (Microsoft OfficeOpenXML) because OOXML offers a backwards compatibility with the legacy of existing billions of binary documents.

    This oft sighted history of Microsoft's reprehensible business practices is worth citing once again before the nations of the world go down that treacherous path towards ratifying Microsoft's proprietary systems and products as international standards.



Gary Edwards

What Oracle Sees in Sun Microsystems | NewsFactor Network - 0 views

www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml

openoffice java sun oracle ibm da-vinci massachusetts

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Citigroup's Thill estimates Oracle could cut between 40 percent and 70 percent of Sun's roughly 33,000 employees. Excluding restructuring costs, Oracle expects Sun to add $1.5 billion in profit during the first year after the acquisition closes this summer, and another $2 billion the following year. Oracle executives declined to say how many jobs would be eliminated.
  • Citigroup's Thill estimates Oracle could cut between 40 percent and 70 percent of Sun's roughly 33,000 employees. Excluding restructuring costs, Oracle expects Sun to add $1.5 billion in profit during the first year after the acquisition closes this summer, and another $2 billion the following year. Oracle executives declined to say how many jobs would be eliminated.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 09
     
    Good article from Aaron Ricadela. The focus is on Java, Sun's hardware-Server business, and Oracle's business objectives. No mention of OpenOffice or ODf though. There is however an interesting quote from IBM regarding the battle between Java and Microsoft .NET. Also, no mention of a OpenOffice-Java Foundation that would truly open source these technologies.

    When we were involved with the Massachusetts Pilot Study and ODF Plug-in proposals, IBM and Oracle lead the effort to open source the da Vinci plug-in. They put together a group of vendors known as "the benefactors", with the objective of completing work on da Vinci while forming a patent pool - open source foundation for all OpenOffice and da Vinci source. This idea was based on the Eclipse model.

    One of the more interesting ideas coming out of the IBM-Oracle led "benefactors", was the idea of breaking OpenOffice into components that could then be re-purposed by the Eclipse community of developers. The da Vinci plug-in was to be the integration bridge between Eclipse and the Microsoft Office productivity environment. Very cool. And no doubt IBM and Oracle were in synch on this in 2006. The problem was that they couldn't convince Sun to go along with the plan.

    Sun of course owned both Java and OpenOffice, and thought they could build a better ODF plug-in for OpenOffice (and own that too). A year later, Sun actually did produce an ODF plug-in for MSOffice. It was sent to Massachusetts on July 3rd, 2007, and tested against the same set of 150 critical documents da Vinci had to successfully convert without breaking. The next day, July 4th, Massachusetts announced their decision that they would approve the use of both ODF and OOXML! The much hoped for exclusive ODF requirement failed in Massachusetts exactly because Sun insisted on their way or the highway.

    Let's hope Oracle can right the ship and get OpenOffice-ODF-Java back on track.

    "......To gain
Gary Edwards

Can Microsoft Count on Inertia to Spur Office 2010 Upgrades? | Eric Lai - CIO Article Comments - 0 views

comments.cio.com/489648

msoffice ooxml odf html webkit iphone

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 09
     
    This article left me a bit confused. The author poses an important question about the next release of MSOffice; MSOffice 2010. Or what others have called MSOffice 11. The question is whether or not end users will buy into the new features, and continue on the upgrade treadmill as they have for the past 15 years or so. Strangely though, there is no discussion of the traditional factors binding end users to the upgrade treadmill. Things like ever changing formats, protocols and interfaces. Nor is there discussion as to the impact of marketplace demands that Microsoft comply with open standards; including open document exchange formats like ODF, OOXML and HTML+ (the advanced WebKit-Ajax document model).

    The thing is, it's more than simple "inertia" that compels people to jump on the upgrade treadmill. The ODF pilot studies conducted in Massachusetts, California, Denmark and Belgium brought into sharp focus the difficulties workgroups have in replacing MSOffice. Years of client/server systems designed to run within the MSOffice productivity environment has left many a business process bound to the MSOffice suite of editors and the compound documents they produce.

    I left my response in the reader feedback section of this CIO article.

    ".....In the past, the MSOffice upgrade treadmill was unavoidable due to the file format compatibility problem. As workgroups and business divisions purchased new computers with newer versions of MSOffice, resulting file format incompatibilities made workflow exchange of documents impossibly frustrating. Eventually, entire workgroups were forced into upgrading just to keep day to day business processes working....."
Gary Edwards

Groklaw - Digging for Truth : The problem with XML document formats - 0 views

www.groklaw.net/comment.php

odf ooxml html webkit groklaw alex-brown document-wars

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The problem with that, as I understand it, is that the transitional spec is pretty much unimplementable by anybody except MS
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 15 Apr 09
       
      Well, herein lies the problem, dude ... you don't understand it.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Apr 09
     
    Wow! The ODF peasants with pitchforks are have taken to the streets, and ISO document expert Alex Brown is taking them on. The volumes of traffic generated by any discussion of the ISO XML document wars continues to amaze. It's very one sided though. The basic problem seems to be that ISO has accepted two XML document format standards, OOXML and ODF, with OOXML being held to a higher set of expectations than ODF. Alex would do well if he could step back from the OOXML - ODF war, and move the discussion to something like the theoretical IDABC ODEF: the European "Open Document Exchange Formats" design. With ODEF as single set of XML format requirements against which both OOXML and ODF can be measured and compared, Alex might be able to neutralize the heated emotions of angry Open Source - Open Standards - Open Web supporters, who mistakenly think ODF measures up to ODEF expectations and requirements. Trying to compare ODF to OOXML isn't getting us anywhere. At some point, we have to ask ourselves what is it that we want from a standardized XML document format. Having participated in both the Massachusetts pilot study and the California pilot discussions, i have to say that the public expectations were that XML formats would have a basic set of characteristics: open markup; structured separation of content, presentation and logic; high level interoperability (exchange), and Web ready. These are basic "must have" expectations. XML formats were expected to be "better" than 1998 HTML-CSS. But when we apply the basic set of expectations, todays HTML+ (webkit HTML5, CSS4, SVG/Canvas, JS, JS Libs) turns out to be a far better format. Where the XML formats really fall off the wagon are the interoperability and Web ready expectations. For the life of me i don't see how anyone can compare ODF or OOXML interoperability with that of HTML+. And of course, HTML+ is the native language/for
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Apr 09
     
    Jesper Lund Stocholm was kind enough to point out that, once again, GrokLaw is stoking the fires of the XML document wars. This time PJ takes on Alex Brown, of the ISO SC34 document standards group convenor. And Alex responds ... and responds ... and responds. of course, the attacks keep coming! I left Jesper a rather lengthy comment at: http://tinyurl.com/document-wars
Gary Edwards

An interesting offer: get paid to contribute to Wikipedia - Rick Jelliffe - 1 views

www.oreillynet.com/...an_interesting_offer.html

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 11
     
    Classic argument about ODF vs OOXML.  Need to send Rick an explanation about how the da Vinci plug-in works.  It is entirely possible to capture everythign MSOffice editors do in ODF using namespace extensions compliant with ODF 1.1 standard.   What was impossible was to round-trip those MSOffice ODF documents to OpenOffice.org.  And as it turns out, replacing MSOffice/Windows on new workgroup desktops with OpenOffice/Linux was one of the primary objectives behind the Massachussetts effort to standardize on ODF.  They believed the hype that ODF was cross platform interoperable.  It wasn't then, and it still isn't five years later. As for capturing all the complexities and nuances of the very robust MSOffice productivity environment and authoring system?  Sure, ODf could easily be extended for that. What an incredible discussion!
Gary Edwards

Two weeks later: My switch from Outlook to Gmail | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/om-outlook-to-gmail-7000032955

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 14
     
    Two weeks later: My switch from Outlook to Gmail Summary: ZDNet's David Gewirtz has been using Gmail for two weeks after switching all his email from Outlook. After two weeks with Gmail as his primary mail environment, what's his verdict? It might surprise you. David Gewirtz By David Gewirtz for DIY-IT | August 26, 2014 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT) 28Comments 4 Votes inShare more + emptyinboxCan there be anything more relaxing than an empty inbox? Besides my car, wife, and puppy, of course. I have been using Gmail instead of Outlook for the past two weeks. And you know what? I couldn't be happier with it. Yeah, I didn't expect that, either. More on Gmail & Productivity Why I bit the bullet and finally switched from Outlook to Gmail Your questions answered: Why I switched from Outlook to Gmail I figured I'd be somewhat satisfied at best, but more probably I'd evidence the general level of disgruntlement most technology inspires in me. But no. I'm actually quite happy with Gmail. Fundamentally, the reason is simple: my email has been under control for two whole weeks. I can't remember when that was last the case, but it sure hasn't been for a few years, at least. Achieving Inbox Zero Within two days of moving to Gmail, I actually achieved Inbox Zero, that mythical state that described an inbox completely devoid of messages. Even more astonishing, I've managed to keep my inbox at Inbox Zero each day for the last few weeks. I attribute this to a number of factors, each of which I will enumerate here."
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