Skip to main content

Home/ Document Wars/ Group items matching "Computer" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
1More

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
1More

A New Patent Application from Apple Introduces us to a Breakthrough Platform Independen... - 0 views

www.patentlyapple.com/...ndependent-word-processor.html apple-patent browser-wordprocessor layout-engine
shared by Gary Edwards on 23 May 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 23 May 11
     
    excerpt:  This could be Apple's new internet strategy that thrusts more of us into the next phase of what is now known as the Post-PC era. In my view, this breakthrough could be a game changer.   The Problem to Solve The recent proliferation of web browsers and computer networks has made it easy to display the same document on different computing platforms. However, inconsistencies in the way fonts are rendered across different computing platforms could cause the same document to be rendered differently for users of different computing platforms. More specifically, for a given font, the way in which metrics for various font features are interpreted, such as character height, width, leading and white space, can differ between computing platforms. These differences in interpretation could cause individual characters in a document to be rendered at different locations, which could ultimately cause the words in a document to be positioned differently between lines and pages on different computing platforms.   This inconsistent rendering could be a problem for people who are collaborating on a document. For example, if one collaborator points out an error on a specific line of a specific page, another collaborator viewing the same document on a different computing platform may have to first locate the error on a different line of a different page. Hence, what is needed is a technique for providing consistent rendering for documents across different computer systems and computing platforms. Apple's patent application describe a system that typesets and renders a document in a platform-independent manner. During operation, the system first obtains the document, wherein the document includes text content and associated style information including one or more fonts. The system also generates platform-independent font metrics for the one or more fonts, wherein the platform-independent font metrics include information that could be used to determine the positions of i
11More

Why Microsoft Azure could have the last laugh in the cloud wars | CITEworld - 0 views

www.citeworld.com/...t-laugh-in-the-cloud-wars.html rdsdk Office-365 Cloud-Productivity-Platform
shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Venture capitalist Brad Feld recently wrote an interesting post predicting the end of Amazon's dominance of the cloud computing market, and concluded, "it’s suddenly a good time to be Microsoft or Google in the cloud computing wars." I'd go one step farther. Using Feld's arguments, I'd say that Microsoft is in the driver's seat. More like this The dark side of the cloud price wars between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft The rise, fall, and rehabilitation of Internet Explorer Microsoft, Apple, and Google battle for the mobile enterprise Featured Resource Presented by Citrix Systems 10 essential elements for a secure enterprise mobility strategy Best practices for protecting sensitive business information while making people productive from Learn More First, the price war. Microsoft and Google are on approximately equal ground when it comes to cutting prices -- both have highly profitable core businesses that they can use to subsidize a price war in cloud infrastructure, even to the point of sustaining losses for a while to gain market share. Amazon does not. 
  • Second, the quality argument. Like Feld, we've also pointed out that there are niche cloud providers that do a better job than the big guys at providing infrastructure-as-a-service for specific verticals, but when you move all the way up the stack to full software-as-a-service applications, Microsoft has an edge among the big three with Office 365.
  • Google has been making inroads into smaller businesses with Google Apps for almost a decade now, Microsoft remains the standard in the biggest and most profitable business customers -- as this recent investigation from Dan Frommer at Quartz showed, only one company in the Fortune 50 uses Google Apps. (That company happens to be Google itself.) 
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The third argument, support, is mostly a wash. While Amazon's support may be terrible (I have no evidence of this, but I'm taking Feld's word for it), Microsoft and Google and their respective ecosystem partners do a decent job of supporting customers on their stacks.
  • But then comes the fourth argument. Feld points out that once companies get to $200,000 per month of cloud-infrastructure spend, it's actually significantly cheaper to build their own data centers
  • Microsoft is the only one of the big three players with an on-premise offering -- Windows Server and the rest of the Microsoft infrastructure family. Maybe the exact break-even point will change as the cloud price wars continue, but Microsoft has the most pieces customers would need to move from all-cloud to a hybrid or on-premise solution. Or, for that matter, for existing on-premise customers to begin experimenting moving some workloads to the cloud.
  • There's one more point favoring Microsoft. Google's core business is selling online advertising. That business makes up about 90% of Google's revenue, and it has enviably high operating margins -- around 30%, based on Google's 2011 financial report. (I picked 2011 because that was before Google bought Motorola Mobility, which changed the margin structure.)
  • It's unclear how the Google Cloud Platform helps that business. Are customers using Google's cloud somehow more likely to advertise with Google? I don't see it. Are Google advertising customers demanding to run other workloads on Google technology? I don't see it.
  • Meanwhile, while Azure almost certainly offers lower margins than, say, on-premises Windows Servers, it's necessary -- customers are moving workloads to the cloud, and Microsoft needs a competitive offering there to keep them on the Microsoft stack so they continue to buy other Microsoft products. Plus, as I argued in point four, today's Azure customers could become tomorrow's on-premise Microsoft infrastructure customers.
  • In other words, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Engine both lower the profit margins of their parent companies. But Azure is clearly strategic while Cloud Engine, as far as I can tell, is not. Who's more likely to keep investing in and improving its cloud? 
  • right now, Microsoft's chances look pretty good to me. No wonder they put the cloud guy in charge of the company.
5More

We Can No Longer Unbundle Microsoft Office - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...cannot-unbundle-office-anymore wordsdk Office-365 office-formats Office-Productivity
shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • In 2007, productivity reached the cloud when the EU forced Microsoft to open the file formats to OpenXML and add an x at the end of our familiar file extensions .pptx, .xlsx and .docx. Google Docs also quickly floated cloud versions of each Office document format. However, in the same year, Apple launched iPhone without a view to file storage on the device. Since then a lot of startup innovation came from Dropbox and Box unbundling file storage from the OS, but software that enables the creation and editing of files on touchscreen devices has been less of a concern.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 14
       
      2007 was also the year that Apple released the first iPhone. ISO standardised PDF with a unique very valuable attribute; "tags". Tagged PDF raced into the mobility breach enabling all kinds of data binding and digital signature advances critical to mobile document centric workflows. In 2008 we saw a global financial collapse that put more pressure than ever on productivity. To survive, companies had to do more with less. Less people, less resources and less money. Cloud computing and mobility rose to the occasion, but the timing of the cloud tsunami connects the incredible synchronicity of XML compound document formats (business documents), Tagged PDF, the iPhone, and the financial collapse of 2008. The rise of sync-share-store services like DropBox is a natural replacement of the local, workgroup bound, client/server hard drive problem. Most importantly though, the iPhone is the first device to integrate and combine communications with computation. The data had to move to the Cloud before it could become useful to mobile apps combining for the first time, communications, content and computation is hand held devices. Anyone who ever worked in the Microsoft client/server productivity ecosystem will tell you that the desktop PC was totally lacking in "communications"; let alone the kind of integrated communications that the iPhone offers. It is the integration of communications, content and collaborative computation that will make the productivity of Cloud Computing something extraordinary.
  • Three years ago, CloudOn CEO Milind Gadekar started using OpenXML formats to bring Microsoft Office to iPad. Since then, the company opened its interface to file authoring tools from Office and Google Drive, and storage providers like Dropbox, Box and Hightail, Google Drive, and OneDrive, and will soon be hard at work adding Apple’s CloudDrive. CloudOn feels that if it focuses on providing the best compatibility and exportability across devices, then they can be the place where users can “preserve, render and manipulate” documents on mobile. Once CloudOn can maintain its goal of giving consumers a familiar look and feel and lossless publishing for all the most popular document creation and storage providers, they plan to optimize for touchscreens. CloudOn sees only single-digit-minute session times in files, so their next step is to enable gestures to edit charts and annotate text with your fingers to help make better use of that time.
  • Feature-bundled workflows to get things done on the device you’re looking at are necessities, not nice pairings like chocolate and peanut butter.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Pellucid Analytics takes a different strategy to rebuilding PowerPoint. Instead of looking at PowerPoint as a design tool, Pellucid fixes the design and enables archive search for thousands of financial accounting slide templates that an analyst would need to fill a pitch book such as ROE, EBITDA and other fun acronyms. Since the formatting is already set, analysts can just enter company names and based on the data sources that the bank they work for has licensed, Pellucid can fill in any of that data automatically and keep it up to date. However, the concept of live data in presentations is a shock to most bankers, so Adrian Crockett of Pellucid admits that it’s one of the first things he has to explain to new users. Of course, Pellucid offers the ability to snapshot data for use in later presentations. But Adrian stressed that in addition to Pellucid’s approach to removing grunt work for analysts, it is giving senior bankers access to live data right in the presentation that would normally require VPN access, logins, app switching and all other sorts of headaches to be able to access, especially on tablets.
3More

Microsoft Hit By U.S. DOT Ban On Windows Vista, Explorer 7, and Office 2007 - Technolog... - 0 views

www.informationweek.com/...showArticle.jhtml exchange/sharepoint government msoffice odf opendocument standards vista vistachain vistastack
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • »  E-Mail »  Print »  Discuss »  Write To Editor late last year -- can be resolved. "We have more confidence in Microsoft than we would have 10 years ago," says Schmidt. "But it always makes sense to look at the security implications, the value back to the customer, and those kind of issues." The DOT's ban on Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and Office 2007 applies to 15,000 computer users at DOT proper who are currently running the Windows XP Professional operating system. The memo indicates that a similar ban is in effect at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has 45,000 desktop users. Compatibility with existing applications appears to be the Transportation Department's major concern. According to a separate memo, a number of key software applications and utilities in use in various branches of the department aren't Vista compatible. Among them are Aspen 2.8.1, ISS 2.11, ProVu 3.1.1, and Capri 6.5, according to a memo issued by staffers at the DOT's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Any prolonged ban on new Microsoft technologies by the federal government could have a significant impact on the software maker's bottom line, as Microsoft sells millions of dollars in software to the feds annually. http://as.cmpnet.com/event.ng/Type=count&ClientType=2&AdID=125682&FlightID=75634&TargetID=2625&SiteID=222&AffiliateID=283&EntityDefResetFlag=0&Segments=1411,3108,3448,11291,12119&Targets=2625,2878,7904,8579&Values=34,46,51,63,77,87,91,102,140,222,227,283,442,646,656,1184,1255,1311,1405,1431,1716,1767,1785,1798,1925,1945,1970,2217,2299,2310,2326,2352,2678,2727,2767,2862,2942,3140,3347,3632,3636,3638,3890,3904,4080,448
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
       
      DOT chief technology officer Tim Schmidt DOT's CIO Daniel Mintz Federal Department of Transportation
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Whoa, those government desktops add up quickly.  This Vista ban will immediately effect over 50,000 desktops, with tens of thousands more possibly impacted by the IE 7.0 ban.  The MS Exchange/SharePoint Hub juggernaut is based on IE 7.0, which is not available for Windows 2000 - MSOffice 2000 desktops.

    Lack of Vista Stack compatibility with non Microsoft application is given as the reason for the ban.  But notice the "alternatives" to Vista mentioned; Novel SuSE and Apple Mac.  What kind of interop - compatibility do they offer?  My guess is ZERO!

    The reality is that the DOT is trapped.  My advice would be stay exactly where they are, keeping the current MSOffice desktop installs running.  Then, install the Foundation's daVinci ODF plugin for MSOffice. 

    This will insure that Windows OS and  MSOffice bound business processes can continue to function without disruption.  Win32 APi based applications like those mentioned in the article can continue.  Critical day to day business processes, workgroup and workflow related activities can continue without disruption or costly re engineering demanded by a cross platform port.

    What daVinci doe sdo is move the iron triangle that binds Windows-MSOffice applications to business processes and documents, to an ODF footing.  Once on a ODF footing, the government can push forward with the same kind of workgroup - workflow - intelligent docuemnt - collaborative computing advnaces that the Vista Stack was designed to deliver.  Only this push will involve the highly competitive "the customer is sovereign" environment of ODF ready desktop, server, device and Web 2.0 systems.  End of Redmond lock-in.  End of the costly iron triangle and the force march upgrade treadmill that so enriches Microsoft.

    So what's not to like?  We can do this.
    ~ge~

    http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dghfk5w9_20d2x6rf&revi
4More

OOXML/ODF: Just One Battlefield in a Much Bigger War | Linux Today - 2 views

www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3 cloud-computing grid-computing odf ooxml openxml
shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Mar 08 - Cached
  • If the OOXML format in its current form cannot get made into a true ISO standard, it could lock Microsoft out of any future plays in what could be the biggest IT revolution to date. Here are the pieces of the puzzle that fit together for me:
  • "Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time."
  • "Structured data." And what's a good way to contain such data? In well-built structured data file format of course. Like, for instance, the Open Document Format (ODF). And who has a vested interest in ODF? IBM certainly does. And so does Sun. And these two companies, along with Google, Microsoft, and I'm sure many others, realize that if cloud computing does indeed take off, then it will be the file format that makes the whole thing work. Which is why Microsoft feels it must get their format standardized. Even with tactics that ironically have started to attract the attention of the EU again. How else can they get a piece of the cloud pie?
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 07 Mar 08
       
      Partly right. The MS plan is actually much bigger than Brian Profitt suggests. The MSOffice 2007 SDK is fille dwith new API's, the most interesting of which are the ones connecting MSOffice to XAML and the Windows Presentation Foundation layer. The killer component though is the OOXML <> fixed/flow translator component with related API's. fixed/flow is a new web format that is 100% proprietary. It's at the heart of the Microsoft cloud, enabling developers to easily transition between OOXML and IE browsers able to serve fixed/flow pages to devices, desktops and just about any kind re purposing publication - content management system imaginable. If ISO approves OOXML, then they've standardized MSOffice as a legitamate Web editor - enterprise publication, content management, archive management front end. Instead of producing W3C compliant (X)HTML - CSS web pages though, the MSOffice Web editor will produce the proprietary fixed/flow format via the OOXML translation component we can now see in the SDK. What we don't see in the MSOffice SDK is the use of W3C technologies such as (X)HTML, CSS, SVG, XForms, SMiL, XSL, XSL-FO. Instead of Mozilla XUL or Adobe Flex, we find XAML and Silverlight. IMHO, Microsoft is making their run for the Web. Key to this run is ISO approval of OOXML. Once that happens, there will be no need for MS product compliance with W3C standards. The break will be complete. The We forever split into the Windows Web, and the Firefox - Apache Tomcat Web. And never the twain shall meet.
2More

Notes on Breaking the Web to Ride the Fifth Wave - 1 views

community.zdnet.co.uk/...,1000000565,2000542666b,00.htm ie-8 iso microsoft msoffice odf ooxml sdk xaml
shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Mar 08 - Cached
  • garyedwards's Discussions Breaking the Web Talkback: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Mar 08
     
    Somehow i got involved in this discussion and ended up posting a number of comments explaining the how and why behind Microsoft's push for ISO approval of MS-OOXML. I have been working on a paper titled, "Breaking the Web to Ride the Great Wave". Breaking the Web is what will happen once ISO approves MS-OOXML. The MIcrosoft Stack of Web Servers (Exchange, SharePoint, MS-SQL Server) are integrated into the MSOffice-Outlook desktop. The MS desktop dominates much of the document workflows and business processes of the commercial world. ISO approval of the MSOffice specific MS-OOXML will legitamize MSOffice as an editor of standardized web ready docuemnts. But how MS-OOXML docuemnts become "Web REady" is tricky. In the December 2007 MSOffice SDK beta, we see how this is done. The SDK provides a conversion component for the quick high fidelity conversion of MS-OOXML documents to XAML. XAML is a proprietary part of the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) layer of the .NET framework, and is easily paried with Silverlight. Sometimes XAML is referred to as "fixed/flow". XAML is an MS proprietary replacement for the W3C's (X)HTML. Billions of MSOffice docuemnts will make their way to the Web using this SDK converter. The path for transitioning the monopolist hold on desktop business processes to the monopolist stack of web servers is set with this converter. ISO approval of MS-OOXML will enable Microsoft to dodge brining their desktop editor into compliance with advancing W3C standards such as (X)HTML, CSS 3, XForms, SVG and RDF. Instead of these open standards, transitioning business processes will be locked into MS only dependencies; XAML, Silverlight, WinForms, and Smart Tags. The breaking of the web results in a consumer/business cloud dependent on MS proprietary technologies that are out of the reach of Firefox, Apache, Java, and Adobe technologies. Google won't be able to penetrate the business stack, and will be kept very busy trying to defen
1More

Q&amp;A: Nicholas Carr on the big switch to utility computing - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...article.do carr cloud switch utility web-platform
shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jan 08 - Cached
  • I think we’re at the early stages of a fundamental shift in the nature of computing, which is going from something that people and businesses had to supply locally, through their own machines and their own installed software, to much more of a utility model where a lot of the computer functions we depend on are supplied from big, central stations, big central utilities over the Internet.
2More

Microsoft Closer on &amp;#0092;'Office Open&amp;#0092;' Blessing - 0 views

www.internetnews.com/...3662681 ecma exchange iso microsoft msoffice oasis odf ooxml opendocument openxml sharepoint vista xml
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Opponents to OOXML, which include IBM (Quote)&nbsp;and the Open Document Foundation, have argued that Microsoft's specifications are unwieldy and that the standard application is redundant with the Open Document Format (ODF), which already exists. Microsoft has countered that the OOXML format is valuable because it is closer to Office 2007 and is backwards-compatible with older versions of Office. "Although both ODF and Open XML are document formats, they are designed to address different needs in the marketplace," the company wrote in an open letter published earlier this month.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Internet News is reporting that Ecma has submitted to the ISO/IEC JTC1 their repsonsess to the 20 "fast track" for Ecma 376 (OOXML) objections.  Nothing but blue skies and steady breeze at their back for our friends at Redmond, according to Ecma's rubber stamper in chief, Jan van den Beld.

    Once again there is that ever present drum beat from Microsoft that ODF can't handle MSOffice and legacy MSOffice features - including but not mentioned the conversion to XML of those infamous billions of binary documents:
    "Microsoft has countered that the OOXML format is valuable because it is closer to Office 2007 and is backwards-compatible with older versions of Office. "Although both ODF and Open XML are document formats, they are designed to address diffe
3More

Fear not beloved 450! - 0 views

openstack.blogspot.com/...fear-not-beloved-450.html imported:del.icio.us msecmaxml oasis odf open-standards opendocument opendocument-foundation
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    ODF and the great herd of 450 million Win32 bound desktop users have an interesting furture ahead. Microsoft will try to force march them to the integrated Vista Stack and on into the Age of Collaborative Computing. IBM will try to bring collaborative co
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    ODF and the great herd of 450 million Win32 bound desktop users have an interesting furture ahead. Microsoft will try to force march them to the integrated Vista Stack and on into the Age of Collaborative Computing. IBM will try to bring collaborative co
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    ODF and the great herd of 450 million Win32 bound desktop users have an interesting furture ahead. Microsoft will try to force march them to the integrated Vista Stack and on into the Age of Collaborative Computing. IBM will try to bring collaborative co
13More

Dump the file server: Why we moved to the SharePoint Online cloud [review] - 0 views

betanews.com/...sharepoint-online-cloud-review ODF document-wars Cloud-Computing
shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • For this article, I wanted to focus on an important aspect of our move to Office 365, and that was our adoption of SharePoint Online as our sole document file server. I know, how passé&nbsp;for me to call it a file server as it represents everything that fixes what plagues traditional file servers and NASes. Let's face it: file servers have been a necessary evil, not a nicety that have enabled collaboration and seamless access to data. They offer superior security and storage space, but this comes at the price of external access and coauthoring functionality. Corporate IT departments have had a band-aid known as VPN for some time now, but it falls short of being the panacea vendors like Cisco make it out to be. I know this well -- I support these kinds of VPNs day to day. Their licensing is convoluted, they're drowning in client application bug hell, and most of all, bound by the performance bottlenecks on either the client or server end.
  • I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format. And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space.
  • I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space.
  • We liked Google Drive's real time collaboration functionality, but the way it treated non-Docs files was pretty pitiful.
  • Dropbox for Business provides the best headroom for growth, but it's starting monthly price is too much to swallow.
  • And Box and Egnyte don't bring much more to the table besides bona fide cloud storage and sync;
  • SharePoint Online offers a rich ecosystem that we can grow on.
  • For the purpose of running our day to day business needs, SharePoint Online has taken over for both Google Drive and our former NAS alike. We don't have to convert items to and from Google Docs anymore just to collaborate. We have as good, or better, permissions in SharePoint compared to Google Drive. And the search power in SharePoint is disgustingly accurate, providing the accuracy and file previews that we were used to on Google Drive.
  • SharePoint Online is first and foremost a cloud solution that has additional tie-ins with Office Online products, OneDrive, etc that may or may not exist in the on-premise version of the product.
  • It's a cloud file server (the focus of this piece). It's a content search hub. It can run public websites and internal intranets. It can help handle complex document workflows. You can even run Access databases on it.
  • I can finally work as I wish, in-browser or in Office 2013 -- or both at once. My entire company "file server" is synced via OneDrive for Business to my Thinkpad, and likewise, I can edit any files in a browser via Office Online apps. It's a nirvana that Google Drive almost afforded us, if it weren't for Google's distaste of traditional Office files. It's good to know you can have your cake and eat it too.
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Mar 14
     
    Yesterday Google announced dramatic price reductions for their Cloud Computing platform. This announcement was followed immediately by a similar announcement from Amazon. But what about Microsoft? The truth is that Microsoft doesn't need to reduce prices, and they are forcing both Google and Amazon reductions. My guess is that there are more reductions to come too. The answer is in this review of SharePoint OnLine and Office 365, where the author points out the fact that Google Drive / Apps totally mangles an MSOffice document. Once Google converts the documents, they are useless. "I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format. And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space." In 2006-2007, when we were in the middle of the great ODF vs OOXML document wars, I had a conversation with Google's Open Source - Opoen Standards guru, Chris DiBona. It was during the Massachusetts crisis, and we were trying to garner Google Corporate support for ODF. Chris listened to my pitch and summarized his position that conversion methods were very advanced, and going forward, file formats really didn't matter. He famously said, "Let a thousand formats bloom". I wonder if he still thinks that?
1More

ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words | Andrew Updegrove: Tales of Adversego - 0 views

updegrove.wordpress.com/...odf-vs-ooxml-war-of-the-words ODF
shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 14
     
    "For some time I've been considering writing a book about what has become a standards war of truly epic proportions.  I refer, of course, to the ongoing, ever expanding, still escalating conflict between ODF and OOXML, a battle that is playing out across five continents and in both the halls of government and the marketplace alike.  And, needless to say, at countless blogs and news sites all the Web over as well. Arrayed on one side or the other, either in the forefront of battle or behind the scenes, are most of the major IT vendors of our time.  And at the center of the conflict is Microsoft, the most successful software vendor of all time, faced with the first significant challenge ever to one of its core businesses and profit centers - its flagship Office productivity suite. The story has other notable features as well:  ODF is the first IT standard to be taken up as a popular cause, and also represents the first "cross over" standards issue that has attracted the broad support of the open source community.  Then there are the societal dimensions: open formats are needed to safeguard our culture and our history from oblivion.  And when implemented in open source software and deployed on Linux-based systems (not to mention One Laptop Per Child computers), the benefits and opportunities of IT become more available to those throughout the third world. There is little question, I think, that regardless of where and how this saga ends, it will be studied in business schools and by economists for decades to come.  What they will conclude will depend in part upon the materials we leave behind for them to examine.  That's one of the reasons I'm launching this effort now, as a publicly posted eBook in progress, rather than waiting until some indefinite point in the future when the memories of the players in this drama have become colored by the passage of time and the influence of later events. My hope is that those of you who have played or are n
2More

AlphaDog Barks Loudly: Why Can't You Guys Just Get Along and Solve MY MSOffice Problem!... - 0 views

fussnotes.typepad.com/...going-to-bed-wi.html alphadog cdf foundation hiser odf ooxml updegrove
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • First, let me say that I am a CIO in a small (20 employees but growing fast) financial services company. I am well aware of how locked-in I am getting with our MS-only shop. I am trying to see my way out of it, but this "ODF vs ODFF" is leaving me very confused and no one is working to clear the fog. I beg for all parties to really work towards some sort of defined understanding. I don't need cooperation. But, what I don't have is well-defined positions from all parties. As it is, I feel safer staying the course with MS right now, honestly. It's what I know vs the mystery of this "open cloud" and all the bellicose infighting. How's that for "in the trenches" data? I posted a comment on Andy's blog, and I will post the same comment here for your group (minor edits): I will admit to being very, very confused by all of this ODF vs ODFF posturing. I will try to put my current thoughts in short form, but it will be a muddled mess. I warned you! From what I gather, the OpenDocument Foundation (ODFF) is attempting to create more of an interop format for working against a background MS server stack (Exchange/Sharepoint). You worry that MS is further cementing their business lock-in by moving more and more companies into dependency on not only the client-side software but also the MS business stack that has finally evolved into a serious competitive set. At that level, and in your view, the "atomic unit" is the whole document. The encoded content is not of immediate concern. ODF is concerned with the actual document content, which ODFF is prepared to ignore. The "atomic unit" is the bits and parts in the document. They want to break the proprietary encodings that MS has that lock people into MSOffice. The stack is not of any immediate concern. So, unless I misunderstand either camp, ODF is first attacking the client end of the stack, and ODFF is attacking the backbone server end of the stack. The former wants to break the MSOffice monopoly by allowing people to escape those proprietary encodings, and the latter wants to prevent the dependency on server software like Exchange and Sharepoint by allowing MS documents to travel to other destinations than MS "server" products. Is this correct? I have yet to see anyone summarize the differences in any non-partisan way, so I am at a loss and not enough information is forthcoming for me to see what's what. The usual diatribe by people closer to the action is to go into the history of ODF or ODFF, talk about old slights and lost fights, and somehow try to pull at emotional heartstrings so as to gain mindshare. Gary's set of comments on this blog have that flavor. This is childish on both sides. Furthermore, the word "orthogonal" comes to mind. I often see people too busy arguing their POV, and not listening to others, when there is no real argument to keep making. It's apple-and-oranges. ODF vs ODFF seems like they are caught in this trap. Everyone wants to win an argument that has no possible win because the participants are not arguing about the same thing. Tell me: Why can't the two parties get along? I can see a "cooperative" that attacks the entire stack. Am I the only one seeing this? Am I wrong? If yes, what's the fundamental difference that prevents cooperation?
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    AlphaDog When asked about the source of his incredible success, the hockey great Wayne Gretzky replied, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." You and i need to do the same. Let me state our position as this: The desktop office suite is where the puck has been. The Exchange/SharePoint Hub is where it's going to be. The E/S Hub is the core of an emerging Microsoft specific web platform which we've also called, the MS Stack. In this stack, MSOffice is relegated to the task of a rich client end user interface into the E/S Hub of business processes and collaborative computing connections. The rest of the MS Stack swirls like a galaxy of services around the E/S Hub. Key to Microsoft's web platform is the gradual movement of MSOffice bound business processes to the E/S Hub where they connect to the rest of the MS Stack. So what now you might ask? Some things to consider before we get down to brass tacks: ... There is a way to break the monopolists MSOffice desktop grip, but it's not a rip out and replace the desktop model. It's a beat them at the E/S Hub model that then opens up the desktop space. And opens it up totally. (this is a 3-5 year challenge though since it's a movement of currently bound business processes). ... It's all about the business processes. Focusing entirely on the file formats is to miss the big picture. ... The da Vinci group's position is this; we believe we can neutralize and re purpose MSOffice by converting in proce
1More

What Cloud Means to Marketing Forecast - Nick Carr The Big Switch - 1 views

adage.com/...article cloud-computing google grid-computing microsoft server-farms
shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Mar 08 - Cached
  • The gorilla in this nascent market is Google. It has been spending billions of dollars to build huge data centers, or "server farms," around the world, enabling it to run all sorts of consumer software and store enormous quantities of personal data. Combine that processing muscle with the company's dominance of web searching and advertising, and you have a juggernaut capable of redefining the software business on the media model.
2More

» Getting enveloped by the potential of Cloud computing | Web 2.0 Explorer | ... - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer client-server cloud-computing realestate web20
shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jan 08 - Cached
  • By taking a fundamentally Web-based approach to the development of applications, we shift from bolting Web capabilities onto the silo toward a mode in which data and functionality are native to the Web: a mode in which the design decisions are more about modelling business requirements for limiting the ways in which data flows from one point to another rather than trying to anticipate the places in which it might be needed in order to design those pathways into software from the outset.
  • How do we change the mindset of today’s application developers, in order that they stop building ‘old’ applications in the new world?
2More

What is RDF and what is it good for? - 0 views

www.rdfabout.com/intro metadata odf rdf rdf_xml semantic w3c web xml
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • On the Semantic Web, computers do the browsing for us. The SemWeb enables computers to seek out knowledge distributed throughout the Web, mesh it, and then take action based on it. To use an analogy, the current Web is a decentralized platform for distributed presentations while the SemWeb is a decentralized platform for distributed knowledge. RDF is the W3C standard for encoding knowledge.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Exellent introduction to RDF and the Semantic Web!
1More

Can Microsoft Count on Inertia to Spur Office 2010 Upgrades? | Eric Lai - CIO Article C... - 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....."
1More

Developing a Universal Markup Solution For Web Content - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...ion-for-web-content-004290.php kodaxil xml interop gnoesis
shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 09
     
    KODAXIL To Replace XML?\n

    \nFile this one under the Universal Interoperability label. Very interesting. Especially since XML document formats have proven to fall short on the two primary expectations of users: interoperability and Web ready. Like HTML+ :) Maybe KODAXIL will work?\n

    \nThe recent Web 2.0 Conference was filled with new web services , portals and wiki efforts trying their best to mash data into document objects. iCloud, MindTouch, AppLogic, 3Tera, Caspio and Gazoodle all deserve attention. although each took a rather different approach towards solving the problem. MindTouch in particular was excellent.\n

    \n"A Montreal-based software and research development company has developed a markup solution and language-neutral asset-descriptor that when fully developed, could result in a universal computer language for representing information in databases, web and document contents and business objects."\n

    \n"While still at a seminal stage of development, the company Gnoesis, aims to address the problem of data fragmentation caused by semantic differences between developers and users from different linguistic backgrounds."\n

    \nGnoesis, the company that has developed the language called KODAXIL (Knowledge, Object, Data, Action, and eXtensible Interoperable Language), a data and information representation language, says the new language will replace the XML function of consolidating semantically identical data streams from different languages, by creating a common language to do this.\n

    \nThe extensible semantic markup associated with this language will be understood worldwide and is three times shorter than XML.
1More

Antitrust &amp; Competition : The European Union, the United States, and Microsoft: A Compa... - 0 views

lawprofessors.typepad.com/...iew-of-antitrust-doctrine.html antitrust interoperability
shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Sep 09
     
    Interoperability through antitrust - is there a legal foundation in place capable of pulling this off?  This article is a lengthy study and comparative analysis of the legal foundation in the USA and Europe.  Microsoft is of course the target. Excerpt: Microsoft has incorporated products, such as browsers and media players, into its operating system, behavior that again amounts to technological tying. It has also improved its server software by heightening the degree to which servers employing that software can interact. By raising the level of interaction among servers equipped with its software, Microsoft has so integrated work group servers as to enable groups of small servers to approach the capacities of mainframe computers. The European competition-law authorities see both matters as problematic. The integration of the media player has been condemned as tying; and the heightened server interaction has been faulted for failing to provide the interoperability that rival server software requires in order to participate on an equal footing with Microsoft server software in Windows work groups. Microsoft’s integration (at least in the view of the European antitrust authorities) also raises issues of essential facilities, and of the role of antitrust in achieving interoperability. . We have now reached a moment in time in which both the American and European laws are sufficiently developed to warrant reflection and comparison. That is the task approached in this article.  Three part study:  Part I -The European approach.  Part II-USA decisions regarding Microsoft tying.  Part III-comparison of USA and European approaches to product integration (tying).
1 - 20 of 60 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page