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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:

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.

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....."

"Version 4.3 of LibreOffice, the free and open source productivity suite developed by the Document Foundation and derived from the OpenOffice.org project, was released today. Aside from the usual array of bug fixes and new features designed to make it more cross-compatible with Microsoft Office, version 4.3 has features that give files from legacy Macintosh productivity software a new lease on life. Take control! 30 essential OS X command-line tips Go beyond the graphical user interface and take full advantage of Mac OS X at the command line READ NOW Most of the improvements around file handling in 4.3 involve better support for various aspects of the Office Open XML (OOXML) format used by Microsoft for its productivity software. LibreOffice users have often complained of opening Word 2010 or Word 2013 documents and finding that the formatting had been mangled or features like annotations hadn't survive being resaved in LibreOffice. Version 4.3 preserves many more of the attributes used in OOXML documents, such as style attributes for text and images. Also new to this edition of LibreOffice is import support for document formats created by a slew of legacy Macintosh applications: BeagleWorks, ClarisWorks, Claris Resolve, GreatWorks, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and Wingz. Likewise, Microsoft Works spreadsheets and databases -- not just word processing documents -- can now also be imported into LibreOffice. Another change, which might not directly affect many users but hints at how the refactoring of LibreOffice's code is reaching many legacy issues, involves the lengths of paragraphs. Previously, paragraphs in a LibreOffice document couldn't exceed 65,000 characters due to a bug in the underlying OpenOffice.org code that had persisted for over a decade and remained unclosed. Other changes include comments that can now be "printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported," according to the Document Foundation; better behaviors for sp

Microsoft's proposed undertaking for resolving the ECIS complaint to the European Commission regarding its office productivity software can be downloaded from this linked web page. I've given it a quick skim. Didn't see anything in it for anyone but competing big vendors. E.g., no profiling of data formats for interop of less and more featureful implementations, no round-tripping provisions. Still, some major concessions offered.

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

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.