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Gary Edwards

XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web and XHTML - 1 views

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

OpenWeb XML XHTML-CSS HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript IDML

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform
  • Gary Edwards on 01 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

Does It Matter Who Wins the Browser Wars? Only if you care about the Future of the Open... - 1 views

www.bnet.com/...4-16236

ge OpenWeb OpenWeb-Productivity-Platform Browser-Wars

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Aug 10
     
    The Future of the Open Web You're right that the browser wars do not matter - except for this point of demarcation; browsers that support HTML+ and browser that support 1998 HTML. extensive comment by ~ge~ Not all Web services and applications support HTML+, the rapidly advancing set of technologies that includes HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript (including the libraries and JSON). Microsoft has chosen to draw the Open Web line at what amounts to 1998-2001 level of HTML/CSS. Above that line, they provision a rich-client / rich-server Web model bound to the .NET-WPF platform where C#, Silverlight, and XAML are very prominent. Noticeably, Open Web standards are for the most part replaced at this richer MSWeb level by proprietary technologies. Through limited support for HTML/CSS, IE8 itself acts to dumb down the Open Web. The effect of this is that business systems and day-to-day workflow processes bound to the ubiquitous and very "rich" MSOffice Productivity Environment have little choice when it comes to transitioning to the Web but to stay on the Microsoft 2010 treadmill. Sure, at some point legacy business processes and systems will be rewritten to the Web. The question is, will it be the Open Web or the MS-Web? The Open Web standards are the dividing line between owning your information and content, or, having that content bound to a Web platform comprised of proprietary Microsoft services, systems and applications. Web designers and developers are still caught up in the browser wars. They worry incessantly as to how to dumb down Web content and services to meet the limited functionality of IE. This sucks. So everyone continues to watch "the browser wars" stats. What they are really watching for though is that magic moment where "combined" HTML+ browser uptake in marketshare signals that they can start to implement highly graphical and collaboratively interactive HTML+ specific content. Meanwhile, the greater Web is a
Gary Edwards

How Google's Ecosystem Changes Everything | BNET Technology Blog | BNET - 0 views

industry.bnet.com/...s-ecosystem-changes-everything

Web-Productivity-Environment Open-Web MS-Web MSOffice-ecosystem Open-Web-Ecosystem Open-Web-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09
     
    Michael Hickins separates the platform forest from the application trees, putting the focus of the future where it belongs - the movement of the legacy MSOffice Productivity Environment to the Web.  The only question will be which Web?  The Open Web?  Or the MS-Web? excerpt:  Microsoft and Apple have leveraged a particular dominant proprietary platform (Windows/Office in one case, the iPhone/iTunes duopoly in the other) to turn every other vendor into a bit player; and by allowing other vendors to sell products or services that integrate with theirs, they offer just enough incentives for the others to play along. Google is also leveraging a dominant platform (in this case, the Web, the largest platform there is) just as relentlessly as Microsoft and Apple have done, but with an open source philosophy that encourages others to compete. The ecosystem includes everything from a development platform to application suites, but its strength emanates from a basic understanding of what it takes to dominate technology: you have to control what former Open Document Foundation director Gary Edwards calls the "point of assembly" - that crucial spot where end users have to come in order to save, share and retrieve their documents - the final work product that all this technology is meant to help create. What Google is in the process of doing is moving that point of assembly from the desktop, where Microsoft and Apple rule, to the Web, where Google is king.
Gary Edwards

Strobe Launches Game-Changing HTML5 App Platform | TechCrunch - 1 views

techcrunch.com/...me-changing-html5-app-platform

Strobe Charles-Jolley SproutCore Ruby-on-Rails

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Sep 11
     
    Today, Strobe Inc. is launching a new platform that helps developers build HTML5-based Web applications for desktops, smartphones and tablets, and centrally manage them from a single interface. The launch is a major leap forward in HTML5 app development. From one interface, teams can manage code (both test code and production code), configure the app's deployment across platforms (Web, Android, iOS, etc.), add additional services (social, push notifications, authentication, etc.), and even track analytics within an easy-to-use dashboard. In short, it's a comprehensive platform that makes building apps with Web technologies, like HTML5 and JavaScript, not just possible, but easy, straightforward and fast. The company was co-founded by Ruby on Rails Core Team member Carl Lerche, Ruby on Rails, jQuery and SproutCore Core team member Yehuda Katz, and Charles Jolley, formerly the JavaScript Frameworks Manager for Apple. At Apple, Jolley worked on Apple's Web products like MobileMe and iCloud. He's also the creator of the open source JavaScript framework, SproutCore, which powered Apple's Web services and is now a key part of the Strobe platform. In addition to SproutCore, Strobe also uses PhoneGap, the popular HTML5 app platform. PhoneGap lets developers author apps using Web technologies then deliver them in a native wrapper to the iTunes App Store, Android Marketplace and other app stores. It also happens to integrate nicely with SproutCore.
Gary Edwards

Is productivity in the workplace possible with Surface 2 or iPad? | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/h-surface-2-or-ipad-7000022220

Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform mobile-computing business-productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 13
     
    Not surprisingly, Microsoft is going to pound on "productivity" as the key differential between their desktop-cloud-mobile computing products, and those of mobile-productivity platform challengers, Apple and Google. There are three platform contenders, and this article points out that it is Google Apps that is keeping Apple in the business productivity game. Very interesting insight. Especially since a recent Forrester Report has the Apple platform capturing 65% of all mobile business application development. And Microsoft with only 1%. Google weighs in with 13%. This is a stunning setback for Microsoft. The MS monopolist empire is built on business productivity, with 98% of clinet/server marketshare. excerpt: "Over time, Microsoft has tried to tilt the marketing message to position Surface as a "productivity tablet". Now that Surface 2 is out, the "productivity tablet" message is coming across loud and clear. But can what people use tablets at work for actually be described as "productive"? Surface might be new, but the idea of using tablets in business is not. Although Microsoft would like us to believe that a tablet that doesn't run Office and doesn't have a good solution for a keyboard can't be used in business, the iPad has been used in business since its release in April 2010. Mobile device management (MDM) allows enterprises to control which apps are available on both on BYOD and enterprise-supplied tablets. Some MDM vendors publish reports and surveys on what their customers' allow and disallow. This information can provide some insight into what apps people are typically using. Back in June, my ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reported on a report put out by one such vendor. Fiberlink gave this list of iOS apps that are commonly whitelisted: iBooks Adobe Reader Google Citrix Receiver Numbers Dropbox Pages iTunes U Keynote WebEx Along with those apps, you also need to add that apps that come with the device - namely web browsing, email,
Gary Edwards

Andreessen Horowitz & the Meteor investment - 0 views

a16z.com

VC venture-capital Andreessen-Horowitz

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 12 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 12
     
    Web site for Andreessen Horowitz VC. List of blogs for general partners. The reason for linking into a16z is the $11.2 Million they invested in Meteor! Meteor is awesome. My guess is that Meteor will provide a very effective Cloud platform to replace or extend the Windows Client/Server business productivity platform. Many VC watchers are wondering if a16z can recover the investment? Say what? IMHO this is for all the marbles. Platform is everything, and Cloud Computing is certain to replace Client/Server over time. Meteor just move that time frame from a future uncertainty to NOW. The Windows Productivity Platform has dominated Client/Server computing since the introduction of Windows 4 WorkGroups (v3.11) in 1992. Key technologies that followed or were included in v3.11 were DDE, OLE, MAPI, ODBC, ActiveX, and Visual Basic scripting - to name but a few. Meteor is an open source platform that hits these technologies directly with an approach that truly improves the complicated development of all Cloud based Web Apps - including the sacred Microsoft Cow herd of client/server business productivity apps. Meteor nails OLE and ODBC like nothing i've ever seen before. Very dramatic stuff. Maybe they are nailing shut the Redmond coffin in the process - making that $11.2 Mill a drop in the bucket considering the opportunity Meteor has cracked open. The iron grip Microsoft has on business productivity is so tight and so far reaching that one could easily say that Windows is the client in Client/Server. But it took years to build that empire. With this investment, Meteor could do it in months. Compound documents are the fuel in Windows business productivity and office automation systems. Tear apart a compound document, and you'll find embedded logic for OLE and ODBC. Sure, it's brittle, costly to develop, costly to maintain, and a bear to distribute. Tear apart a Meteor productivity service and you'll find the same kind of OLE-ODBC-Script
Gary Edwards

Mobile Helix Link | Secure enterprise HTML5 Application & Data Platform - 0 views

www.mobilehelix.com

HTML5 Visual-Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform Cloud-Computing

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13
     
    Another HTML5 Application Platform for Cloud Computing.  Provides secure data connections to existing business systems and workflows.  Not an Open Web Platform. summary: Mobile Helix is an enterprise application and data security platform provider focused on enabling unrestricted enterprise productivity. We are redefining endpoint computing by evolving and extending existing IT infrastructure and standards rather than reinventing them. At our core are three fundamental principles that are at the center of everything that we do: 1) we are application- and data-centric - we embrace the blurring lines between phones, tablets and laptops, permitting IT to relinquish control of the endpoint device entirely and embrace a bring-your-own-anything policy; 2) we provide unmatched yet unobtrusive security for sensitive corporate data by intelligently securing the data rather than the devices; and 3) simplicity is embedded into the DNA of our products, our designs and our communications. Our solution, Mobile Helix Link, is the industry's first pure HTML5 platform that combines unparalleled data security, a unique HTML5 application development and delivery platform, and breakthrough patent-pending performance enhancement technology. 
Gary Edwards

Office suites in the cloud: Microsoft Office Web Apps versus Google Docs and Zoho | App... - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...ersus-google-docs-and-zoho-726

Office-suites Cloud-Computing MSOffice-Web-Apps google-docs ZOHO

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09
     
    Neil McAllister provides an in-depth no-holds-barred comparison of Google, Zoho and Micorsoft Web Office Productivity Apps.  It's not pretty, but spot on honest.  Some of the short comings are that Neil overly focuses on document fidelity, but is comparatively light on the productivity environment/platform problems of embedded business logic.  These document aspects are represented by internal application and platform specific components such as OLE, scripting, macros, formulas, security settings, data bindings, media/graphics, applications specific settings, workflow logic, and other ecosystem entanglements so common to MSOffice compound "in-process" business documents.   Sadly, Neil also misses the larger issue that Microsoft is moving the legacy MSOffice Productivity Environment to a MS-Web center.   excerpt:  A spreadsheet in your browser? A word processor on the Web? These days, SaaS (software as a service) is all the rage, and the success of Web-based upstarts like Salesforce.com has sent vendors searching for ever more categories of software to bring online. If you believe Google, virtually all software will be Web-based soon -- and as if to prove it, Google now offers a complete suite of office productivity applications that run in your browser. Google isn't the only one. A number of competitors are readying Web-based office suites of their own -- most prominently Zoho, but even Microsoft is getting in on the act. In addition to the typical features of desktop productivity suites, each offering promises greater integration with the Web, including collaboration and publishing features not available with traditional apps.
Gary Edwards

Google's Chrome Browser Sprouts Programming Kit of the Future "Node.js" | Wired Enterpr... - 1 views

www.wired.com/...node-dot-js

Stephen-OGrady Node.JS Joyent Wired

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Jan 12
     
    Good article describing Node.js.  The Node.js Summitt is taking place in San Francisco on Jan 24th - 25th.  http://goo.gl/AhZTD I'm wondering if anyone has used Node.js to create real time Cloud ready compound documents?  Replacing MSOffice OLE-ODBC-ActiveX heavy productivity documents, forms and reports with Node.js event widgets, messages and database connections?  I'm thinking along the lines of a Lotus Notes alternative with a Node.js enhanced version of EverNote on the front end, and Node.js-Hadoop productivity platform on the server side? Might have to contact Stephen O'Grady on this.  He is a featured speaker at the conference. excerpt: At first, Chito Manansala (Visa & Sabre) built his Internet transaction processing systems using the venerable Java programming language. But he has since dropped Java and switched to what is widely regarded as The Next Big Thing among Silicon Valley developers. He switched to Node. Node is short for Node.js, a new-age programming platform based on a software engine at the heart of Google's Chrome browser. But it's not a browser technology. It's meant to help build software that sits on a distant server somewhere, feeding an application to your PC or smartphone, and it's particularly suited to systems like the one Chito Manansala is building - systems that juggle scads of information streaming to and from other sources. In other words, it's suited to the modern internet. Two years ago, Node was just another open source project. But it has since grown into the development platform of the moment. At Yahoo!, Node underpins "Manhattan," a fledgling online service for building and hosting mobile applications. Microsoft is offering Node atop Windows Azure, its online service for building and hosting a much beefier breed of business application. And Sabre is just one of a host of big names using the open source platform to erect applications on their own servers. Node is based on the Javascript engine at th
Gary Edwards

Topix Weblog: The Secret Source of Google's Power - 1 views

blog.topix.com/...000016.html

google platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Apr 10
     
    Incredible.  Despite the title.  It's the platform stupid! excerpt: Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring. No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else. I've written before about Google's snippet service, which required that they store the entire web in RAM. All so they could generate a slightly better page excerpt than other search engines. Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.
Gary Edwards

Government Market Drags Microsoft Deeper into the Cloud - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...soft-deeper-into-the-cloud.php

Cloud-Productivity-Platform Microsoft Great-Transition desktop-productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 12
     
    Nice article from Scott M. Fulton describing Microsoft's iron fisted lock on government desktop productivity systems and the great transition to a Cloud Productivity Platform.  Keep in mind that in 2005, Massachusetts tried to do the same thing with their SOA effort.  Then Governor Romney put over $1 M into a beta test that produced the now infamous 300 page report written by Sam Hiser.  The details of this test resulted in the even more infamous da Vinci ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office desktops.   The lessons of Massachusetts are simple enough; it's not the formats or office suite applications.  It's the business process!  Conversion of documents not only breaks the document.  It also breaks the embedded "business process". The mystery here is that Microsoft owns the client side of client/server computing.  Compound documents, loaded with intertwined OLE, ODBC, ActiveX, and other embedded protocols and interface dependencies connecting data sources with work flow, are the fuel of these client/server business productivity systems.  Break a compound document and you break the business process.   Even though Massachusetts workers were wonderfully enthusiastic and supportive of an SOA based infrastructure that would include Linux servers and desktops as well as OSS productivity applications, at the end of the day it's all about getting the work done.  Breaking the business process turned out to be a show stopper. Cloud Computing changes all that.  The reason is that the Cloud is rapidly replacing client/server as the target architecture for new productivity developments; including data centers and transaction processing systems.  There are many reasons for the great transition, but IMHO the most important is that the Web combines communications with content, data, and collaborative computing.   Anyone who ever worked with the Microsoft desktop productivity environment knows that the desktop sucks as a communication device.  There was
Gary Edwards

Office to finally fully support ODF, Open XML, and PDF formats | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/xml-and-pdf-formats-7000002696

ODF ODF-interop MSOffice-productivity Cloud-Compound-Document

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 12
     
    The king of clicks returns!  No doubt there was a time when the mere mention of ODF and the now legendary XML "document" format wars with Microsoft could drive click counts into the statisphere.  Sorry to say though, those times are long gone. It's still a good story though.  Even if the fate of mankind and the future of the Internet no longer hinges on the outcome.  There is that question that continues defy answer; "Did Microsoft win or lose?"  So the mere announcement of supported formats in MSOffice XX is guaranteed to rev the clicks somewhat. Veteran ODF clickmeister SVN does make an interesting observation though: "The ironic thing is that, while this was as hotly debated am issue in the mid-2000s as are mobile patents and cloud implementation is today, this news was barely noticed. That's a mistake. Updegrove points out, "document interoperability and vendor neutrality matter more now than ever before as paper archives disappear and literally all of human knowledge is entrusted to electronic storage." He concluded, "Only if documents can be easily exchanged and reliably accessed on an ongoing basis will competition in the present be preserved, and the availability of knowledge down through the ages be assured. Without robust, universally adopted document formats, both of those goals will be impossible to attain." Updegrove's right of course. Don't believe me? Go into your office's archives and try to bring up documents your wrote in the 90s in WordPerfect or papers your staff created in the 80s with WordStar. If you don't want to lose your institutional memory, open document standards support is more important than ever. "....................................... Sorry but Updegrove is wrong.  Woefully wrong. The Web is the future.  Sure interoperability matters, but only as far as the Web and the future of Cloud Computing is concerned.  Sadly neither ODF or Open XML are Web ready.  The language of the Web is famously HTML, now HTML5+
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Office 2010 Boosts Core Features, Branches Out onto the Web - eWeek - 1 views

www.eweek.com/...ures-Branches-Out-onto-the-Web

MSOffice-2010 OpenWeb-Productivity-Platform MS-Business-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 May 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 May 10
     
    Extensive review of Office 2010 by Jason Brooks.  Lengthy comment by ge   Is the Web the new productivity platform?      By: Gary Edwards at: 05-27-10 @ 8:02 pm EST     Thanks Jason for the very detailed and thorough review of Office 2010. I was however left with the impression that Office 2010 includes a number of improved (but for the most part existing) desktop features, but the primary value statement involves the new and very advanced features designed for Web based collaboration and productivity. Would it be worthwhile for business users to upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 2010 if not for the new Web collaboration features? And if that's the case, what does that say about the aging desktop productivity platform empire that has served Microsoft so well?
Gary Edwards

Windows 8: Microsoft's browser-based OS | ExtremeTech - 1 views

www.extremetech.com/...s-8-the-first-browser-based-os

Windows-8 Win8 HTML+ Native-HTML-Apps Open-Web-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Microsoft’s browser-based operating systemGet this: The entire Metro interface — the complete Windows 8 front-end — is powered by Internet Explorer 10. Not the browser with a back button and an address bar, but the IE10 rendering engine Trident. To drive this point home, Metro-style apps in Windows 8 can be written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and they will be just as “low-level” as their C++ and C# cousins. In other words, Windows 8 runs web apps natively.
  • To put this into contrast, think about the current state-of-the-art in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 9. Chrome has glorified extensions and bookmarks, Firefox is working on an Open Web App Store, and IE9 has pinned sites. Windows 8 will have web apps that are first-class citizens, capable of using all of the same hardware resources as any other compiled program — and it will all be powered by Internet Explorer 10.
  • It’s the great Web App Dream: write once, run anywhere.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • All three versions are fundamentally identical.
  • What if Windows 8 is actually a success on the tablet? If Windows 8 becomes ubiquitous, so does Internet Explorer 10 — and if IE10 can be found on hundreds of millions of devices, what platform do you think developers will choose?
  • This poses a tricky question, though. You see, not only does IE10 power Windows 8′s primary interface, but Internet Explorer 10 — the browser — is also available as a Metro-style app, and as a full-interface browser in the Explorer Desktop.
  • Do you write an app for tens of millions of iPhones and iPads, or do you write a single piece of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can run perfectly on every Windows 8, IE10-powered tablet, laptop, and desktop?
  • Those same web apps, with a little tweaking, will probably even work with Chrome and Firefox and Safari — but here’s an uncomfortable truth: if Windows 8 reaches 90% penetration of the computing market, why bother targeting a web browser at all? Just write a native, Metro-style web app instead.
  • Finally, add in the fact that IE10 will almost certainly come to Windows Phone 8 next year, and you will have a single app container — AppX — that runs across every damn computer form factor.
  • Microsoft, threatened by the idea of OS-agnostic web apps and browser-based operating systems from Google and Mozilla, has just taken the game to a whole new level — and, rather shockingly, given that Windows 8 started its development in mid-2009, it would seem that the lumbering behemoth might have actually out-maneuvered Google
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Sep 11
     
    Excellent review of Windows 8, including some prescient thinking about what it means to have HTML+ Web Apps running natively on the Win8 OS platform.  The author/reviewer Sebastion Anthony suggest why this breakthrough is a problem for Google, Apple and Mozilla.  I'm wondering though; is this a problem for the Open Web future?  Or is this a positive step towards an Open Web communications and collaborative computation platform that  is used by all and owned by none?   After nearly thirty years of a love-hate-hate more than ever relationship with Microsoft, for sure Win8 and native HTML+ is something to carefully watch.
Gary Edwards

In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It. - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010030402374.html

webkit-html5 OpenWeb-Standards Web-apps OpenWeb-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 10
     
    I disagree with the authors conclusions here.  He misses some very significant developments.  Particularly around Google, WebKit, and WebKit-HTML5. For instance, there is this article out today; "Google Really is Giving Away Free Nexus One and Droid Handsets to Developers".  Also, Palm is working on a WiMAX/WiFi version of their WebOS (WebKit) smartphone for Sprint.  Sprint and ClearWire are pushing forward with a very aggressive WiMAX rollout in the USA.  San Francisco should go on line this year!   One of the more interesting things about the Sprint WiMAX plan is that they have a set fee of $69.00 per month that covers EVERYTHING; cellphone, WiMAX Web browsing, video, and data connectivity, texting (SMS) and VOIP.  Major Sprint competitors, Verizon, AT&T and TMobile charge $69 per month, but it only covers cellphone access.  Everything else is extra adn also at low speed/ low bandwidth.  3G at best.  WiMAX however is a 4G screamer.  It's also an open standard.  (Verizon FIOS and LTE are comparable and said to be coming soon, but they are proprietary technologies).   The Cable guys are itneresting in that they are major backers of WiMAX, but also have a bandwidth explosive technology called Docsis. There is an interesting article at TechCrunch, "In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It."  I disagree entirely with the authors conclusion.  WebKit is capable of providing a universal HTML5 application developers layer for mobile and desktop browser computing.  It's supported by Apple, Google, Palm (WebOS), Nokia, RiMM (Blackberry) and others to such an extent that 85% of all smartphones shipped this year will either ship with WebKit or, an Opera browser compatible with the WebKit HTML5 document layout/rendering model.   I would even go as far as to say that WebKit-HTML5 owns the Web's document model and application layer for the future.  Excepting for Silverlight, which features the OOXML document model with over 500 million desktop develop
Gary Edwards

Is the Apps Marketplace just playing catchup to Microsoft? | Googling Google | ZDNet.com - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/Google

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Take the basic communication, calendaring, and documentation enabled for free by Apps Standard Edition, add a few slick applications from the Marketplace and the sky was the limit. Or at least the clouds were.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10
       
      Google Apps have all the basic elements of a productivity environment, but lack the internal application messaging, data connectivity and exchange that made the Windows desktop productivity platform so powerful.   gAPPS are great.  They even have copy/paste! But they lack the basics needed for simple "merge" of client and contact data into a wordprocessor letter/report/form/research paper. Things like DDE, OLE, ODBC, MAPI, COM, and DCOM have to be reinvented for the Open Web.   gAPPS is a good place to start.  But the focus has got to shift to Wave technologies like OT, XMPP and JSON.  Then there are the lower level innovations such as Web Sockets, Native Client, HTML5, and the Cairo-Skia graphics layer (thanks Florian).
  • Whether you (or your business) choose a Microsoft-centered solution that now has well-implemented cloud integration and tightly coupled productivity and collaboration software (think Office Live Web Apps, Office 2010, and Sharepoint 2010) or you build a business around the web-based collaboration inherent in Google Apps and extend its core functions with cool and useful applications, you win.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10
       
      Not true!!! The Microsoft Cloud is based on proprietary technologies, with the Silverlight-OOXML runtime/plug-in at the core of a WPF-.NET driven "Business Productivity Platform. The Google Cloud is based on the Open Web, and not the "Open Web" that's tied up in corporate "standards" consortia like the W3C, OASIS and Ecma. One of the reasons i really like WebKit is that they push HTML5 technologies to the edge, submitting new enhancements back into the knuckle dragging W3C HTML5 workgroups as "proposals".  They don't however wait for the entangled corporate politics of the W3C to "approve and include" these proposals.  Google and Apple submit and go live simultaneously.   This of course negates the heavy influence platform rivals like Microsoft have over the activities of corporate standards orgs.  Which has to be done if WebKit-HTML5-JavaScript-XMPP-OT-Web Sockets-Native Client family of technologies is ever to challenge the interactive and graphical richness of proprietary Microsoft technologies (Silverlight, OOXML, DrawingML, C#). The important hedge here is that Google is Open Sourcing their enhancements and innovations.  Without that Open Sourcing, i think there would be reasons to fear any platform player pushing beyond the corporate standards consortia approval process.  For me, OSS balances out the incredible influence of Google, and the ownership they have over core Open Web productivity application components. Which is to say; i don't want to find myself tomorrow in the same position with a Google Open Web Productivity Platform, that i found myself in with the 1994 Windows desktop productivity environment - where Microsoft owned every opportunity, and could take the marketshare of any Windows developed application with simple announcements that they to will enter that application category.  (ex. the entire independent contact/project management category was wiped out by mere announcement of MS Outlook).
Gary Edwards

HTML5, Cloud and Mobile Create 'Perfect Storm' for Major App Dev Shift - Application De... - 0 views

www.eweek.com/...for-Major-App-Dev-Shift-235285

Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform mobility Visual-Documents Visual-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Jun 12
     
    Good discussion, but it really deserves a more in-depth thrashing.  The basic concept is that a perfect storm of mobility, cloud-computing and HTML5-JavaScript has set the stage for a major, massive shift in application development.  The shift from C++ to Java is now being replaced by a greater shift from Java and C++ to JavaScript-JSON-HTML5. Interesting, but i continue to insist that the greater "Perfect Storm" triggered in 2008, is causing a platform shift from client/server computing to full on, must have "cloud-computing".   There are three major "waves"; platform shifts in the history of computing at work here.  The first wave was "Mainframe computing", otherwise known as server/terminal.  The second wave was that of "client/server" computing, where the Windows desktop eventually came to totally dominate and control the "client" side of the client/server equation. The third wave began with the Internet, and the dominance of the WWW protocols, interfaces, methods and formats.  The Web provides the foundation for the third great Wave of Cloud-Computing. The Perfect Storm of 2008 lit the fuse of the third Wave of computing.  Key to the 2008 Perfect Storm is the world wide financial collapse that put enormous pressure on businesses to cut cost and improve productivity; to do more with less, or die.  The survival maxim quickly became do more with less people - which is the most effective form of "productivity".  The nature of the collapse itself, and the kind of centralized, all powerful bailout-fascists governments that rose during the financial collapse, guaranteed that labor costs would rise dramatically while also being "uncertain".  Think government controlled healthcare. The other aspects of the 2008 Perfect Storm are mobility, HTML5, cloud-computing platform availability, and, the ISO standardization of "tagged" PDF.   The mobility bomb kicked off in late 2007, with the introduction of the Apple iPhone.  No further explanation needed :) Th
Gary Edwards

Adeptol Viewing Technology Features - 0 views

www.ajaxdocumentviewer.com/features.asp

sursen florian wiki-word visual-document file-viewer

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Jan 11
     
    Quick LinksGet a TrialEnterprise On DemandEnterprise On PremiseFAQHelpContact UsWhy Adeptol?Document SupportSupport for more than 300 document types out of boxNot a Virtual PrinterMultitenant platform for high end document viewingNo SoftwaresNo need to install any additional softwares on serverNo ActiveX/PluginsNo plugins or active x or applets need to be downloaded on client side.Fully customizableAdvanced API offers full customization and UI changes.Any OS/Any Prog LanguageInstall Adeptol Server on any OS and integrate with any programming language.AwardsAdeptol products receive industry awards and accolades year after year  View a DemoAttend a WebcastContact AdeptolView a Success StoryNo ActiveX, No Plug-in, No Software's to download. Any OS, Any Browser, Any Programming Language. That is the Power of Adeptol. Adeptol can help you retain your customers and streamline your content integration efforts. Leverage Web 2.0 technologies to get a completely scalable content viewer that easily handles any type of content in virtually unlimited volume, with additional capabilities to support high-volume transaction and archive environments. Our enterprise-class infrastructure was built to meet the needs of the world's most demanding global enterprises. Based on AJAX technology you can easily integrate the viewer into your application with complete ease. Support for all Server PlatformsCan be installed on Windows   (32bit/64bit) Server and Linux   (32bit/64bit) Server. Click here to see technical specifications.Integrate with any programming languageWhether you work in .net, c#, php, cold fusion or JSP. Adeptol Viewer can be integrated easily in any programming language using the easy API set. It also comes with sample code for all languages to get you started.Compatibility with more than 99% of the browsersTested & verified for compatibility with 99% of the various browsers on different platforms. Click here to see browser compatibility report.More than 300 Document T
Gary Edwards

It's Microsoft's Game to Lose with Windows Mobile 7 - PCWorld Business Center - 0 views

www.pcworld.com/...ose_with_windows_mobile_7.html

Windows-7 windows-mobile MS-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Feb 10
     
    Good title.  Nice to see that some of the tech media are starting to figure this out.  It's about time. excerpt: While Microsoft has struggled with its mobile operating system, it still occupies a dominant stake of the server operating system, desktop operating system, business productivity software, messaging, and Web browser markets. Bells and whistles aside, it's hard to argue with the potential of a smartphone platform that can seamlessly tie in with the platforms and tools that businesses rely on. RIM, Apple, Palm, and now Google, all recognize and respect Microsoft's presence in the enterprise. These other mobile platforms realize that integration with Microsoft backend tools--particularly Exchange Server--is imperative to success in the enterprise. No matter how hard they try, though, the solutions are often clumsy or cumbersome, and have a sort of "square peg in the round hole" feel to them. The core appeal of a Microsoft mobile operating system is the inclusion of native tools that naturally integrate with the existing server, desktop, and office productivity environment. Windows Mobile is uniquely suited to deliver a seamless and familiar experience for business professionals. Expecting Microsoft to introduce unique innovations or raise the bar in any way for mobile operating systems is probably a recipe for disappointment. Assuming that Microsoft can at least improve Windows Mobile to the point that Windows Phones are more or less on par with next-generation smartphones like the iPhone or Droid will be enough, though, for Microsoft to get the ship pointed in the right direction and begin to reclaim some of its lost mobile platform market share. Microsoft has a built-in audience and the game is Microsoft's to lose.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Office fends off open source OpenOffice and LibreOffice but cloud tools gain ... - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/d-tools-gain-ground-7000022114

Office-Productivity Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform Cloud-Compound-Document HTML5

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Oct 13
     
    Interesting stats coming out from the recent Forrester study on Office Productivity.  The study was conducted by Philipp Karcher, and it shows a fcoming collision of two interesting phenomenon that cannot continue to "coexist".  Something has to give. The two phenom are the continuing dominance and use of client/server desktop productivity application anchor, MSOffice, and, the continuing push of all business productivity application to highly mobile cloud-computing platforms.   It seems we are stuck in this truly odd dichotomy where the desktop MSOffice compound document model continues to dominate business productivity processes, yet those same users are spending ever more time mobile and in the cloud.  Something has got to give. And yes, I am very concerned about the fact that neither of the native XML document formats {used by MSOffice (OXML), OpenOffice and LibreOffice (ODF)} are designed for highly mobile cloud-computing.   It's been said before, the Web is the future of computing.  And HTML5 is the language of the Web.  HTML is also the most prolific compound-document format ever.  One of the key problems for cloud-computing is the lack of HTML5 ready Office Productivity Suites that can also manage the complexities of integrating cloud-ready data streams. Sadly, when Office Productivity formats went down the rat hole of a 1995 client/server compound document model, the productivity suites went right with them.  Very sad.  But the gaping hole in cloud-computing is going to be filled.  One way or the other.
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