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Custom Document Format Interoperability You may have heard that Office 2007 SP2 will now support editing files in the OpenDocument 1.1 (ODF) format. This document format was added to Office's long list of supported documents formats to give customers more choices for the format they use to save their documents. In addition to allowing you to edit the ODF 1.1 format within Office 2007, SP2 also supports a new External File Format API that can be used to edit other document formats as well. With this API, users can choose to save their documents in any format they want. In this post we will explore how to use the API to enable Office 2007 to edit our own custom document format. We will then use Office 2007 to save our custom format as DOCX, ODT and HTML. Our Custom Document Format For the purpose of this article, we have a company who needs to manage their sales pipeline information. The data is available as XML, but they do not want to spend the money to build a custom editor. They just want to let their users edit the pipeline data in Word, as a table. They give these files an extension of SPLX (i.e. Sales PipeLine Xml) The sales pipeline information is made up of a series of SalesItem tags, each with a unique id that represents the index of the item. They track the name of the customer (CustomerName), how much the deal represents (DealValue) and a percent that represents how confident they are that the sales opportunity will close (ConfidencePercent).

Microsoft has announced the next generation of MSOffice, and it turns out to be SharePoint at the center of the deep connected MSOffice "rich client" desktop productivity environment, and, an online Web version of MSOffice. Who would have guessed that one of the key features to MOSS would be universal accessibility to and collaboration on MSOffice documents - without loss of fidelity? No doubt the embedded logic that drive BBP's (Bound Business Processes) is also perfectly preserved. Excerpt: "Office Web Applications, the online companion to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, allow you to access documents from anywhere. You can even simultaneously share and work on documents with others online," Microsoft says on its Office 2010 Technical Preview site. "View documents across PCs, mobile phones, and the Web without compromising document fidelity. Create new documents and do basic editing using the familiar Office interface."

My initial impression is that this is not good news, that this is a further sign of W3C abandonment of XHTML. The announcement that the WG will be closed by implication means that all CDF WG projects are coming to a standstill. The CDF WICD profiles currently have no profiles developed for spreadsheets and presentations albeit feature-rich enough to serve for web display of presentations. WICD profiles are at version. 2.0, with each 2.0 profile a superset of the 1.0 profiles. They are feature-lean in comparison to desktop word processors. The Compoound Document by Incorporation Framework  is an even more immature document, not nearly ready for prime time. All of which suggests that the Compound Document by Reference Framework itself may be the only WG work product with a shot at survival. HTML 5 and browser quirks mode wins; the world loses. Blech!

Content controls are bounded and potentially labeled regions in a document that serve as containers for specific types of content. Individual content controls can contain content such as dates, lists, or paragraphs of formatted text. In some cases, content controls might remind you of forms. However, they are much more powerful, flexible, and useful because they enable you to create rich, structured blocks of content. Content controls also build on the custom XML support introduced in Microsoft Office Word 2003. Content controls enable you to author templates that insert well-defined blocks into your documents. Content controls enable you to: * Specify structured regions in a template. Each structured region has its own unique ID so that you can read from and write to it. Examples of types of structured regions (or content controls) are combo boxes, pictures, text blocks, and calendars. * Determine the behavior of content controls. Each content control takes up a portion of a document and, as the template author, you can specify what each region does. For example, if you want a region of your template to be a calendar, you insert a calendar content control in that area of the document, which automatically determines what that block of content does. Similarly, if you want a section of a template to display an image, create a picture content control in that area. In this way, you can build a template with predefined block types. * Restrict the content of content controls. Each content control can be restricted, so that it cannot be deleted or edited. This is useful if, for example, you have copyright information in a template that the user should be able to read but not edit. You can also lock a template's content so that a user does not accidentally delete portions of it. This makes templates more robust than in previous versions. * Map the contents of a content control to data in a custom XML part that is stored with the document. For example, if you i

Although you need Chrome for the new Google Docs pagination feature, the key here is that gDocs now supports the CSS3 pagination module!   excerpt: Today, we're doing another first for web browsers by adding a classic word processing feature-pagination, the ability to see visual pages on your screen. We're also using pagination and some of Chrome's capabilities to improve how printing works in Google Docs. Native Printing: Pagination also changes what's possible with printing in modern browsers. We've worked closely with the Chrome team to implement a recent web standard, CSS3, so we can support a feature called native printing. Before, if you wanted to print your document we'd need to first convert it into a PDF, which you would then need to open and print yourself. With native printing, you can print directly from your browser and the printed document will always exactly match what you see on your screen.

XML Template Designer - Document Layout Designer, uses XF "XEP" Rendering engine.  XML to PDF, XSLFO Designer, Document Layout, compatible with Word and Powerpoint documents and templates.

iOS visual eBooks and magazine "immersive media" category.  Push Pop Press seeks to provide a platform for digital eBooks that are more multimedia content than text.  It's more like writing in powerpoint or Flash than Word.  Think flipboard.  Another interesting term used by Push Pop Press is that this is a "layout platform" for rich content. features:  A demo of the first book powered byPush Pop Press, Al Gore's Our Choice.A New Digital Publishing Platform Easy to PublishLayout and publish interactive digital books without writing codeMixed MediaTell rich stories using text, images, audio, video, maps and interactive graphicsInteractive GraphicsEmbed interactive graphics that use the microphone, accelerometer and moreMulti-Touch User InterfaceEdge-to-edge content without any distracting toolbars or buttonsVisual Table of ContentsBrowse through hundreds of pages quickly and easilyPages Load InstantlyPages load as fast as your finger can swipeStart Reading ImmediatelyStart reading the first chapter as the rest of the book downloads in the backgroundUpdatable ContentUpdate your content without having to update the appiPad, iPhone & iPod TouchPublish one universal app that can be read on an iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch

Not sure why this is "huge", but it is very cool.  Personally i don't care for Box.net.  DropBox sync has them beat by a mile.  Where Box.net could seriously improve and distinguish themselves from DropBox is with the Project Management component.  Needs improvement.  Maybe they should hire Conrado?  For integration with Google Docs, SyncDocs is still my fav.  For sync-share-collaborate with MSOffice, nothing beats wiki-WORD. excerpt: Box.net made a huge announcement about online collaboration. Box.net is now almost completely integrated with Google Docs for collaborating with friends or in the workplace.

Clash of the Productivity Clouds: Before we attempt to answer those questions, one thing must be stated flatly: Office 365 and Google Apps are vastly different products. Office 365 is meant to be used with a locally installed version of Office (preferably Office 2010), whereas Google Apps lives 100 percent in the browser. To use a hackneyed metaphor, we're talking apples and oranges. With so many feature variables between the two products, blanket pronouncements don't make a lot of sense. Nonetheless, with the production release of Office 365, the cloud era of desktop productivity software officially kicks into high gear. Office 365 works with Microsoft's Web App versions of desktop Office applications -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote -- so theoretically, you can use it without a locally installed version of Office at all. But most people won't. The real Office 365 ploy is this: Sick of maintaining Exchange and SharePoint servers? No problem. Pay Microsoft and it will run those servers for you -- and throw in the fancy new Lync communications server. Office 365 represents the first time Microsoft has bundled desktop software (Office 2010) with an online service into a single subscription-based offering. But if you have another source of licenses for Office (2010, 2007, or otherwise), or if you want to run just the Office Web Apps (not likely), you can get an Office 365 license without paying for Office.

Let's also not forget that what is now named "Verizon" used to be named Bell Atlantic, one of the seven Baby Bells that were spun off by AT&T by government order during antitrust proceedings.  In other words, this is one of the companies rate-payers financed through a heavily-regulated analog telephony absolute monopoly. But Verizon wants to spread its wings and escape the chains of regulation as a telecommunications carrier. While having its cake and eating it to, according to this article. The FCC has poised itself through a proposed rule with the flexibility to postpone a decision on net neutrality.  AT&T famously was allowed to keep its R&D arm while being freed of the expense of upgrading the U.S. telephony network from analog to digital and from copper wire to fibre optic.  And pay for those Baby Bells to make that transition we did. I remember monthly bills for a two person office running as high as $1,100 a month for calls all carried from Baby Bell to AT&T and back to another Baby Bell. All at state-regulated rates with FCC looking the other way. But now Verizon, Comcast (the originally munipally regulated cable television monopolies) and the few other "competing" survivors of that broadband rollout, having had their infrastructure paid for by the ratepayers, want to fly off and begin charging us at the other end of the pipe,via charges to content providers that will be passed on to us. Leading to the squeezing out of Mom and Pop internet businesses by the big content providers that can afford the charges and pass them on to us. This is looking more and more like another massive rip-off of the customers who already paid for that infrasture. Is that banksters I smell, privatizing a enormous public utility in the name of free markets?      

Tucked into a budget authorization act in December without press notice. Section 309 (the Act is linked from the article) appears to be very broad authority for the NSA to intercept any form of telephone or other electronic information in bulk. There are far more exceptions from the five-year retention limitation than the encrypted information exception. When reading this, keep in mind that the U.S. intelligence community plays semantic games to obfuscate what it does. One of its word plays is that communications are not "collected" until an analyst looks at or listens to partiuclar data, even though the data will be searched to find information countless times before it becomes "collected." That searching was the major basis for a decision by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. that bulk collection of telephone communications was unconstitutional: Under the Fourth Amendment, a "search" or "seizure" requiring a judicial warrant occurs no later than when the information is intercepted. That case is on appeal, has been briefed and argued, and a decision could come any time now. Similar cases are pending in two other courts of appeals. Also, an important definition from the new Intelligence Authorization Act: "(a) DEFINITIONS.-In this section: (1) COVERED COMMUNICATION.-The term ''covered communication'' means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage."       

I omitted some stuff about opposition to sunsetting the provisions. They  seem to forget, as does Obama, that the proponents of the FISA Court's expansive reading of section 215 have not yet come up with a single instance where 215-derived data caught a single terrorist or prevented a single act of terrorism. Which means that if that data is of some use, it ain't in fighting terrorism, the purpose of the section.  Patriot Act § 215 is codified as 50 USCS § 1861, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861 That section authorizes the FBI to obtain an iorder from the FISA Court "requiring the production of *any tangible things* (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items)."  Specific examples (a non-exclusive list) include: the production of library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing information that would identify a person." The Court can order that the recipient of the order tell no one of its receipt of the order or its response to it.   In other words, this is about way more than your telephone metadata. Do you trust the NSA with your medical records? 

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Indeed, the ITU's current vision of Internet policy-making is less one of distributed decision-making, and more one of 'taking control.' For example, in an interview conducted last June with ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Touré, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin raised the suggestion that the union might take control of the Internet: "We are thankful to you for the ideas that you have proposed for discussion," Putin told Touré in that conversation. "One of them is establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)." Rights to online expression are unlikely to fare much better than privacy under an ITU model. During last year's IGF in Kenya, a voluntary code of conduct was issued to further restrict free expression online. A group of nations (including China, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) released a Resolution for the UN General Assembly titled, "International Code of Conduct for Information Security." The Code seems to be designed to preserve and protect national powers in information and communication. In it, governments pledge to curb "the dissemination of information that incites terrorism, secessionism or extremism or that undermines other countries' political, economic and social stability, as well as their spiritual and cultural environment." This overly broad provision accords any state the right to censor or block international communications, for almost any reason.

We urge the ITU Secretary General et al to ensure that the outcomes of the WCIT and its preparatory process truly represent the common interests of all who hold a stake in the future of our information society. If your government is a member of ITU, demand transparency and tell them to open the process and disclose the WCIT preparatory documents and Treaty amendments.

Excellent and well worth the time to read! Founder of DropBox tells his story and it's full of insight, wisdom and naked truth. excerpt: "I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing - who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way. I have some other friends who also work hard and get paid well in their jobs, but they complain as if they were shackled to a desk. The problem is a lot of people don't find their tennis ball right away. Don't get me wrong - I love a good standardized test as much as the next guy, but being king of SAT prep wasn't going to be mine. What scares me is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best. It took me a while to get it, but the hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun. So after today, it's not about pushing yourself; it's about finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you. It might take a while, but until you find it, keep listening for that little voice. "