Open Web

Some good commentary on chrome OS from InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn. Excerpt: With Chrome OS, Google aims to make the Web the primary platform for software development....... The fact that Chrome OS applications will be written using open Web standards like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS might seem like a liability because Web applications still aren't as capable as applications written for specific devices and operating systems. But Google is betting that will change and is working to effect the change on which its bet depends. Within a year or two, Web browsers will gain access to peripherals, through an infrastructure layer above the level of device drivers. Google's work with standards bodies is making that happen..... ..... According to Matt Womer, the "ubiquitous Web activity lead" for W3C, the Web standards consortium, Web protocol groups are working to codify ways to access peripherals like digital cameras, the messaging stack, calendar data, and contact data. There's now a JavaScript API that Web developers can use to get GPS information from mobile phones using the phone's browser, he points out. What that means is that device drivers for Chrome OS will emerge as HTML 5 and related standards mature. Without these, consumers would never use Chrome OS because devices like digital cameras wouldn't be able to transfer data. Womer said the standardization work could move quite quickly, but won't be done until there's an actual implementation. That would be Chrome OS...... ..... Chrome OS will sell itself to developers because, as Google puts it, writing applications for the Web gives "developers the largest user base of any platform."

.... "While i don't see Google or anyone else replacing the MSOffice productivity environment anytime soon, i do see Google challenging Microsoft wherever the Web comes into play. As for the future, that battle for desktop productivity will take place, just not with ChromeOS, Linux, or, the MacOS. What has to happen before the assault on the Microsoft's productivity empire can begin is that the business systems bound to the MSOffice productivity environment must transition to the Open Web, via SaaS or some other replacement. Or, the productivity environment itself must be re-purposed to the Open Web. The tricky part will be that re-purposing play. ChromeOS is a blockbuster announcement. Not a declaration of war, but a shot across the bow that shouts; Google will defend the Open Web, and profitable business they have there. ..... ~ge~

Another good article form Michael Hickins, this time linking the success of Google Wave to the success of Microsoft OOXML. Rob Weir jumps in to defend , well, i'm not sure. I did however respond. Excerpt: Developers hoping to hitch a ride on Google's Wave have discovered that Microsoft may have unwittingly helped them resolve the single greatest problem they needed to overcome in order to challenge the dominance of Office. When Microsoft set out to create Office 2007 using a brand new code base - Office Open XML (OOXML) - it needed to accomplish two goals: make it compatible with all previous versions of Office, and have it accepted as a standard file format for productivity tools so that governments could continue using it while complying with rules forcing them to use standards-based software. ..... Depending on your perspective, either Microsoft has sowed the seeds of its own undoing, or international standards bodies succeeded in forcing Microsoft to open itself up. Either way, Microsoft has given away the key to compatibility with Office documents, allowing all comers to overcome the one barrier that has heretofore prevented customers from dumping Microsoft's Office suite.

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."

Om Malik has an interesting commentary on Google Voice, the Android OS, and a new gVoice application for iPhones and Androids. For sure, new gVoice app meshes into the Andorid OS as if it were hard coded into the silicon. I left a lengthy comment in the discussion section describing my experiences with gVoice and what i see emerging as Google's Unified Productivity Platform. Of course, gWave, Chrome, Chrome OS, webkit-HTML+, and the sweep of Google Web applications and service come into play. Excerpt: Can Google be your phone company? The answer is yes. I came to that conclusion after I met with Vincent Paquet, co-founder of GrandCentral (a company acquired by Google) and now a member of the Google Voice team. Earlier today he stopped by our office to show the mobile app versions of its Google Voice service for Blackberry and Android. Google recently announced that it was going to make the Voice service widely available to users in the U.S. soon.

This document discusses the primary reason ODF failed in Massachusetts: compatibility with the MSOffice productivity environment, and, the billions of binary documents in use by MSOffice bound workgroups and the business processes so important to them.

This is a really good descriptive "story" about Google Wave, and why it' revolutionary.

This commentary concerns the Microsoft Office Productivity Environment and the opportunity presented as Microsoft tries to move that environment to the MS-Web stack of servers and services. The MS-Web is comprised of many server side applications, but the center is that of the Exchange/SharePoint/MOSS juggernaut. With the 2010 series of product and services release, Microsoft will be accelerating this great transition of the Microsoft monopoly base. While there are many Open Web alternatives to specific applications and services found in the 2010 MS-Web stack, few competitors are in position to put their arms around the whole thing. This is after all an ecosystem that has been put in transition. Replacing parts of the MSOffice ecosystem will break the continuity of existing business processes bound to that productivity environment. This is a disruption few businesses are willing to tolerate. Because of the disruptive cost and the difficulty of cracking into existing bound business systems without breaking things, Microsoft is in position to charge a premium for comparatively featureless MS-Web products and services. Given time, this will no doubt change. And because of the impossible barriers to entry, Microsoft has had lots of time. Still, i'm betting on the Open Web. This commentary attempts to explain why...... I also had some fun with Google Docs templates. What a mess :)

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).

http://www.manageit.me ---The greatest minds in IT in 50+ presentations : top industry-leaders: Creator of MySQL Michael "Monty" Widenius, Internet Celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk, Co-Creator of PHP & Zend CTO Zeev Suraski, Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations & Pioneer of Agile eXtreme Programmi...

Web technologies are increasingly being used on the desktop to bring richer user interfaces to conventional applications. In this tutorial we will show you how to use the WebKit HTML renderer alongside native GTK+ widgets to make a desktop WYSIWYG editor with Python.

Google programmers open source two components of the Google Wave messaging and collaboration prototype. One includes the Operational Transform, which forms the complex center of the Wave model. Google Wave is an example of the Pushbutton Web, where real-time communications rule the roost. Google July 24 said it released to open source the OT (Operational Transform) code, the framework that enables multiple people to edit a single document in real time across a wide-area network, as well as a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an open extension to the XMPP core protocol, geared to allow near real-time communication of wave updates between two wave servers.

Overview: Aspose.Word is a powerful .NET component that allows any .NET application to work with Microsoft Word documents without utilizing Microsoft Word and Office Automation. Aspose.Word supports a wide array of features including new document creation, document manipulation, powerful mail merge abilities, exporting to multiple formats (DOC, PDF & HTML) and much, much more. Aspose.Word is truly the most affordable, fastest, feature rich Word component on the market. Aspose.Word application programming interface (API) is powerful and easy to use at the same time. Classes, properties and method names are easy to remember and understand: for example, Document represents a Word document, DocumentBuilder is responsible for building a document dynamically, and so on. Although this guilde provides many code samples, intuitively understandable interface allows you create working document producing applications having minimal knowledge of C# or VB.NET and Microsoft Word features. $899