Office Archive

Microsoft Corp. has told beta testers of Office 11, its next-version Office desktop productivity suite, that the product will only work with the Windows 2000 operating system with Service Pack 3 installed, Windows XP and later desktop releases. While Office 11 is slated for release next year, today Win9x/ME/NT OSes still hold about 52% of the overall OS market, and by next year's Office release, this is still expected to be around 40%. This is a tremendous amount of sales getting wasted (Office is the main income for Microsoft), but Microsoft said that this decision was mostly taken in order to incorporate new technologies on Office that are only available on the 2k/XP OSes, and also for security reasons ("Windows 9x is inherently insecure" Sloan Crayton of Microsoft said).

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday will announce XDocs, the working code name for the latest addition to its Office desktop productivity family. Steve Ballmer, CEO of the Redmond, Wash., software company, will use the Gartner ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., to announce this latest Office application. Microsoft officials are promoting XDocs as a smart client like Office. "Think of it as a hybrid information gathering tool for organizations that blends the benefits and richness of a traditional word processing program with the data capturing ability and rigor of a forms package into the XDocs templates," Scott Bishop, an Office product manager, told eWEEK.

You can call Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of Productivity and Business Services, just about anything you want, just don't call him a desktop guy. Raikes is charged with the responsibility of guiding Microsoft's enormously successful desktop business -- the jewel of which is Office XP -- into the new era of computing where desktop, server, and peer-to-peer technologies are beginning to all swirl together as a seamless whole. Read the interview at InfoWorld.

Six Degrees is a remarkable new piece of software for Mac OS X and Windows. This article describes my experiences with the application and discusses some of its implications for the future of all software.

Giving off an impression as the Swiss Army knife of Linux books, "MultiTool Linux" by Schwarz, Anderson, Curtis, Murphy and published by Addison-Wesley, this book tries to solve very specific problems with Linux. Let's see whether it succeeds to do so or not.

The first pre-alpha Linux version of gobeProductive 3, the popular office suite, is now available for download. Read through for installation, other information and the download URL, along with a message for the OSNews readers, directly from Gobe.

"Microsoft's operating-system monopoly has gotten plenty of ink in this paper, but Microsoft Office exerts an even tighter stranglehold on the market. The productivity suite dominates not just on Windows PCs but on Macs as well, and its file formats have become a default language in offices, homes and schools around the world." Rob Pegoraro reviews OpenOffice for WatshingtonPost. In the meantime, Sun puts a price at Star Office, while Microsoft is finalizing its next-gen Office.

When I received the "Learning Red Hat Linux, 2nd Edition" book from O'Reilly, I thought that this would be an in-depth guide, a way to hack around the Red Hat Linux operating system. It was a bit of let down for me to see that the book was for beginners. But, reading through it, I realized that the beauty of the book is in teaching new users lessons that are solid and well constructed throughout its 350 pages.

The good people over at Addison-Wesley sent us this book, "Understanding Open Source Software Development" written by Joseph Feller & Brian Fitzgerald. It is an analysis of the history of the open source, its goals, where it is now and where it is expected to be in the near future. The ultimate goal and target of the book, apart from the knowledge feed about open source in general, seems to be the effort to convince project managers why they should adopt Open Source. Does the book succeed? Read on.

"SOT Office 2002 is a free productivity suite for Windows and Linux. At SOT, we're committed to making sure that a free, commercial-quality office suite is available to all Windows and Linux users. Partly based on OpenOffice.org, SOT Office 2002 is the only office application you'll ever need. A full-featured, high-quality software suite, SOT Office is fully compatible with other major office applications. You can open and save .doc, .xls and all your usual file formats with SOT Office, so sharing documents with friends and colleagues is a breeze." SOT Office is an OpenOffice spin-off and it was released for both Windows & Linux recently. Update: On a similar note, Office NGO screenshots have been leaked.

There has been a number of MacOSX books released since the MacOSX public release by Apple a year ago. However, none is either as... thick or as rich in content as "Mac OS X Unleashed" by SAMS Publishing. It took me some time to go through its 1400+ pages, but the review is finally here. Update: Current readers can find the errata of the book over at the author's web site.

While the information is still unconfirmed, the talk is that the leaked slides from a Microsoft presentation regarding the next Office version, are authentic. WindowsSuperSite features two articles, the first talks about the new Office version, codenamed NGO, but the second set of slides, is the truly interesting part, explaining how the subscription/renting .NET model will work with Microsoft's upcoming Web Services. In fact, it seems that Office will be the leading application in this new sales model, which will help promote the subscription model in general, however a "traditional" licensing method will also be available. Update: Some analysis of the NGO presentation can be found at ExtremeTech.

Kelly McNeill from OSOpinion writes: "A few weeks ago, I wrote an editorial detailing the importance of a well-designed user interface (UI) and the need to keep that interface consistent. Unfortunately, my article was incredibly misunderstood by nearly all those who read it. To help clarify the issues surrounding this choice, I contacted Jef Raskin, arguably the leading authority on user interface design and author of the highly acclaimed user interface book, "The Humane Interface." What follows is an interview I conducted with the interface expert to help clarify the issue of consistency vs. skins."

With the release of MacOSX, Apple has engineered and released two new APIs: Carbon & Cocoa. Carbon is similar to MacOS 9 API and it can be programmed in C & C++. Carbon was created in order to give Macintosh developers an easy-to-walk "bridge" to easily port their MacOS applications to OSX. Through the CarbonLib, developers can now develop both MacOSX and MacOS9 applications with a single effort. Cocoa is the fully native MacOSX API; it gives access to more MacOSX-specific features and it can be programmed with Objective-C or Java. Apple, through O'Reilly, last year released two books, "Learning Carbon" and "Learning Cocoa".