Apples to Apples

Office Live Workspace and Autotag

This piece is intended as an introduction to Office live workspace, as well as an introduction to its potential uses with our template designer/generator – Autotag.
With Office Live Workspace combined with AutotagMax (scheduled reports) we have something almost identical to our old product called the Arrow.

Office Live Workspace – workspace.office.live.com

• Similar to google docs, provides powerful online collaboration and content management, but everything is done within Microsoft office.
• Benefits of Office Live workspace
  • Easy way to manage projects
  • Can serve as a central location for all reports, and templates
  • Can edit templates and generate reports away from the office
  • Easy versioning, says who and when someone edits the template, with the ability to add comments
  • Simple sharing, invite other people to edit, or view documents in a workspace.
  • A free and powerful alternative to a "shared" drive on your network
• Great tool for Autotag users because we are already integrated into Microsoft Office.

Office Live Workspace Overview

• Website: ( http://workspace.office.live.com )
• Stuff to Show :
  • Workspaces, one for templates, one for reports
    • Can also create new Workspaces, Microsoft has default templates for various projects, can also make a new blank workspace
  • Sharing
    • Share editing, or read-only privileges
  • Comments
    • Allows people to comment on a workspace, or on individual documents
  • Activity
    • "this is a list of all the recent activity in the workspace"
  • Documents
    • Show documents, and mention DataSources folder
    • Easy way to share datasources that are in an .xml or .mdb file
    • Autotag will soon (very soon) work with .xml datasources through office live
  • Preview function
    • Can preview any office formatted document in the browser
  • edit function
    • Opens automatically in appropriate office product, on your client machine
      • Requires office live plugin, 5mb dl from Microsoft website

Summary

• We are currently working on a few hotfixes to make Autotag seamlessly integrate with Office live (will be released very soon)
• The implications of this would be the following:
  • You can open and save templates directly from word, excel, powerpoint
  • You can use .xml files as datasources DIRECTLY from autotag.
    • This would allow the user to just open the datasources menu
    • Browse to the xml file in your office live workspace
    • And everything would connect automatically
• A simple example of an office live workspace setup to be used as a content management system with autotag would contain the following
  • 3 workspace
    • Templates
    • Reports
    • Datasources
  • Read/Write privileges would be given out accordingly
  • Versioning would allow the template admin to see when templates were changed, and by who
  • Customers, or Management who just need to see the reports, but not edit them, can have read only privileges to the Reports Workspace
    • They could even just view them in their browser
  • Admins can update the datasource files in the datasources workspace
    • All the datasource connection info would live in the template, so it would automatically connect,
    • No need to connect to the datasource everytime.
  • 5 gb of space will be plenty for most reporting needs
• We are the only reporting package that can do this !!
• Its accessible anywhere with an internet connection
• AND ITS 100% FREE !!

The Future of Microsoft Office

Hi everyone, I’ve done some quick digging around about the future of office, and SharePoint and here are some of the things I have found. Some of it is general info about office, but it is focused more on stuff that affects our primary report design tool Autotag. For a bigger list of general features that are expected to be released with office 2010, goto the links at the bottom. They have lots of good explanations and screenshots of new office features, not covered in this post.

 

Office Live Workspace

 

Firstly, going off the SharePoint presentation Tomas just gave us, there is a FREE online service called Office Live Workspace, which is comparative to Google Docs.

 

-          It is an online content management tool

-          Just like SharePoint, users can view, download, and upload documents (supported file formats include office files, but also any other type of document that is not on their banned list)

-          Files can only be viewed online, editing happens inside of office, on the users computer.

-          After installing the Office Live Add-in (for MS Office) documents can be checked out, edited, and saved directly to the Office Live workspace

-          Files can be shared with others

-          Collaboration is similar to the way we do source control, i.e. files can be checked out for edit, then checked back in for someone else to edit.

 

Here is a well written comparison of Office Live Workspace vs. Google Docs.

 

Here is a link to Office Live Workspace’s homepage, its free if you have a Microsoft Live account (also free).

 

It seems like a publicly available, “lite” version of SharePoint.

 

Office 2010

 

Due to be released in the first half of 2010, the new office will have lots of changes that our product will need to address.

 

Some of the major ones are:

 

-          Microsoft will now fully comply with their own OOXML formats that were finalized by the ISO in 2008.

1.       The primary implications of this are: Compatibility problems with the existing engine, since the docx, xlsx, pptx formats should be slightly different.

2.       New functionality that will need to be added to the engine.

-          The ribbon interface is being implemented across the board which means current office products such as Outlook, OneNote, Publisher will now all use the ribbon interface

-          The current ribbon interface is going to be tweaked, which could pose problems for the Autotag UI.

-          Improved Author Permissions

-          Big push towards real-time collaboration, which will be integrated into the desktop and web version of the new office

-          Bigger integration with SharePoint

 

Then there is the Office Web Applications, these will be slightly scaled down versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Onenote, that will run inside most browsers on most platforms.

 

-          This is important since we will need to find a way to incorporate Autotag into these web versions of office.

-          Will be optimized for mobile devices, including the iPhone.

-          Can be hosted on or off site for company employees to use.

 

A beta release is due to come out in July. You can sign up to be in the test program at http://www.office2010themovie.com/, which btw has a really overproduced video about office 2010.

 

SharePoint 2010

 

Due to be released in the first half of 2010, SharePoint will become Microsoft’s primary tool for business intelligence delivery. SharePoint 2010 will absorb PerformancePoint’s dashboard and scorecard building capabilities. SharePoint will more closely integrate with Microsoft Office 2010 clients like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

 

-          Revamped UI will use a web version of the Ribbon Interface.

-          Office Web Applications will probably be bundled with SharePoint using one license for everything.

-          Stricter hardware requirements

-          SharePoint lists will now behave like SQL tables

 

Summary

 

If we can integrate Autotag into the new web versions of office, we will be able to piggy back onto all of the improvements that will come with the new office and SharePoint. Mainly increased accessibility (online access, mobile device access) improved collaboration, and better integration into SharePoint, which would give us the ultimate Enterprise level content management system available. Integration into the new SharePoint would also give us access to its improved dashboarding capabilities.

 

Extras

 

There is a Office 2010 developers conference in October 2009 in Las Vegas that will cover all of the new office 2010 features, specifically targeted towards developers. This conference is being combined with the annual SharePoint developer conference.

 

Here are some links to websites I used to write this piece:

 

New office 2010 features: link1, link2, link3(Best), office web applications, link5

 

General overview of the new office products from Senior Exec at MS

 

SharePoint 2010 features: link1, link2

Mobi File format +/-

I did this research to determine whether or not our company should pursue direct/native .mobi support. If your not familiar with .mobi files, they are used on eBook readers like Amazon's kindle.

As some of you might know we are looking into supporting a file format to work on Amazon’s kindle. There are a couple of different formats .azw is the proprietary amazon format. Anything that comes from the amazon website is in .azw, and it contains any necessary drm. There are two other formats supported by the kindle, .prc and .mobi. (dot)PRC and (dot) mobi are exactly the same internally, the only reason there are 2 different formats is because the PalmOS only recognizes the file extension .prc.

 

There are a few ways to get content to the kindle

 

1.       Amazon has a service that lets you send any unprotected Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PRC and MOBI files to a specified email address registered to your kindle. Amazon converts the file for you and then it gets sent wirelessly to the kindle.

2.       You can buy/download books online from amazon or other ebook sites

3.       You can hook up the kindle to a PC and directly copy over supported documents (.azw, .prc, .mobi) to the kindles documents directory.

 

Now how does windward reports get content to a kindle ?

 

1.       There is a freely available command line tool that will convert HTML files to .mobi. we could easily include this in the engine to allow .mobi as an output option. (files would first goto .html then to .mobi)

2.       We could have the user specify their kindle email address, and then we could have part of the engine send an email with the report as an attachment to the special kindle email, which after conversion, will send it to the kindle.

3.       We could develop .mobi output from the ground up and have an option to generate the report as a .mobi file.

4.       We could wait until everyone is reading using the Kindle DX which natively supports .pdf, and then we could just have the user put the .pdf on their kindle DX.

 

Plus’ and Minus’ for options 1-4

 

1.       Use the command line tool

a.       Plus +

                                                               i.      Its easy

                                                             ii.      Free

                                                            iii.      Already developed and will produce syntactically correct .mobi/.prc files

                                                           iv.      Can be sent to any ebook reader that supports .mobi or .prc

b.      Minus –

                                                               i.      Table of contents doesn’t always come through very well

                                                             ii.      our engines .html support is not great, which means the .mobi files generated through this manner don’t look great.

                                                            iii.      You have to manually load the file onto the kindle, which might be beyond some peoples tech threshold, and its not really the way content gets delivered to the kindle

                                                           iv.      Less control over content creation compared with implementing .mobi support internally.

2.       Email file to kindle email address

a.       Plus +

                                                               i.      Its easy

                                                             ii.      Its free for windward, costs 10 cents for the user, unless you opt to get it emailed back to you and then you can manually load it using USB (this email back method is free).

                                                            iii.      Not sure how accurate, but I would imagine it probably produces the most accurate conversions out of all the choices mentioned above.

b.      Minus –

                                                               i.      User has to set up the email address, and needs to be connected to the internet when they run windward reports

                                                             ii.      Needs to pay 10 cents, unless they want to do the email back and manually load onto the device through usb

                                                            iii.      Less control over content creation compared with implementing .mobi support internally.

                                                           iv.      Slightly more work by the user if they opt to do the email back method since they have to load via usb.

                                                             v.      Only works with kindle

3.       Implement .mobi internally

a.       Plus +

                                                               i.      Most control over content creation

                                                             ii.      Easy for the user, just select .mobi as output.

                                                            iii.      Can be sent to any ebook reader that supports .mobi/.prc

b.      Minus –

                                                               i.      Decent amount of coding to implement this feature

1.       The way .mobi works is that there is a meta file with info about the author and title, toc, and files referenced. Then there are the .html files that are referenced.

2.       Html output would need some work, and outputting the meta file would be done from the ground up

3.       Overall a decent chunk of coding

                                                             ii.      User still has to load manually using usb to get file onto kindle.

                                                            iii.      Longer turnaround time compared with other options

4.       Wait for kindle DX and use .pdf output

a.       Plus +

                                                               i.      Easy

                                                             ii.      Free

                                                            iii.      Already implemented

b.      Minus –

                                                               i.      wont work with current kindles 1 and 2. Those users would need to email their file to the amazon service, or use the free conversion program mobipocket creator (same as command line).

                                                             ii.      User would need to manually load using USB

                                                            iii.      Kindle DX is not released yet, most people will have kindles 1 and 2 until DX really takes off.

                                                           iv.      Basically ignores all older kindle users

                                                             v.      Doesn’t work with other ebook readers

 

 

I think that the best course of action would be to implement the email functionality (and the command line option). This is the easiest for the user because if they don’t want to mess around with the usb they can just have it sent to them (10 cents). If they do feel like messing with the usb cable they can use the emailed back version from amazon, or the one we generate in the engine using the command line tool.

 

Why email option is preferable:

 

A lot of users would want to save the 10 cents and opt to have it emailed back to them. Although not as easy as having the engine generate the .mobi file, the file given back from amazon should look really good and only adds a few additional steps compared with having a .mobi output in the engine.

 

It’s one of the easiest to implement and has the shortest turnaround time in terms of development. This will allow us to get a better idea of how many Windward users actually want this feature. If we get a positive response we could implement .mobi as an output.

 

Why the command line is preferable

 

We could also implement the command line tool, which would be relatively easy. The only drawback is the poor formatting.

 

Combined with the email functionality the user has the choice of direct .mobi output, which most of the time would suffice, and if they formatting problems they can use the email option instead.

 

Again this lets us gauge the user response. It might not be worth the time to implement a full on .mobi output from scratch. For example, maybe no one ends up complaining about the poor formatting, then the command line option would be satisfactory.

 

 

Long list I know, so if you have anything to weigh in on let me know.