This isn’t a post about Office 12, but thought many of you might be interested in this. Just saw this article on Digg, that details out how to participate in the Windows Live Mail beta. I just did it, so it still works as of 12/31/2005 at 6:14pm EST.
Basically gives Hotmail and MSN accounts plenty of Outlook like features, as well as some of the new Web2.0 stuff like drag and drop user interface features.
Get Windows Live Mail! for free – no invite needed!
Big thanks to Forever Geek for this post alerting me to the possibility of tracking packages using an RSS feed. This works just great for people like me with their heads buried too far in their Bloglines account to bother themselves with trying to maintain status of shipped packages for purchases on eBay.
This site lets your track packages from UPS, FedEx, USPS and soon to offer DHL.
That title is obviously meant more for me. It’s been quite some time since I last posted. Guess I’ve gotten caught up in the holidays and taking a little bit of a break from my “real” job. Christmas was really good with the family. Probably the best Christmas we’ve had as a family. Kids have been great and seem to really like and appreciate the gifts they received.
That was a challenge for me this year. I recently went through my son’s closet and threw away a bunch of toys that were purchased for him in the past year or two. Lot’s of crap. This year I wanted to try and stick with classic toys that hopefully wouldn’t grow as old so quick. Santa brought him a new NFL regulation size football, just like the Colts play with, a new Nike basketball, and a Nerf dart gun with pseudo-laser sites. The rest of his Christmas stash was rounded out with Legos, G.I.Joe’s new Sigma Six force, some Hot Wheels playsets and a couple of Xbox games.
My daughter was classic too. Baby dolls, Little Tikes kitchen stuff and other girly things. The two of them also shared some movies together.
I’ll be back into the swing of things shortly. Looking forward to a New Year with everyone!
Aaron at the Emerging Earth blog (RSS Subscribe) has this post that talks about the new SSE spec. The spec is based on the functionality of RSS, but for bi-directional use. What happens is that an RSS feed is received from a client, which then triggers an RSS feed response from the recipient. As Microsoft shares, what RSS is doing for aggregating information, SSE will assist in the duplication and replication of information.
As Aaron shared in his blog, some of the specific examples of how it would be used are best shared from Microsoft itself on the MSDN site:
From the user’s perspective, this means that you will be able to share your data (such as calendar appointments, contact lists, and favorites) across all of your devices and with anyone else that you choose, regardless of infrastructure or organization.
SSE is particularly useful for scenarios in which there are multiple masters and/or asynchronous updates. For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse—either of you could enter new appointments, even if not currently connected. Similarly, SSE could be used to replicate a set of calendar entries among a group of people, each working in a different company and using different infrastructure.
This is a current frustration of mine with my current installation of Outlook 2003. My wife and I both use the same installation of the Outlook and have separate profiles setup. What’s irritating to me is that we can’t have a shared contacts list, family calendar or To Do lists. I know it could be done if we had an Exchange Server setup at home, but that’s just not in the budget in our little one computer household.
What’s not clear though is if anyone of this will be built into the new Office 12 architecture. The MSDN site does say this:
SSE is distinct from other work within Microsoft related to RSS, such as the support for RSS within Vista, the next version of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system, and Simple List Extensions to RSS, which can be used to enable Web sites to publish lists, such as photo albums or music playlists. While distinct from other RSS-related projects within Microsoft, SSE is another example of Microsoft’s desire to make it easy for users to discover, read, and subscribe to RSS feeds, as well as enable developers to deliver powerful applications that can act on behalf of the user. With SSE, users can use RSS for bidirectional replication, not just unidirectional publish and subscribe.
I’ve sent an e-mail to the Microsoft RSS Team to see if they can answer the question on if this functionality will be built into the new Office.
This article on PC Magazine’s website gives a great overview of the major changs that will be available in the new Microsoft Office 12. Microsoft Office 12 Beta 1: Extreme Makeover
The article provides a great collection of the major features available in the new Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, and OneNote applications that are part of the Office suite of products. Also included is a slideshow with screenshots highlighting the user interface and described changes.
According to the article, Microsoft had four major goals in the development of Office 12:
Okay, I promise there will be future posts about topics related to Office 12 that aren’t directly related to Open Formatting brouhaha, but I had to share this article about Peter Quinn, Republican Gov. Mitt Romney’s technology adviser resigning from his position.
Robin Miller recently had an article on Slashdot on whether or not Microsoft is still a monopoly. The article actually even questions whether they ever were. That’s not the initial interesting part of his article though. He goes on to discuss the importance of Microsoft beginning to work with more formats.
Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.
I agree with the vast majority of everything that Mr. Miller states in the entire article. It’s a new day in the hardware and software business. This new day forces companies to react quickly and continually improve, if they don’t there’s someone there to offer something more to your customers than you are currently delivering. This is good! Let’s continue to improve everything everywhere.
Earlier we spoke of the involvement of Microsoft with ECMA standards board and Bob Sutor’s disagreement over Microsoft developing their own standards.
Microsoft’s move to sidestep the OASIS OpenDocument format (ODF) standard by making its own standards submission to the European ECMA standards body appears to contain ‘bizarre restrictions’ and are designed to give Microsoft ‘complete control by tying products’ together, IBM’s standards chief said in an interview Friday.
A recent article at Information Week rehashes alot of what was already discussed, but also adds information regarding Microsoft’s not supporting the full OASIS standards and their reason for developing their own formats.
Microsoft has criticized the OASIS approach. In a statement, the software giant said: “The OpenDocument format would not meet requirements for backward compatibility, for forward compatibility, or for performance, that millions of Microsoft customers tell us that they require.”
“bizarre restrictions”? Yeah, making formats that are backwards and forwards compatible, that’s just nutty!
I don’t know about you, but being able to open all my documents saved in previous versions of Microsoft products would be a pretty important feature I’d be looking for in the new version. At this point, I don’t have any of the details on just how much performance would be impacted by either formats.
I think it would be a great idea for both formats to be supported in Office 12. We already know they’re going to start supporting the ability to save documents directly to PDF format. However, I think it would be something to pursue as an optional free upgrade download later once the initial software has been released.
I’d almost be willing to put money on the fact that even if they supported both, Microsoft’s proposed format would still be the most used file format for items to be saved. See, not everyone is going to upgrade to Office 12, so I think being able to save files into a format that can be opened in older versions of the Office software is a definite must-have feature.
Mark Merrill’s Family Minute reminds me of my personal reason for the season.
He was born in a tiny village to a peasant girl. He worked as a carpenter until he was 30, then became a traveling preacher. When popular opinion turned against him, he was nailed to a cross, died and rose again. Two thousand years later he is the central figure for much of the human race. All of the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed and all the kings that ever reigned — put together — have not affected mankind as powerfully as this “one solitary life” — Jesus Christ. Merry Christmas.
As always, my friend Ben has shared something with the viewing public that I find interesting as well. He actually got it from another friend, whom I think I’m friends with too if it’s who I think it is. Anway, the map below shows all the states I’ve been in, 34 to be exact, so only 16 to go. Looks like I need to do some work in the Pacific Northwest and north central United States and of course Hawaii!
create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.
This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this blog. I’m sure the majority of our readership is quite familiar with RSS and the features and functionality it brings to the table.
Robert Scoble questions just how integrated it will be with the features that he feels are important. Scoble is currently using and a big fan of NewsGator for managing his daily diet of RSS goodness. His biggest question revolves around the ability NewsGator has of keeping his subscriptions in sync across numerous platforms and devices.
I’m very happy to see Outlook have this integration coming. Synchronization will be key though. I currently use Bloglines to maintain my RSS subscriptions (currently 239 feeds). I like Bloglines because it allows me to stay current on everything, whether I’m checking on things from work, home, or someone else’s computer.
I’m curious as to how Office 12, and specifically Outlook 12, will integrate with what may be available through Microsoft’s Windows Live service. If I can maintain my main e-mail, calendar, contacts, notes and now RSS database at home from a web connection, I’m eager to get started yesterday!
[Blog Post: Outlook PM talks about upcoming RSS integration]
Brian Jones, a program manager in the Office team focused on the XML formats, was at the Ecma meeting in Switzerland that the previous post spoke about.
Contrary to Bob Sutor’s viewpoint, Brian feels the work being done on the Office Open XML format is definitely a team effort. He points out on his blog that it’s been a team effort from the beginning with companies participating like:
Of those companies listed, some will be users of the new format while others will actually be assisting with the development. I find it very interesting that Apple is on that list. Last time I checked, Apple and Microsoft were pretty big competitors with each other. So, why is Bob Sutor with IBM is complaining about Microsoft controlling the show?
Brian provides a link to the initial draft of the proposed document on his blog. [WARNING! This is a large file, almost 10MB and the document itself is 1,901 pages! Just in time for reading over the holiday break or wrapping up all those Christmas ornaments for storage.]
Brian said one of the goals of the proposal is that everything is backwards compatible so that the end-users won’t be impacted at all, something I alluded to in my previous post as well. Brian states:
We want to make sure that you don’t lose anything, and that the average end user (who doesn’t care about XML) isn’t impacted.
Brian goes on to say he undersands where Bob Sutor is coming from as well:
You can see that IBM (and Sun to a lesser extent) is still pushing pretty hard against the Open XML formats; which is understandable given their investments in OpenDocument. Hopefully they’ll eventually see that this is a good move for everyone though, as this means they will be free to implement the Open XML formats if that’s what their customers want just like we are free to implement OpenDocument if that’s what our customers want. That’s really what this all comes down to; it’s important to let the market decide.
I like what I’m hearing from Brian as the results of this meeting, and like Brian I understand IBM’s concerns. I just think it’s a little too early to be throwing down gauntlets on what’s going to be the final outcome.
[Brian Jones Blog: Back from the Ecma meetings]
