Microsoft Must Stop Selling Word 2007 by Jan 11: Patent Ruling
Ouch – this one has to hurt.
Turns out that Microsoft has been accused of infringing on a patent related to XML in its Word 2007 application. The company has been appealing rulings related to this for some time, however, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has just upheld a decision that would see Microsoft Word and Office banned from sale starting January 11.
The funny thing is the company who is suing, is not a patent troll seeking massive damages. The company, i4i, and is just looking to protect its IP.
Not sure how this will play out. Microsoft says that Office 2010 does not use the technology and seems to be scrambling to remove the seldom used feature from the software in time for the January 11 deadline.
Microsoft Releases Office Mobile 2010 Beta for WinMo Phones
Alongside Microsoft's launch of the Office 2010 beta, Microsoft on Wednesday launched a public beta of Office Mobile 2010
Office 2010 Beta Released To Developer Community
Microsoft on Monday released the beta version of Office 2010to its MSDN and TechNet subscribers. As for the general public, they just have to wait.
Microsoft Opening-up Outlook (.PST) Format
If you’ve ever been an Outlook / Microsoft Exchange user, you’ve valued many of the features of the .PST file format. Microsoft has had a winning combination for years with these products which allows everything from easy back-up and restore of your mail files as well as access to your e-mail via a variety of devices in a common experience.
Now, Microsoft has announced that it is making the .PST format available to third-party developers.
“This documentation is still in its early stages and work is ongoing. We are engaging directly with industry experts and interested customers to gather feedback on the quality of the technical documentation to ensure that it is clear and useful,” Paul Lorimer, group manager of Microsoft Office Interoperability wrote in a blog post. “When it is complete, it will be released under our Open Specification Promise, which will allow anyone to implement the .pst file format on any platform and in any tool, without concerns about patents, and without the need to contact Microsoft in any way.”
I personally rent my own exchange server for $8/month in order to avoid using yahoo, google or the other webmail services. While Google has gotten good at aggregating multiple e-mail accounts (one reason why I went this way), it doesn’t provide an easy to implement way to work with outlook and to leave the mail on the server but still have a working backup. Wouldn’t surprise me if either Google itself, or a 3rd party developed some applications using the format to allow for this!
