Microsoft Must Stop Selling Word 2007 by Jan 11: Patent Ruling
December 22, 2009 by The Editor
Filed under Company Strategy, Office
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
November 19, 2009 by The Editor
Filed under Office, Windows Mobile / Phone
Alongside Microsoft’s launch of the Office 2010 beta, Microsoft on Wednesday launched a public beta of Office Mobile 2010
The set of applications will allow users to view and edit their Office documents, use their phones as a PowerPoint presentation aid, and connect with their SharePoint Workspace Mobile accounts. The app is available for download in the Windows Marketplace for Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones. Anyone with a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone can download and test the app until April 5 of next year.
The app appears to be a step forward for Office Mobile because it interacts exclusively with touch screen Win Mobile 6.5 phones and offers functionalities like syncing with Microsoft OneNote.
Office 2010 Beta Released To Developer Community
November 18, 2009 by The Editor
Filed under Office
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.
“Office 2010 has not yet officially released for the public and we have no further information to share at this time,” a Microsoft spokesperson stated via e-mail. Presumably, SharePoint 2010 is also unavailable to the public.
Microsoft has typically said that its Office 2010 products will be available to the general public in the first half of next year.
Office 2010 will include Office Web Apps — browser-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Organizations will be able to host those applications on their own servers or pay for access through Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) offerings. The consumer versions will be ad-supported, at no additional cost.
IT organizations considering whether to upgrade to Office 2010 should poll users, according to a study released last week by Forrester Research, “Best Practices: Microsoft Office Enterprise Strategy.” About 80 percent of companies surveyed earlier this year by Forrester use Office, but there are alternatives, including Google Apps, Zoho’s hosted apps and OpenOffice.org, among others.
Microsoft Opening-up Outlook (.PST) Format
October 27, 2009 by The Editor
Filed under Office
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!
