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Office 2007 update comes early
Because Microsoft often gets rapped for delivering products late, it seems worth noting that, on Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2007, it delivered a product early.
The software maker issued the first service pack update to Office 2007, roughly a year after the product first became available to businesses.
The new update, which has gotten a whole lot less attention than Vista SP1, adds largely performance and stability improvements, along with making the server components of Office fully compatible with the forthcoming Windows Server 2008 update.
"These enhancements span the software applications and servers that home and office workers use each … Read more
Ulteo brings OpenOffice to Web browser
Ulteo, a company staffed by Linux veterans, on Wednesday launched the test version of a service that lets people run the OpenOffice.org desktop suite in the Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers.
The service is designed to let people collaborate with OpenOffice documents online and use the open-source application suite without having to download it.
People can also exchange documents in Microsoft's Office format or PDF. The service also supports the OpenDocument Format standard.
There are already several companies offering online versions of traditional desktop applications, including Google, Zoho, and others. Microsoft on Monday released Office Live Workspace, which … Read more
Office Live Workspace (almost) brings Office 2007 online
Microsoft is stepping closer to providing anywhere access to Office files. The free Office Live Workspace (more here), which lets people share work in Word, Excel and PowerPoint online, is expanding today to invite more beta testers.
You can sign up to try the work in progress at OfficeLive.com, although access may not be immediate. A final version is set for next spring.
When Office 2007 debuted nearly a year ago, it seemed curious that Microsoft offered no easy, one-click option for accessing work from the Web. Meanwhile, Zoho built an add-in for Office 2007, as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and other tools allowed people to share as well as compose work within a browser.
The free, ad-supported Office Live Workspace is a bridge to Office software, not a browser-based replica. Workspace synchronizes changes made to files stored both on a desktop and at Office Live's servers, including Outlook contacts and events. It works with Windows XP SP2, 2003 Server, or Vista with Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2 or higher (required for users of Mac OS 10.2 and up).
The online tools preview Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files as well as PDFs, PNGs, and JPGs. Workspace is meant to work in tandem with Word, Excel and PowerPoint XP, 2003, or 2007 running locally on a PC. You can preview, not edit, documents from a browser. Web Notes, on the other hand, do enable the creation and formatting of small text documents online.
Office Live Workspace emphasizes collaboration rather than composition. To share documents with other people, you can send them a secure URL without requiring them to sign in with a Windows Live ID. Everyone with access to the workspace can make and view each others' comments.
Those invited for editing can make changes to the work, as long as they have Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on their hard drive. Office Live Workspace handily preserves the Track Changes feature from Office apps while also keeping five histories of a file. And the Share View screen allows control of another user's PC.
Another desktop component of this service is the Office Live Add-In for Microsoft Office. This is a quick download, although you'll have to restart the system afterward. Once it's installed, a Save to Office Live option will appear under the Office button within Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, with the subsequent dialog box showing your available workspaces.
Workspaces are collections of documents. Ten templates are built to manage a classroom, sports team, travels, job search, household, and so forth. For example, a travel workspace will include an expense report spreadsheet with Word files for an itinerary, packing list, and personal data. You can store a maximum of 500 workspaces containing 500 documents each for a total of 500 MB per account and 25 MB per file.
Office users who learn about these tools are likely to come to depend upon them to stash their work online with a few, quick clicks. Workplaces that use Microsoft's staple software will probably find Workspace a fine collaboration tool that makes it easy to take work away from the office.
This is a well-designed service, but I'd still like something not only to store work, but to let me make edits without opening local applications. What if you only want to correct a misspelled byline in a 20 MB report? You'll have to open Word, since Office Live Workspace doesn't even allow light, text only edits within a browser. I'll continue to lean on Google Docs for that.
Office Live Workspace, by the way, is not to be confused with Office Live Small Business, which offers a free domain name and Web design templates.
Please see more images after the jump.… Read more
OpenOffice.org releases security patch
Got OpenOffice 2.3 or prior versions? Be prepared to download a security patch.
The OpenOffice.org community has issued a patch for a "highly critical" security vulnerability in OpenOffice 2.3 and prior versions, according to a security advisory issued by Secunia on Wednesday.
A security flaw in a third party default database engine module, HSQLDB, shipped with OpenOffice 2.3 and prior versions, could allow malicious attackers to launch arbitrary code. The vulnerabilities could be exploited by manipulating the database documents processing, according to a security advisory issued by OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is asking users … Read more
New software
As a computer nerd, I hold this truth to be self-evident:
All new software contains bugs and design flaws
Thus, from a defensive computing standpoint, the latest is never the greatest. Someone who depends on his or her computer, in a serious way, is always best served by avoiding software that has just been released. With that as a backdrop, here are some thoughts as to what this means to you, in terms of current software choices.
Mac OS X Leopard 10.5
For one thing, it means don't buy a Macintosh computer--at least not now. I have nothing … Read more
Oxygen breathes more life into OpenOffice
Firefox has Flock and Songbird, but it's not the only open-source app with some nifty spin-offs. OxygenOffice Pro is developed from OpenOffice.org, but don't let the name fool you: It's completely free, and like a Thanksgiving turkey it's stuffed with even more features. (Anybody else up for a list of Turkey 2.0 features?) Anyway, it's very much like its parent, and you can opt out of whatever features you dislike during the installation.
Live Documents update: Sounding better all the time
On the assumption that not everyone reads comments, I wanted to post a comment here that was made in response to my earlier post on Live Documents. Net net: Live Documents is much more interesting than I had originally supposed. In fact, I just registered for an account. Here's why.
Is Live Documents simply a competitor to Microsoft Word? No:
[W]e offer the entire Office suite - online equivalents of Word, Excel and PowerPoint - and not just Word as you have mentioned. If it was only Word then yes, many of your points on create vs. collaborate are true but it is far more complex when your data is in a spreadsheet or presentation.What about the limitations inherent in being a pureplay SaaS/browser-based model?
...[W]hen we say that we are an "online" Office suite, we are not limiting ourselves to just a browser-centric experience. While we do offer a browser-based service that offers functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, we also offer a client application that makes your existing version of Microsoft Office web-enabled.
