Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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This will be one of the most current updates I have ever done, because this week I was able to attend the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and you are reading this just a few days later.

My main focus obviously was how Web 2.0 — ostensibly the new wave of collaboration and service oriented tools online — would interface with MS Office.

Microsoft's main thrust in this area is Office Live, which I last looked at in August 2006. At the time I lamented to seemingly complete lack of integration with the "real" Microsoft Office — namely the desktop suite I cover for InformIT.com.

Before attending the show I returned to the Office Live site and managed to log on to my own online site through Hotmail, but several of the links were dead — specifically the one was most interested in: Collaborate with customers and coworkers

(Manage your business and share information with online workspaces, Contact Manager, Project Manager, and more...)

This seemed perfect for integration with Office and Web 2.0 apps online. Unfortunately the site did not work anymore and real integration with Office was still not in evidence.

Figure 1

Others seemed to agree. To quote Mary Jo Foley from ZDNET:

"Web 2.0 means different things to different people. To Microsoft’s Office team, Web 2.0 does not mean a Web-centric version of Microsoft Office, a la Google Apps. It does mean add-ons to SharePoint Server, Microsoft’s back-end bundle of server applications."

Of course I've also covered SharePoint as the server side collaboration tool for MS Office.

But many Office desktop end users don't have a need for SharePoint because they are small or individual business users. And even though Groove is ostensibly part of Office 2007, as I indicated in my intro to Groove, it is a powerful collaboration tool that puts it in the Web 2.0 sphere for those who need to share and conform versions of files created in Office and elsewhere around the planet. One of its coolest attributes is that it keeps track of who's available and lets you work either online or offline and then synch work product.

The other areas of Office that would truly be Web 2.0 elements were introduced in Office 2007 — RSS feed capability in Outlook 2007 and Blogging in Word 2007 — both of which which we've covered.

So my first stop in my adventure at Web 2.0/SF was Microsoft's booth in the Exhibit Hall. But most of the stuff I saw there was still Server oriented and had no real relationship or integration with the Office Suite.

Of course web based Office competitors were in abundance.

Right off the bat I saw a competitor for one of my favorites — OneNote — Springnote.

As you can see it is a web based notebook with some very cool features. You can create pages and organize them, instantly import web pages, and one nice idea is the ability to Export to Blog by clicking on Menu.

Figure 2

When you create a new page you can instantly choose from a plethora of templates — some like OneNote and some completely different.

Figure 3

Among the Add-Ins available directly in Springnote is access to a Mashup Gallery — one of the hot topics at Web 2.0.

Figure 4

The Mashup Gallery gives you even more options for integration with Springnote — beyond what OneNote provides.

Figure 5

I may review Springnote more fully but I suspect that integration with OneNote would also be a nice feature; since it lives in a web browser if you use IE, there is no reason why you can't use the Send to OneNote feature to send content from Springnote to OneNote. Of course, going in the other direction, you would need to copy and paste your OneNote data into Springnote.

One huge advantage of Springnote over OneNote — and this goes for all of the web apps as long as you have a connection — is portability.

For example, let's say you got to the library and want to make notes and use Springnote — later you attend a conference and use a web terminal, add to your notes, then another location and finally at home. You don't need to take a laptop along — as long as you're connected you have your notes and access to them.

Another suite of web apps, which I mentioned in an update last November, is Zoho.

With a presence at Web 2.0 Zoho has almost every kind of web application you can think of, including a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software.

Here again, although the individual apps are not quite as robust (or bloated) as Office, they have singular advantages. For example, the presentation software enables instant remote presentations from directly inside Zoho. You can also embed a YouTube or other web video into the slide(s), and carry on chat while you present, so it's a mini conferencing and presentation app.

Figure 6

There are two tiers of Zoho, for single users or enterprise or CRM users — but both are free for up to three users at present.

What I found really cool about Zoho is that the integration is present directly in the web browser, allowing instant toggling between the applications and seamless movement of data or documents. While docs are stored online, they can be easily downloaded in Office friendly formats.

Also, any document from Zoho can be shared across the web, and perhaps the most amazing thing I saw was a plug in for Excel (with similar plug ins in the works or available for other Office apps) that allow Excel 2007 (for example) to open a Zoho document directly from within the Add In tab of the Ribbon.

The CRM version also lets you plan and implement entire campaigns with calendar and contact integration, all online.

Figure 7

In another recent update I mentioned an online rival to Access — Blist.

They were at Web 2.0 with news — first of all there is a Discovery feature when you begin a new database which creates a community aspect to Blist. What I mean is that you can view a set of similar databases already created by other users; you may not see the underlying data, but you can then use the structure of a similar database to create your own and add your own modifications.

This is a potential timesaver of mammoth proportions.

In addition around June Blist is expected to have SQL connectivity and mail merge capability. The difference with mail merge is that instead of starting from Word, you would start the mail merge from Blist, pick your fields for the import of data, and then launch Word from within Blist.

I will keep you posted in this development.

Another interesting concept is Strata, a "data browser" from Kirix.com. I plan to cover this in some depth in a coming update, but essentially this is a way to open CSV (Excel text delimited) files directly from the web, import HTML tables, linke to data in MySQL and Oracle tables, and bookmark data files. It's another example of how databases are really at the core of the web, and are becoming more accessible even to end users.

More companies are coming up with offline capabilities and versions of Web 2.0 apps — Adobe has a platform called AIR for Flash apps and Google's application engine is called Gears.

With the new Office like applications available online, it is probably not long off that their cousins will be hosted offline as well, making OpenOffice, Blist and Zoho easy to run locally as well as in a web browser.

Web 2.0 is a trend where the web is becoming the largest OS in the world. To get a sense of what is available, check out the Programmable Web Directory for a full set of information on API's and Mashups (aggregators of data and web services).

It's truly a brave new Web 2.0 world.

On a more macro or overview level, the growth of Web 2.0 is about widgets and applications that can aggregate data from other sites with their API's (Application Programming Interface) accessible across the Internet. Picture apps like Flicker and Picasa can be accessed and pointed to from within apps like MySpace and Facebook so that the entire web is becoming an open environment. Will Microsoft (and IE) play along, stay tuned.

At the conference Microsoft announced "Live Mesh", an obvious move designed to expand the Windows operating system as a platform. Mesh is a data synchronization service, but it is also intended to make Microsoft a major source of cloud computing.

Indeed, Microsoft can have the last word, according to Amit Mital: "[O]ur vision of your device mesh extends far beyond this [data synch and cloud computing]" (from his blog post). "In the near future, we’ll add support for the Mac and mobile devices, and then we’ll build upon that foundation."

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

SOA and Web 2.0: Putting It All Together

Introduction to Voice XML Part 5: Voice XML Meets Web 2.0

New Web Tools for Writers

Books and eBooks

Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide

Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators

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