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Form Filling Through Office 12
Qa32 writes "For those chomping at the bit for more Office 12 details, Microsoft offered a tiny peek at the upcoming offering, or offerings, due next year. In what he termed the first public viewing of Office 12, Chris Caposella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, showed off a distributed forms capability that would enable customers to fill in and submit XML forms easily via a browser, without having to run Microsoft InfoPath on their PC."
Besides the blurb being simply a quote from the beginning of the article, it doesn't provide any of the background information that we need. There are many of us who are curious enough about the story to justify it being on the front page of Slashdot but who don't know enough about the buzzwords and products named in the blurb to figure out how it affects us.
A multi-billion dollar company places its best people on creating better office software and we get...
A reinvention of HTML Forms?
This is the 21st century! Where are my flying cars? I want flying cars, not "XML Form Things".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
..would this ability (XML forms thru browser)be limited to Internet Explorer running on Longhorn?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Microsoft is using an open and robust format (XML) for their office documents - what's wrong with that?
Nothing is wrong with that. It's just that none of us actually believe that they will implement an open XML format. Anyone who has been watching MS for the last 10 years knows that the format will be XML with some big chunks of binary data, probably encrypted, and with patents and the DMCA preventing compatibility. I hope they prove me wrong, but at this point I trust them about as far as I can throw their headquarters (which I think is shaped like a giant cobra for some reason). If they want to implement an open XML format the EU and a number of projects have endorsed and implemented the OASIS standard document format. How about adding support for import and export to that format?
Actually, it might become yet another monstruous security hole, given MS's <sarcarsm> amazing security record </sarcarsm>.
The problem I have with MS is that they're so eager to give power to users -- in a haphazardly way -- that it completely overlooks security. Or corporate IT policy compliance, depending of where you work at.
For an evidence of this behavior, take a look at this comment on MS hiring practices and the respective reply. Basically, they're loaded with marketeers, who grasp some of IT, enough to sell stuff and are, somehow, empowered to make technical decisions at the expense of standards.
At this point, I have to praise Apple. IMHO they make good calls on the question of how to give power to users without seriously compromising security. Heck, I really believe that if Apple became a cell phone operator they could make cell phones and network more secure and more powerful.