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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."
Like you can do with PDFs today (and for the past couple of years)?
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
or in the case of /. stories: chumps, or maybe even chimps!
..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
Does this mean the MS Office 12 implements the XForms standard, or that it embraces and extends it in a proprietary way? If so, what's the advantage for users of MS Office 12 over XForms?
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
I don't use it often, since my job requires more design based software (read: Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign, Dreamweaver, etc..) However every year my work spends quite a lot of money making sure I have the newest version, yet I don't really know what changes.
We primarily use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and with small exceptions of where commands are located and the icons "bubbly-ness", I haven't noticed much of a difference between the 95, 2k, XP, and 2k3 versions. In fact the only difference that really pops out at me is what programs are considered as part of "Office Pro".
It used to be that 95 and 2k came with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Access. Then XP came out with those plus Publisher (which IIRC was someone elses product that was purchased by MS) Then 2k3 came out and is the same but with Visio (which I know was someone elses product but bought by MS).
So does each version just add a new software to the bundle or are there really changes? (changes being more than buubly icons and moving the location of th email-merge command)
Ave Molech Setting
... this capability. Yes, PDF forms have allowed this for quite some time. But, like it or lump it, MS is the leader when it comes to productivity apps. This ability expands the Office line further into the general web and closer to the world of open standards. Seems to me like one of the few useful features they have introduced in a long time. Besides, it's not like they have a choice. OpenOffice 2.0 (beta 1.9) is looking sweet and is finally starting to represent an actual threat to the Evil Empire.
Bang Logic - Serious Small Business Services
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?
And it's leverage enabled for system empowerment!
The simple answer is its fun.
The longer answer is that MS has a poor track record with actually implementing the standards they are "embracing". They take the standard, tack on a bunch of crap that isn't part of it, make that proprietary and part of their default build tools. Thus, stuff built by their software becomes unusable or annoying on other software even though it's using the "standard".
Short verion of the long answer, they've hijacked any stanard they embraced in the past.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
InfoPath works independently from XForms, although the aim is similar, to convert user input to XML. Companies that have deployed Office 2003+ would most likely use InfoPath. Companies that haven't would most likely implement XForms.
MS Office -- stick a fork in it -- it's done.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
...when Microsoft stops talking about what they are going to reinvent next year, and releases something new .
Yawn. Never saw a more boring company.
I am reasonably certain you can already do this in with Acrobat with the addition of a small cgi script. Look here, scroll down to where it talks about the "FDF toolkit" API.
In order to do this of course you must write your own cgi frontend, so you could say this isn't as much as Office would hypothetically give you. However all Office would be hypothetically giving you here is a prepared drop-in CGI script, and I'm relatively certain were there need for such a thing there would be several free prepared drop-in CGI scripts for doing this with Acrobat already; and certainly it would likely be quicker and cheaper for any organization with access to at least one programmer to write such a thing internally than to wait for, then upgrade to, a new version of MS-Office.
I would imagine however that no one would ever really bother with such a thing, however, since, well, pretty much everyone in the world except Microsoft considers a PDF viewer a necessary part of a modern desktop system and web browser, so few people would particularly think of "requires PDF support" as "requiring plugin"...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
They do it, quite simply, because Office does pretty much what it always has. Sure, maybe Excel gets a new graph format or a new function, and maybe Word tells you how many paragraphs per fortnight you write.
None of these are sexy marketing bullets. "New in Office 2006! Sin() 125% faster! Slightly different 3D chart you'll never use! Spell check finally has 80% instead of 75% of English words!" doesn't cut it on the banners and magazine ads.
"Office 2006- streamlined for the way YOU and YOUR business works. So you can get to the important things in life quicker" (insert picture of model playing with model child, both of them laughing. Flowers and ice cream and little puppies optional).
Sound familiar? That's because that is the basis for virtually every "new" Office release marketing blitz in the last decade. Why? Because for much of the business world, if you're sitting there at your desk instead of home with your SO and/or kids, chances are you're staring at a Word, Excel, or Powerpoint document. Translation: you identify with the supposed problem and believe the utter lie- that the new software will boost your productivity.
Also, changing around the interface keeps the training companies busy, and pushes companies to upgrade everyone so "people don't get confused" (same with the myriad of niggling little incompatibilities, especially in Powerpoint, which affect how slides are rendered.)
Please help metamoderate.
Could somebody please summarize what in the hell an "XML Form" is? XML is, quite simply, a way of formatting flat data. Saying "XML Form" is like saying "Comma-delimited Form". What in the hell does this mean?
I don't respond to AC's.
They are just copying what OpenOffice.org is doing - representing the document as a set of XML files, and compressing them all into a single ZIP archive.
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.
TFA says "a browser." Doesn't specify which browser or platform.
I'll eat someone's tinfoil hat if this works plugin-free with any browser other than IE7 on Windows.
Will still eventually upgrade.. Can only put off the compatibility issue so long.
It creeps up on you slowly. First one vendor upgrades, then another, then you find you cant 'talk' to your customers, and voila.. you upgrade..
Happens to the best of us..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Umm.. but InfoPath has been around since 2002.
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Thank God someone finally implemented this great idea. I'm so sick of having to telnet into servers and type in POST queries by hand to submit forms. Now, at long last, we'll be able to post comments on Slashdot just by typing text in a box and clicking a button!
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.