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Showing posts from March, 2008

Witness the Academia - Industry divide!

The latest on the OpenXML ISP Standardisation debate is India’s choice to vote “NO” for the Open XML to become an ISO Standard by the BIS committee. the voting pattern was - 13 Against, 1 Abstain and 5 For. So who were the 5 voting for the OpenXML – Microsoft, NASSCOM, TCS, Wipro and Infosys... all of them are BIG IT giants (leaving out MS from this as it is expected to be pro OpenXML) employing thousands of people. A lot of credit for India’s resurgence in the global landscape can be attributed to these IT industries.. Since their businesses come from a variety of technologies (including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP etc.) these are truly vendor neutral organisations! Now, in Sept 2007 BIS had raised 82 Comments for Open XML. On completion of BRM, all 82 comments from India were resolved by the committee. One would expect the committee to then vote “YES” for the standard.. So the question is then why would BIS still choose to vote “NO”? Maybe the answer lies in understanding the ps

Making Vista Search your PST Files

Vista can index a lot of files and for some reason it doesn’t index the MS Outlook files.. maybe it is as Outlook is already doing the same.. in case you still want to search PST from Vista Search here is what you can do: Go to the Control Panel Choose "Indexing Options" Click on the "Advanced" button Click on the "File Types" tab Check the checkbox next to "PST" to include it in the search Select the bullet next to the option "Index Properties and File Contents" Click OK and OK again on the message that appears. This is especially useful for information workers like me who have large PST files and are forced to archive from time to time … indexing the archives would return the information from these forgotten folders as well :) Tip taken from On10.net Technorati tags: Outlook , PST , search

Microsoft licenses Flash lite for Windows Mobile Devices

At the recently concluded Mix 08 , Microsoft showcased Silverlight 2.0 working on Windows Mobile. In addition, Nokia licensed Silverlight to display on its mobile device. In a recent news, it is said that Microsoft is licensing Flash Lite for display with Windows Mobile Devices. Here's what ZDNET thinks of it: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8240 Now i don't think what ZDNET thinks is at all on the mark for the following reasons: it has already being displayed at Mix 08 and I don't doubt that it is going to come out soon. If MS has to dissect Flash lite to learn it, there is no need to license the same. Why wud MS want to make Adobe look relevant, when it is fighting Silverlight war with Flash and Expression suite war with Adobe designer suite? I think: Microsoft will continue to prefer Silverlight for its mobile devices. Flash Lite provides Windows Mobile owners additional avenue of using content. In the new found Interoperability "karma", Microsoft may

OpenXML and ISO standardisation: Community contribution shines

I have been following Open XML for some time now and have earlier posted my views on why OpenXML maybe good for India ? Here's the latest from the OpenXML ISO standardisation process after I made the last post: After India saying "NO" to the standard in Phase I of standardisation process, various worldwide committees (and hopefully Indian as well) participated in the meeting in Geneva to resolve the technical comments made by various committees ( in jargon - "Ballot Resolution Meeting" or BRM). By the end of this mammoth five day meeting, 98.4% of the comments (1011 out of 1027 unique comments raised earlier) were resolved ( ISO release on the process ). IMHO, this is a true example of community contributing to developing a standard and improving it by collective wisdom. Microsoft has in some terms for the first time come to a platform where it is open to review from various companies and nations... and there has been one good action from BIS, India and th

Office Live Workspace Available NOW

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  Office Live Workspace is now available globally! Microsoft Office users will be able to use the English version of Office Live Workspace beta, a free Web-based extension of Microsoft Office, to save and access their works online and easily collaborate with others, whether they live in Australia or Singapore or India or Canada. When u sign up, you should install an addin to your Office applications. This addin provides an additional menu in Office applications that lets you save and retrieve documents from Workspace directly! This enables multiple people to work on the same document. And you can create various kinds of workspaces to categorise the work you are doing! With the activity pane, you can also track what changes are being made to the document. but saving documents (excel, powerpoint or word docs) isn't the only thing you can do here! Check out this screenshot that shows other things that you can include in your workspace: And using Workspace now comes with a wind