Andy Simonds Blog : News and Events

XPS at TechEd 2006

Andy Simonds — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 23:24:00 GMT

Microsoft TechEd 2006 is next week and we will have a session on XPS there. Marcio will be going solo with no support from his team, so if you are there, offer to carry something for him. Description of the session:

DEV324 Windows Vista As a Document Platform: Programming XPS and 2007 Microsoft Office System Documents with WPF

Day/Time: Tuesday, June 13 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM Room: 102 AB

Speaker(s): Marcio Mello

Applications create and edit data files that must be managed, protected, shared and validated. Attend this must-see session to discover how WinFX services simplify the management of XPS documents, the next version of Office documents, and your own application's data through the use of the WinFX package APIs and XPS-specific APIs. For example, learn how to apply and use rights management, digital signatures, and metadata. These services will be valuable if you're creating custom Office or XPS-based solutions.

There will also be a Virtual Tech·Ed where you should be able to see Marcio's presentation directly from your desktop. Tech-Ed is sold out, so if you aren't already attending the virtual session is your only option.

- Andy

XPS, PDF and Adobe

Andy Simonds — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 00:58:00 GMT

So it is certainly an interesting news day today. For those interested in the world of PDF and XPS, you probably have already read the Wall Street Journal Article about changes we are making because of Adobe. There are also a few other articles that cover the story in case you do not have access to WSJ on-line:

CNET TG Daily

Brian Jones Blog also includes a discussion from the Office point of view.

Read Brian’s blog about PDF and Office. One thing I will add, is that the Office team is making both PDF and XPS ‘save-as’ support as free downloads, instead of built into Office directly. This is too bad, but is designed to try and resolve any concerns Adobe has with XPS or PDF functionality as part of Office.

Let me cover the Windows side of the story. For several years we have been sharing detailed plans on XPS with Adobe. I’d say almost to an excess, we kept them up to speed on our designs and implementation at every step and we’ve made a lot of design modifications based on their input. They attend our conferences and plug-fests (plug fest: a multi-day meeting at Microsoft where partners learn about new technologies and share implementations) and we value them as an important Microsoft partner. We see XPS as a platform and still believe that the advances we are making with XPS will have a lot of benefits to Adobe products as well as all the other millions of customers and partners that use the Windows platform

Unfortunately, Adobe has been pushing for us to remove XPS from Windows. Given the clear benefits of XPS to customers and partners, this is something we can not do. We are always sensitive to competitor complaints when we design Windows and we’ve tried to address any concerns Adobe may have. But, we have to first and foremost design our products for customers, not competitors. XPS support in many ways is a natural evolution to the Windows platform. Windows has always had a way to publish documents (in the form of printing) and it is natural to move the platform forward improving the quality of the output of documents, making them more programmable and enabling a seamless transition between view and print scenarios. This is what our customers have been asking from the Windows platform and this is what we are delivering with XPS. We are very excited to deliver innovations in Windows Vista that address long-standing customer needs.

That being said, in order to accommodate Adobe’s concerns, we have made it so OEMs making PCs can choose to not include XPS as part of Windows. The core printing enhancements that we have made in Windows, where we have used XPS as the spool file format, is not removable. Since this makes printing better for everyone, and since Adobe and anyone else that serves the printing market has keen interest in Windows printing improving, there is no contention on that functionality.

Since AIIM and WinHEC, a day does not go by where another customer or big ISV contacts us about building XPS into their document workflows. Some of these folks are extending XPS in new and exciting ways to provide unique solutions to their customers. These calls come in because they see value in XPS. XPS solves key customer problems and that will be the value that ultimately drives adoption.

- Andy

WinHEC and Beta 2

Andy Simonds — Thu, 25 May 2006 07:33:00 GMT

It’s been a big week. WinHEC is wrapping up and we have shipped Beta 2. Beta 2 is awesome (I have been 'XP-free' for several months and love it) and it means we are really headed towards shipping. I stopped by the Beta 2 ship party today here on campus where we had a live band, food and drinks for the entire Windows division (didn’t have my camera so no photos).

Yesterday I was able to catch the WinHEC keynote where Bill announced the trifecta of Betas (Vista Client, Server and Office 2007) and most importantly to see the keynote demo of XPS. It went off without a hitch, although it is so nerve-racking to watch a marketing guy who knows very little about our technology give a demo. We watch with apprehension, but finally, elation once it was over. Great exposure for XPS.

The buzz around XPS, Color and our Web Services for Devices work was outstanding. Lots of people seeing our demos, asking questions and lots of our partners showing off their demos built on our Vista technology. Lots of fun, just walking around the booths and hearing people talk about the technology we are building.

One of the amazing things we showed which probably will fly under the radar of the top-line press, is a demo of high-dynamic range, wide-gamut photo printing using the new imaging pipeline in Windows Vista. We showed a demo of printing from the Vista photo gallery a wide-gamut photograph stored in Windows Media Photo format to an XPS-enabled wide-gamut Epson photo printer. The output was great, you could really see the difference in the side-by-side comparison. The printer was being driven by a print driver put together for us by Software Imaging. For the consumer, the photo printer is able to deliver high quality prints using a wide color gamut without having to circumvent bottlenecks in the OS. With these advances in Windows Vista and with new XPS-capable wide gamut printers, this capability exists right out of the box.

Between Windows Media Photo, the new Windows Color System and XPS, a new level of color quality and fidelity is now achievable. We also had some color demos showing driving >8bpc out to some HDR monitors – stunning results.

We could not have done this without the help of a bunch of our partners. Mainly, Software Imaging, Epson and Monotype Imaging

It continues to be an active week in the press – some more press releases and announcements that cover technology from the D2 team:

Global Graphics continues its great work with XPS

Monotype Imaging to Demo WCS-Compliant Color Profiling Technology at WinHEC

Microsoft Unveils Windows Vista Beta 2

Lots of articles out there about Beta 2 shipping, most make some mention of XPS.

Microsoft presents new photo format for Vista

Play-by-Play of WinHEC Keynote

If you are a gluten for punishment, you car read the minute by minute run-downs of the WinHEC Keynote. The videos are also up on Microsoft.com. Will’s keynote with the XPS demo is here (XPS demo starts at the 10-minute mark).

Madcap software

I’m not familiar with this company, but buried in their press release on their latest financials is a comment about support XPS!

AIIM Day 3 - Final Day

Andy Simonds — Fri, 19 May 2006 18:22:00 GMT

AIIM - Final Day

Like all shows, the last day is always slow. Still, we had a lot of traffic in the booth in the morning. I headed out at noon to catch my flight home, but heard that even until 3 we still had a constant flow of people in the booth and the 1:15 theater presentation was well attended. Flying through Charlotte then to Seattle so it is a long day. I really enjoyed Philadelphia (big fan) - but not the airport.

I had planned to see a bunch of sessions and keynotes, but got too busy with partners/customers to do much of that at all. The session I was finally able to catch was the final keynote by John Seely Brown, ex Xerox Parc guy.

It was nice to see a keynote that wasn't pushing a product. I didn't see the Google keynote, but heard that it had a lot of self-congratulatory content throughout the talk about how amazing google was, their hiring practices, their PHd's…), etc. John's talk was very enjoyable. He did a good job of talking about how humans ability to find information is very strongly related to what it physically looked like and the last time they interacted with it. Situational reference to information is as important as the information itself when it comes to finding it. A very good thing to remember when we get so tied up in thinking about how to tag data. I think if Windows had a natural, built in way to record any transaction that occurs with a document (viewing it, it printing, etc) back into the document as meta-data, that would go a long way to helping people find and organize data. One part of the keynote that was a little odd was the comment that open source and the latest web technologies would be the key to making expensive, complex enterprise content systems very cheap. But, then he went on to say the cost of ownership would still be very very high - but that would eventually be solved by virtualization. Huh? I agree that these systems will definitely get cheaper, but I think this overlooks the fundamental issue that customers want to have someone to call. They want to pick up the phone and know that someone who built and tested the solution from the bottom up and made it all work together will support them. In the end, I really don't think software cost is at the top of the list of big issues for most enterprise customers. It's the cost of support, security, information protection and integration that they really spend money on. I think customers will continue to spend a lot of money with Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM specifically because they will build, test, deploy and support the software the customer is buying. It was just one slide, and I'm sure there is deeper thinking her from John, but it kind of came across as another 'open-source will solve everything' kind of pitch.

Back to the show.

At the show, what was really surprising is the # of people that were coming back for 2nd looks - or bringing their boss, or bringing their engineering manager, etc. I've done a lot of shows in the past and rarely do you have people coming back over and over again to see what you have. We all left the show feeling pretty good about the whole experience. We touched a lot of people that knew very little about XPS and our platform investments around documents - now it is definitely on their radar. I imagine that next year at AIIM it will be a very different story.

A bunch of people really helped make this a success - Kaushik, Vicki, Gregg, Marcio and Adrian from the D2 team all helped make the show come together, managed all the customers, gave presentations and kept all the demos running. The Windows RM team was also great in making sure our demos and presentations worked well together and overall a huge help in just getting the show off the ground. What is more important is all the people that have worked on this product for so long (you know who you are). Beta 2 is around the corner and everything we demo'd was live Beta 2 code. No smoke and mirrors. We had real servers running RMS and Sharepoint and the latest builds of Vista and Office 2007 for all the demos.

Also important are all those early-adopter partners. Those at the show that gave demos and talked to customers about XPS. These are the people that have believed in us, gone through the roller-coaster of the spec and builds changing underneath them all the time and came to AIIM showing how they can create cool solutions on XPS. They are:

Xerox

Konica Minolta

Quality Logic

Scan Optics

Nuance

Informative Graphics

Also important to note that the guys from Global Graphics, Zoran and Software Imaging who have been supporting XPS for a long time were at the show, talking to customers about XPS and spreading the good word. Thanks!

It will be really amazing to see this list the next time we are at AIIM. A lot more will also be at Winhec next week.

Although I think Philly may be the worst airport in the country, Seattle still has the slowest baggage system ever - anywhere. My feet hurt, my back is killing me - maybe I am too old to do booth duty anymore.

- Andy

It's May! AIIM and Winhec around the corner

Andy Simonds — Wed, 03 May 2006 19:38:00 GMT

It is suddenly May and things are busy as ever around here. Of course, focusing on Beta 2 is our top priority and that looks real good at this point. In two weeks we will be on the road at AIIM. A lot of excitement brewing for this event. It is the first time MS has ever had a presence at AIIM let alone be a platinum sponser. We will have a good size booth that will be shared between the Office Sharepoint team, Windows RMS and our team (specifically XPS). In addition to the booth there will be three sessions:

Tuesday, May 16 - 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
General Session: Bridging the Gap between Technology and Solution: the Value of Partners in Microsoft Office's 2007 ECM Offering

Wednesday, May 17 - 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
General Session: Enterprise Content Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Wednesday, May 17 - 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
General Session: Effortlessly Manage and Protect Your Documents Using Microsoft Office, XPS and Windows Rights Management
Services

Lots of work going on working on presentations, working out our demos and working with partners. I think it is going to be a fantastic event. It is the first time we have talked about XPS at a non-Microsoft conference, so it will be very interesting to hear first-hand peoples questions and reactions. I'm very surprised the progress a lot of our partners have made on XPS. Not just the partners we have regular contact with, but also it seems every week we run into a new company we have never worked with that has a solution up and running - I'm hoping to maybe run across a few more at the show.

If you are in Philly at AIIM, stop by the booth and say hi, I'll be there all week.

Winhec is also in full stride. A list of sessions from the D2 team can be found here. We will cover the latest info around color, XPS printing, Windows Image Acquisition, Web Services for Devices and of course anything you need to know about testing your hardware to make sure it will work great with Windows Vista.

- Andy

Latest D2 Newsletter is out

Andy Simonds — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 03:05:00 GMT

We get asked often about how to find out more info on XPS, or other things the D2 team is doing. Well, we have a newsletter, but I think it needs a little more publicity. Our newsletter is awesome, we've been publishing it for a while and it gives you all the things you need to know about what we are doing. When are new features showing up in releases? What events are we presenting at? Where to get the latest specs? Everything. If you want to subscribe to the newsletter click this link to subscribe. To see old newsletters, these are now available on-line.

In the latest newsletter (which came out today) you will notice the subtle introduction of our XPS icon:

This will be used for the icon artwork in Windows and any other place we reference XPS. It is supposed to make you feel that you can go places, send documents at will, share, be free!!....well, anyway it just looks cool to me and hopefully it will give XPS nice imagery in people's brains where today all we have is a TLA.

Reminder: Winhec and AIIM are coming up. They will be great shows, we have a lot of content to present. I will be at both, but at AIIM I will likely be at the booth almost everyday so come by and say hi.

- Andy

Microsoft and XPS at AIIM

Andy Simonds — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 23:19:00 GMT

Microsoft will have a big presence at the AIIM expo in Philadelphia this year (May 15-18). A brief press release went ou on this yesterday. This is a big deal to us. It is the first time we have ever had a presence at AIIM. Expect a large booth and several talks covering XPS, Office and Windows Rights Management. It will be fun - I will be there.

- Andy

WinHec 2006 Registration Open

Andy Simonds — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 02:25:00 GMT

Winhec 2006 is already around the corner. Here is a quick link to the topics coming from the D2 team.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/tracks06.mspx#9

We will focus mostly on the XPS print driver architecture. There will also be a dedicated session to Windows Media Photo.

- Andy

D2's home

Andy Simonds — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 01:35:00 GMT

If you want to see where the D2 team works (the building I am sitting in right now). Check it out here. This is a 'birds-eye' view from the new Windows Live Local Beta using MSN virtual earth. It is surprising cool.

- Andy