Andy Simonds Blog : XPS

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

Windows Vista Product Guide

Andy Simonds — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 18:25:00 GMT

The Windows Vista Product Guide is available up on ms.com. It seems to have finished its’ appearing-disappearing act and is up there permanently. Some links strangely point directly to the word doc forcing you to download a 60MB file instead of the smaller xps version. Here is the link to the page where you can make the choice between the two versions.

The doc is actually a great read about all the stuff in Windows Vista. A good chapter on XPS is in there.

- 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

XPS Sample Docs available

Andy Simonds — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 18:42:00 GMT

We recently posted a bunch of sample XPS documents. Download them here. These are primarily for people building XPS solutions for the purpose of testing. The docs are designed to exercise all of the different parts of XPS. Hopefully soon we will get some 'good looking' docs posted that show real-life examples of XPS docs. Also, the markup compatibility spec is now posted. It was formerly in the appendix of the OPC spec and is now seperated out into its' own spec.

- Andy

XPS Essentials Pack Beta 1 Released!

Andy Simonds — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 18:28:00 GMT

Today we launched Beta 1 of what we are calling the XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack. If you go to our viewer page you will notice that there are now two links - one to the current viewer built on WinFX and the other to the new XPS Essentials Pack Beta 1. Mahmood from the XPS Essentials team posted an entry on the XPS team blog, so go there and get important links for support and feedback. The XPS essentials pack contains:

- A standalone viewer that runs on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 SP4 (Vista support will be coming in later Betas). Key things about this viewer: It is a stand-alone app (does not run inside IE), uses GDI+ for rendering, it is not built on WinFX so the overall footprint of the install is smaller and it supports Windows 2000.

- Shell extensions so that you can view and update XPS properties in Windows Explorer

In later Betas we will also add:

- iPreview interface so that XPS documents can be previewed for instance in a preview pane in Outlook or anything else that implements this interface (Vista has a preview pane and it will work there once Vista is supported in later betas)

-iFilter interface to allow searching for text inside XPS documents from the Windows search engine or anything else that supports this interface.

For anyone building XPS products that are working so diligently on ironing out rendering bugs, etc - please continue to reference the WinFX viewer. This viewer is the reference for rendering and stays up to date with the spec. For instance, when we release B2 of Vista, the spec, the WinFX viewer and all other components will be in synch.

The XPS essentials pack will be compliant with the spec in later betas. Please play with it, give us feedback, let us know what you think. Hopefully you should see this as an indication that we are serious about delivering valuable solutions around XPS and we are committed to deliver that value to older operating systems.

- Andy

.85 is released!

Andy Simonds — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:41:00 GMT

OK..my last post was a little ambitious - I was about a week off in my prediction of getting .85 of the XPS and OPC spec out. More bureaucracy in getting things posted to ms.com then I can faithfully predict sometimes. Printed copies distributed inside the team came in hot-pink covers this time (there is no story as to why that is, just that I said "lets go with hot pink" - GPMs get to make the big decisions). Specs are posted, get them here. You will also find a link to the .9 of the Windows Media Photo specification on this same page.

For all things changed and new - go to the xps blog. Jesse has posted summaries of all the changes in the specs. Hopefully you will notice that most of the changes are clarifications, not big changes. We are essentially design complete, no big changes, no big changes coming. And...the code is marching along right with the spec. When Beta 2 ships - it will be a beautiful thing. I can tell you that playing around with the latest builds of Vista it is quite and exciting thing. Create documents, view, sign, rights-protect, fast - good looking, slick new UI in the viewer. It's all coming together. An important milestone of any Windows project is when you stop using the last version to get your work done. The last XP machine in my office is gone - I switched it to Vista last week. My desktops and laptop are all running Vista, I will never go back. OK..back to XPS.

One thing we did is take the markup compatibility definition that was in the appendix of the OPC spec and create a separate specification for it. That spec will be posted soon. We did this because markup compatibility can be used for more than XPS, so we separated it out. We also hope to shortly post a suite of sample XPS documents. As soon as they arrive I will mention it.

- Andy

XPS .85 spec here soon

Andy Simonds — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:03:00 GMT

A lot of people have been asking about .85 - it's coming soon. Should be out this week. I will make a post (and there will be one on the XPS blog) as soon as it is out.

- 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

Annotations and XPS

Andy Simonds — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 21:57:00 GMT

We've finally created a post on the annotations story for XPS. It's over on the XPS blog site. Take a look here: http://blogs.msdn.com/xps/archive/2006/02/24/538384.aspx

- Andy

New XPS whitepaper on document workflow

Andy Simonds — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 21:04:00 GMT

We snuck a new whitepaper up on microsoft.com. Document Workflows in Windows Vista. The graphic on Page 3 is worth the price of admission all by itself. The paper is not in a very obvious place (up in the printing section of WHDC) but we will get it more visible soon.

Go Seahawks.