My friend and colleague, Eric White, recently posted a superb write up on his blog about a new feature in SharePoint Server 2010—Word Automation Services. Word Automation Services is a new service application included with SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise that provides document conversion capability that can scale to enterprise demand. One shorthand way to think of Word Automation Services is as the Word client application’s “Save As” capability brought to the server. Using Word Automation Services, you can “convert” any document that the Word client application can “Save As” to but without requiring the Word client application to run on the server. Eric sums it up well,
“There are some tasks that are difficult using the Open XML SDK, such as repagination, conversion to other document formats such as PDF, or updating of the table of contents, fields, and other dynamic content in documents. Word Automation Services is a new feature of SharePoint 2010 that can help in these scenarios. It is a shared service that provides unattended, server-side conversion of documents into other formats, as well as some other essential pieces of functionality. It was designed from the outset to work on servers, and can process high volumes of documents in a reliable and predictable fashion.”
Besides the information Eric has provided in his post, developer-related content for Word Automation Services is also being made available in the SharePoint Server 2010 Software Development Kit Beta documentation. The SDK includes general conceptual information and a comprehensive class library for Word Automation services. Included in the final version of the SDK documentation are several walkthroughs that provide usable examples of how to use the Word Automation Services API to perform document conversions.
Look for more Word Automation Services developer-oriented content from myself, Eric White, and others at the release of SharePoint Server 2010 and beyond!
Following up on my blog for the February update of the Outlook Social Connector (OSC) Beta, MySpace released the beta version of their provider for the OSC, MySpace for Outlook, yesterday. MySpace for Outlook lets you view friends' profiles, activities, and status updates, and synchronize MySpace contacts to Outlook contacts.
If you are interested in trying MySpace for Outlook, you are running Outlook 2010 Beta and have not installed the OSC Beta released in February, you must first uninstall the version of OSC Beta that you obtained earlier, and install the OSC Beta released in February. See the Outlook team blog for detailed instructions. Then download MySpace for Outlook at http://www.myspace.com/msoutlook.
Click-to-Run is a software delivery and updating mechanism available to Microsoft Office 2010. Products delivered via Click-to-Run execute in a virtual application environment on the local operating system. This means that they have private copies of their files and settings, and that any changes they make are captured in the virtual environment. Click-To-Run is fast - users can start running an application within a short time without waiting for the entire product to finish installing. Updates are carried out automatically in the background, without requiring a user to first remove an installation or install patches. Click-To-Run products are virtualized and do not conflict with other installed software.
However, because a product delivered by Click-To-Run has private copies of all its files and registration, an add-in developer cannot determine the product's existence the same way as a product that has been installed on a client computer’s hard drive. In particular, in previous scenarios where an add-in had to verify if Outlook had been installed on a client computer, starting with Microsoft Outlook 2010, the add-in should verify if Outlook has been installed, and if Outlook has been delivered as a Click-To-Run product.
Note that only 32-bit Office 2010 is supported in the Click-to-Run virtual application environment, even if the client computer runs a 64-bit operating system.
To check whether Outlook was delivered by Click-To-Run on a client computer:
For more information on delivering Office 2010 by Click-to-Run, see the Office Product development group's blog: Click-to-Run: Delivering Office in the 21st Century.