Darryl Burling @ Work : Office

Auckland SharePoint user group tomorrow night

dburling — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:18:47 GMT

Also - just a reminder for those of you in Auckland who are interested in Sharepoint - the first ever Auckland Sharepoint user group kicks off tomorrow night - October 10.

You'll want to be at Microsoft at 4pm. Details follow:

Microsoft,
Level 5 22 Viaduct Harbour
Auckland

Head around the corner to the MPC room (the big room around the back). Your hosts are Richard A'Court and Alan Marshall.

Open XML Sample coming your way

dburling — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 03:09:55 GMT

Last year I was speaking on the Open XML file formats in Office 2007. Initially I wasn't thrilled to be speaking on the subject, however the more you dig into this area, the more compelling this file format is. The developer story around Open XML is particularly interesting and quite compelling.

Part of .Net 3.0 included the System.IO.Packaging class that allows you to quickly and easily read and write Open XML files using fairly standard code. This led Nigel and I to toss around building a simple converter application to help convert files from the old version to the new version. Nigel found the time one evening to build the app - you can download the application from his blog here. Converting documents to the new format could save you more than 60% of your existing disk space allocated to Office documents.

There have also been good support from third parties who are including OpenXML formats in their products including Corel WordPerfect suite, KOffice, Gnumeric (open source spreadsheet for Linux), Apples TextEdit as well as a number of others who have announced support for it (check out Brian's timeline here for more details). Even the iPhone supports OpenXML!

My favorite Open XML based application is MindJet's MindManager which now supports using OpenXML to support its own data structures

One of the other very cool things about the Open XML file format is that the container is simply a zip container. You can just rename the docx (or xlsx, pptx, etc) file to .zip and open it up to take a look at the contents. This is a great feature and makes it really easy to open the files up regardless of the platform or development environment you are using.

At Microsoft we think that the new Office file formats are pretty cool and will allow developers to build some funky new products that take advantage of the Open XML file format allowing them to do things like generate documents on a server without having to install Office on the server, move documents between formats and extract document information programmatically.

A local example is Xero - Rod Drury has posted about the reports that Xero has been able to enable using OpenXML - including the actual formulas rather than just raw data - very cool.

Get started - IIS Log analyzer sample

To help you get into this we've been working with Intergen to build out a sample application to allow you to take your IIS Logs and pull them into excel, do some analysis and build some reports using System.IO.Packaging.

Chris has just announced that he's looking for testers - so if you are interested in using the app or just pulling it apart - Chris has all the details.

If you are working with Open XML as a developer today, we'd love to hear from you! You can email me or leave a comment below.

Sharepoint User Group - Wellington

dburling — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:28:01 GMT

Chandima has posted the details of the Sharepoint user group that is on in Wellington on Wednesday night.

The Sharepoint user group is one of - if not the biggest Microsoft oriented user group in New Zealand that I'm aware of. If you are interested in a great networking and educational event around MOSS and WSS, this group is a regular and well run group that is worth checking out.

Details of Wednesday nights meeting is available on Chandimas blog here.

Congratulations new MVPs

dburling — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 03:15:49 GMT

In New Zealand we have two brand new MVPs as of last weekend!

Mark Orange (Intergen) and Chandima Kulathilake (Provoke) have been busy in the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server space for over a year now.

Between the two of them they started the Wellington Sharepoint User Group and have run quite a few User Group sessions as well as speaking at various other events around MOSS. You can pick up notes from the last MOSS User Group from Michael Sampson's blog (who seems to blog every event he goes to - great work)!

The Wellington MOSS group is now topping 40 attendees which makes it one of the two biggest user groups in Wellingon to my knowledge.

Thanks for all the hard work you've put in over the year and congratulations once again guys!

Sad to see others leaving...

Technorati tags: MVP, Sharepoint, MOSS, New Zealand