This is my last post on my Microsoft blog. I've had a great 4.5 years here at Microsoft. Met some amazing people, and played with some cool technology. Now I'm moving on to do my own thing.
I'll be blogging about Office 2.0, Web 2.0, and all kinds of technology in general over at my personal blog - http://doncampbell.net/blog. And my new feed is here.
So please come on over, check it out, and stay in touch!
-Don
I know this isn't related to the tech industry, but a few weeks ago I visited my sister in Maui for her graduation. This was my first time to Maui, and it was such a fantastic trip I had to write up a little travelogue about it.
My sister lives there and gave me a tour that I don't think many visitors get. If you are thinking of going to Maui sometime take a look over at my personal blog and you might find some new ideas of things to do there!
The entire Office Developer Portal on MSDN has been redesigned, including the Office Live section. The result is a nice clean look, with less navigation required to get were you're going.
The excellent MSDN team is constantly coming up with improvements to the content and the site.
Here is a great post by Mike Gannotti - how to integrate Popfly mashups with SharePoint. He also published a screen cast. What I think is compelling about this - he was able to create a mashup with Popfly that can be published to any web page, SharePoint site, or as a Gadget on your Vista desktop. Easily done with no code.
Microsoft disclosed Popfly today, as the "fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications." We will be showing it off at Maker Faire this weekend. Mary Jo Foley and TechCrunch have some nice coverage of Popfly as well.
Popfly - which is based on Silverlight - consists of two parts:
1) Popfly Creator - a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups.
2) Popfly Space - an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and remix creations from other Popfly users.
Here's an interesting piece of behind the scenes info - the Web page creator is based on the Office Live code for Site Designer and Page Editor. Not many people know about them yet, but these tools make it easy for non-technical folks to easily create Web pages, style and theme them for their public facing web site. It's exciting to see that technology being used now in the Web 2.0 mashup context in Popfly!
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| Popfly Web Page Creator screens | Office Live Site Designer and Page Editor |
Do you know who employs 98% of the entire workforce worldwide? Do you know which market has 3 million businesses in the US alone which drives $14 Billion? Did you also know that only 49% of these businesses had a web site in 2005, even though two-thirds of them in the US have high-speed Internet connectivity? If you guessed the small business market, you’re right!
Microsoft Office Live provides Internet-based services for small businesses who lack the technology expertise, budget, or time to create a Web site and other online business tools. For developers who specialize in Web design, business process consulting, or creating industry-specific solutions, Microsoft Office Live offers an opportunity to help small businesses develop a Web presence, attract new customers, and manage their organization more effectively.
In our continued effort to expand the opportunities for our developer community, I’m happy to announce the release of the Microsoft Office Live Innovate On. This site provides partners with a full range of technical and business resources to develop Office Live solutions which can be accessed by the myriad of small-business customers of the Microsoft Office Live Marketplace. Over the coming weeks we will continue to add more training content and materials that show how to develop for Office Live, including topics like:
- Incorporating existing client-side or hosted applications into the Microsoft Office Live environment
- Leverage your existing skills in Windows SharePoint Services & Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007
- Using Industry Standards like XML, HTML, and Web design tools
I hope you'll take a look!
Learn about the opportunity that Office Live represents for developers at one of our upcoming Office Live reviews.
- Do you build software solutions and/or provide services to small business?
- Do you want to create an additional stream of income with a low technical barrier of entry?
- Are you interested in knowing how to take advantage of the shifting software plus services paradigm?
- Then the Office Live Review for Micro ISVs is the event you should attend!
In June we are conducting two Office Live Review events:
· Tuesday, June 5th at the Microsoft Technical Center in Boston, Mass.
· Monday, June 11th at the Microsoft Technical Center in Silicon Valley, CA.
These one-day workshop focus on helping custom solution developers, web partners, and ISVs understand Microsoft’s Office Live strategy, how to customize and extend the Microsoft Office Live environment, and identify with Microsoft Office Live offerings – Office Live Basic, Office Live Collaboration, and Office Live Essentials, and what types of scenarios each of these apply to.
Update: As Michael Lehman posted in his blog, attendees will receive a free copy of Office 2007 Professional and Windows Vista Business! The first 20 people to create an Office Live solution and post it to the Office Live Marketplace will also receive a Zune!
Update #2: Use registration code: GENATT when you register for the events.
Update #3: The Windows Vista we are giving away to attendees is the Vista Business rather than Ultimate.
Agenda:
| Start | Stop | Description |
| 08:30 | 09:00 | Arrival and registration |
| 09:00 | 09:15 | Welcome and logistics |
| 09:15 | 10:00 | Understanding the Office Live Architecture |
| 10:00 | 11:00 | Understanding the Office Live Data and Storage Architecture |
| 11:00 | 12:00 | Using Workflows to Define Business Rules in Office Live Apps |
| 12:00 | 13:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00 | 14:00 | Programming with the Office Live Web Service API |
| 14:00 | 15:00 | Integrating with Office Live Authentication using Windows Live ID |
| 15:00 | 15:15 | Break |
| 15:15 | 16:15 | Build Office Live Integration using VS with Project GlidePath |
| 16:15 | 17:15 | Creating Mash-Ups in Office Live |
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My colleague Rohit Puri and I will be leading these events, and I hope to see you there!
On Wednesday May 9 at 4:00 my colleague Ben Riga and I will be doing a keynote presentation to the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce called Microsoft for Small Business: Ready to Grow When You Are.
We will demo Windows Vista, the new Office 2007 user interface, and Office Live. No PowerPoints here, only demos.
Mountain View is the first place my wife and I landed when we moved to the Bay Area; we lived there for 18 months and it is a nice little town, with a lot of Silicon Valley startup history like Netscape, Yahoo, Google, etc. The downtown is beautiful and you can tell the town benefited from all those tax dollars during the .com boom.
Well Mix07 was a blast. My colleague Rohit Puri and I did a session on Office Live for Designers and Developers. We had 70-80 people in the audience and got a lot of questions. We did our Northwind Inn demo, which shows many of the ways you can customize and extend Office Live like:
- Customizing the Public site
- Customizing the Business Applications
- Building Web 2.0 Mash Ups, and
- Writing rich client WPF applications that connect to Office Live via Web services.
Thanks to everyone who came to our session. If you want to see some of the ways that web designers and developers can customize and build on Office Live, check out our session recording is available online - and you can even view it using Silverlight!
Session Abstract:
Come find out how to build and deliver your solutions to Small Businesses via Microsoft Office Live. Learn how Office Live uses a combination of software and services to provide the Web presence, business task automation, and collaboration capabilities that until now, only large enterprises could take advantage of. Find out how building on top of Office Live makes your solution more accessible to small businesses, and more profitable to you!
p.s. The Venetian was nice too!
I'm working on an Office Live end-to-end demonstration called Northwind Inn for the Mix07 Conference with my colleague, Rohit Puri.
During the demo I wanted to add some JavaScript code to pre-fill form field elements as part of the demo. You know, the magic roll-over that pre-fills all the form fields for you so you don't have to do all that typing during your demo :)
I ran into a few little caveats while doing this and want to share them for other Office Live developers.
The demo is about a Bed & Breakfast named Northwind Inn that wants a web presence to help with advertising and reservations. As part of the demo we show how you can use the Data Collection web part to capture information from the public site and populate a Reservations Request list in the private site.
<-- Here is the reservations form (left.)
The Office Live Page Editor has a way to insert HTML on a page, called the HTML Module. So I created some HTML hrefs that would fire the onclick() event and call JavaScript to fill the table with sample data. I tested this out on a separate web page copy to make sure it all worked ok.
Here is the HTML:
The Page Editor gives you window paste the code into that looks like this:
So I pasted the HTML above plus the JavaScript code to handle the onclick() events and populate the form fields.
But it didn't work.
The first thing I discovered is that any time you use the HTML Module in the Page Editor, the code you insert is included in the page in its own iframe. So that means I don't have direct access to the form from the JavaScript function I just pasted in.
So instead of accessing the form elements directly, like this:
I had to make the JavaScript assume it was in an Iframe, and change it access the form ID through window.parent like this:
So now when we go to demo the Reservations Form, we have a few links that will quickly fill in the form for us. (Note, this is not real contact information in the form...)
So remember that when you insert HTML using the Page Editor HTML Module, your code will have to reference the parent IFrame and will need to use the DOM to get object IDs of the values you want to manipulate.
For an overview of how to develop for Office Live, we have some great screencasts on Channel9 from the product team that will get you started in no time!
Our SMBx Application Marketplace panel discussion went well today - despite the fact that it started at 8:30am and everyone was out late at the parties last night. We had probably 150+ people in the session and tons of great questions from the audience, and many people who stayed after to talk. Thanks to everyone who attended!
The big announcement today - I'm sitting in the Eric Schmidt keynote at Web 2.0 where John Battelle is interviewing Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. He just announced that Google is offering an online presentation tool to round out their Google docs and spreadsheets offerings.
John asks him - "is this a competitor to Microsoft?"
Eric replies - "no, it does not have all the features that Office has, and it targets different scenarios. We're really focusing on how people use the web."
John says - "Come on. This is a competitor to Microsoft Office! This provides people with a free alternative to some of the capabilities."
Eric says - "I'm sure Microsoft will respond, they have a set of web based products they can talk about. Web 2.0 is about an architectural transition, and this is a testament of what is possible."
(I'm paraphrasing these quotes here)
Now they are talking about the DoubleClick acquisition...
I'll have more to say about this later today...
I'm looking forward to the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo - I'll be speaking on a panel called SMBx: The Revolution Of The SMB Application Marketplace with my friends from Etelos, Google, and Zoho. The moderator will be Joel Dreyfuss from Red Herring whom I haven't met yet but I'm looking forward to it.
Despite the title, this is actually a very interesting topic - software companies are looking to the emerging application marketplaces to provide solutions to small and medium businesses. Platforms like Office Live, Google Apps, Etelos, Salesforce App Exchange and others are becoming more and more compelling as a way to deliver software and services to hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses.
I've been working with many partners like this who are building for our Office Live Marketplace, and it has been quite an experience. There are lots of challenges and even more possibilities. I hope to share some of those, and learn about others on the panel. Please consider joining us if you are going to be at the show!
There has been a lot of controversy about these formats recently, but the reality is both will be around for a long time. I don't think it is an either - or proposition.
Michael Scherotter at Mindjet Labs just posted about the ability for MindManager to export both OpenXML and ODF type documents. He takes a realistic and balanced view about XML formats in general. MindManager has been using an XML file format since 2003.
I'm a MindManager fan and have been using it for about that long.
When Mindjet built the integration with Word 2007 using the OpenXML file formats, it enabled me to send my mind maps around to many folks who don't have MindManager within Microsoft - as an Open XML Word document. OpenXML allowed them to do a high-fidelity round trip of the mind map which allows editing in both applications. It has also convinced more than a few folks to pick up a copy of MindManager ;)
It's very compelling example of what can be done now that XML file formats are becoming mainstream.
What is Office Live? What does it mean for web-savvy developers? Here is my attempt to bring things together in one of my favorite ways - a mindmap.
Simply put, Office Live is a set of web-based services for small businesses to manage their business online. It consists of a public facing web site for their customers and private web site that employees can use to collaborate and manage the business. The private site comes with business applications for managing contacts, e-mail, calendars, projects, documents, sales and more.
These sites can be customized by developers, and this map contains links to developer resources for customizing both Public and Private Office Live sites, and a map to the Office Live Developer Guide.
Click on the image to view it as a click-able image map, and if you want to view it better and be able to manipulate it, get MindManager or download the free viewer. Then download the Mindmap itself.
Also - I'd like to keep this current, so please tell me what I've left out in the comments below!
