In the months since August 2009, interested users submitted ideas to makeofficebetter.com

The Microsoft employees who ran that site have shut it down.  Not stopped accepting new submissions, but shut it down entirely.

As a result, all the community submitted data is lost to the community. Or has been taken from us, since it is no longer shared.

People have been asking me why Google bought Docverse.

Surely, Google already has the collaboration smarts?  After all, it was Google Docs which made document collaboration mainstream.  And it is Google Wave which is arguably now taking it to the next level.  Google also employs Neil Fraser, and it recently bought Etherpad.

So what does Docverse give them?  And why pay so much?

Its not about getting the people – Docverse is a small team – although additional engineers with domain knowledge are surely nice to have.

What this is about is taking away the reasons for upgrading to Office 2010, and more particularly, Sharepoint 2010.  Any business which takes Sharepoint 2010 is making a commitment to Microsoft technology for the next decade or so, which effectively shuts Google enterprise products out, and might even lead these customers to use IIS etc for their consumer web sites (which would also be bad for Google).

So Google is doing what it can to give businesses reason to stop and think.

In the 6 months ended 31 December 2009, Microsoft’s Business Products Division had revenue of $9.149 billion, and operating income of $5.867 billion.  Office is responsible for around 90% of that.

What would it be worth to Google, if it could put a 5% dent in those figures? 5% of $9 billion is $450 million. 0.5% is $45 million.

Put one way, if the people responsible for just 0.5% of Office purchase decisions look at Google + Docverse and say “hey, we can stick with the version of Office we’ve got; we don’t need to buy Office 2010 and Sharepoint to do real time collaboration”, then the Docverse acquisition has made sense for Google.

But really, its about the larger ecosystems, not just the Office purchase.  An Office purchase is a commitment to Windows on the client, and possibly Windows on the server.  And it has network effects along the supply chain (people you exchange documents with).  So preventing an Office purchase frees up a lot of other spend.

Now, Google needs to prove that with Google you get:

• the ability to keep using your existing Microsoft Office (Docverse’s contribution)
• real-time collaboration (without Office 2010 or Sharepoint 2010)
• web-based editing if/when you need it

Docverse gives Google slick looking Add-Ins for Word, Powerpoint and Excel.

Time is of the essence.  Office 2010 will be launched for businesses on May 12, and available online/retail in June.

The adds-ins are worth a few months head start.  (So maybe it is about the people after all?)

Now Google needs to integrate Docverse in to Google Apps.  Rip/replace of the existing Docverse back-end (and probably much of their Word Add-In, since it sends the whole document every time you save, not just the diffs – something Plutext has had right since the beginning) will take a while.  However, the rip/replace isn’t necessary for a rudimentary integration into Google Docs.  What is critical is to make Docverse’s server-side differencing work on Google scale and interoperate with the Google Docs webapp.  Same  for presentations and slides.

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly this can be done.

I’m pleased to announce the release of docx4j v2.3.0

docx4j is an open source (Apache license) project which facilitates the manipulation of Microsoft OpenXML docx (and now pptx) documents in Java, using JAXB.

The main features of this release are support for pptx files, and improvements to HTML export (via NG2), and PDF export (via XSL FO).

For further details, please see the release announcement.

Plutext has released a robot for Google Wave which you can use to convert Microsoft Office Word documents into Wave content.

The robot is at docxwave@appspot.com

This is especially useful if your Word document contains tables or images, because copy/pasting from Word leaves them out. Adding the document as an attachment in Wave wouldn’t be the answer either, because that doesn’t bring the power of Wave to bear on the doc at all.

This wave was the announcement and is for support (Wave account required):

By now you’ve probably heard how hitherto largely unknown i4i teamed up with some bottom feeding lowlife and successfully sued  Microsoft for patent infringement to the tune of USD 240 million.

If you read the patent in question, US patent number 5787449, you’ll see that the so-called invention was entirely obvious, consisting only of annotations pointing to positions in a character stream (as distinct from embedded within it).

Microsoft suggested some prior art, but nothing which knocked out the patent.

What i4i chose to call a ‘metacode’ sounds a lot like the markers described in 1986 in Data Structures in the Andrew Text Editor:

A marker is a data structure that refers to a portion of the text of a document; the portion starting at some character and extending for some length.

The people involved in the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines leading up to publication of their proposal 3 in 1994 (which is before the patent was filed) probably discussed and published relevant stuff as well – did anyone ask them? [Edit 18/9/09] Hmmm, Markup Reconsidered (presented in 1992) says:

A word should be said about so-called out-of-line markup, non-embedded structure that conforms to the syntactic requirements of a given markup standard

and references a 1992 document: David Barnard, Lou Burnard, Jean-Pierre Gaspart, Lynne Price, C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, and Nino Varile, “Notes on SGML Solutions to Markup Problems”, TEI MLW18, which I haven’t looked at.  And “Refining our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies” contains a wealth of historical references which probably contain stuff.

[Added 18/9/09] Most interestingly, Ted Nelson states in “Embedded Markup Considered Harmful” that Xanadu has used parallel markup since the 1960’s!  Unfortunately, he didn’t publish much about it (which limits its value as prior art); though Rick points out that Nelson disclosed some stuff in his 1992 book.

So the i4i patent should have been knocked out:

• because it was obvious, and
• because the USPTO and Microsoft should have found prior art.

In any case, the patent system should be reformed, so that, if you must have a patent system at all, and one in which software and algorithms are effectively patentable, such patents last for no more than say 4 years from the priority date.  Their patent would have expired in 1998 (the same year it was granted!).

In this case, what i4i patented has been independently thought of (ie invented) as part of one approach to the related problem of overlapping markup.  Independent invention should also be a defense (although that might not have helped Microsoft in this case)

A further thought: what if patentees were liable every time they described something as new if it could be shown that it wasn’t? That might give them pause for thought.

Here is a screencast which walks you through sharing your own document, and trying our collaboration features:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Of course, you can just play with one of the pre-existing shared documents.

The video width is 1280 pixels, so if you are browsing in a narrow window, you’ll need to expand your browser window to see it properly.  (Everybody has screens that wide these days don’t they, unless they are mobile?)

For completeness:

• here is the download link for our Word Add-In
  
• are you a Mac OSX or Linux user, or don’t have Word 2007?  check out docx4all
• if you can’t see the username/password in the video, please see here. The password is “tester”.
• any test documents you create using that logon will be publicly visible.  If you want your own private space, you can set that up here

We’ve just published a new build of the Word Add-In, which among other things, supports replication between users of images and comments.

For a good while now, with Plutext you’ve been able to be in a Word document at the same time as your co-workers – provided all you were doing was working on tables and paragraphs (editing them, inserting, deleting or moving them around).

With this latest release, you can add images and Word comments, and have them replicate properly between Word 2007 users.

Here is a screencast of this in action:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

If you want to play with this yourself, you can download our Word Add-In and give it a shot!

For username & password, please see here. The password is “tester”.

For detailed instructions, see this PDF, or this earlier screencast.

If you’d like to chat about your own Plutext installation, please contact us using this form.

You can launch docx4all as a desktop application, or as an applet in your web browser (requires Java 6).

If you choose to do the latter, you can (provided you are running then new Java Update 10) drag the applet to your desktop, where it will keep running even if you close the web browser.

See this video:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Is this a gimmick, or is it truly useful?

It is useful if you want to close your browser, but not docx4all.

It can also be thought of as a way to preview before you install (dragging it to the desktop installs the desktop shortcut / Start menu option).

It would be nice if, having dragged the applet outside of the browser, you could resize it (as you can with a normal desktop application) – but you can’t (at least without some extra coding on our part).

So, although its cool, it is not really a major feature.

docx4all has now reached the point where you can collaborate happily with a Word user, both working on the document at the same time.

This screencast shows a docx4all user and a Word user doing that:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

docx4all will work on any platform if you have Java 6 installed – including Windows, OSX, or Linux.

You can try collaborating now, in your web browser by clicking here (warning: ~10 MB).  The download is of course one-time.  Next time, it will start quicker.

That link takes you to the docx4all applet, which does collaboration in your web browser.

You can also run docx4all as a desktop application – the functionality is identical.

The nice thing about the docx4all experience is that with just one-click you can be collaborating. Ok, a couple of clicks – one to start docx4all, and another to do File > Open.

Because all changes are versioned, from the Plutext menu you can see:

• a history of all the changes which have been made to a given content control

• a version of the document showing the most recent change to each paragraph