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:

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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

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve released v2.1.0 of docx4j.  Get it from our downloads page.

docx4j is an open source Java library for manipulating OpenXML WordprocessingML documents, released under the Apache software licence. docx is the default file format in Word 2007 in Microsoft Office 2007, and part of an ISO standard (more or less unchanged).

v2.1.0 is mainly a maintenance release.

Attention has been paid to ease of use of hyperlinks, images, and headers/footers.

The HTML output has been redone to use the XSLT from the OpenXMLViewer project; it can be configured to save images as files, and automatic list numbers are handled.

This release should also work under Java 1.5, now that I have re-built fop-fonts.  I had contributed TTC (true type collection) handling code to FOP, and it was accepted, so fop-fonts now uses that (ie the patch which makes fop-fonts is that much smaller).

Well, the announcement happened, and its vaporware.

Microsoft’s anouncement is that you will be able to “create, edit and collaborate” on Office documents using your web browser (IE, Firefox, or Safari), but not until Office 14.

Office 14 is expected late 2009 or 2010. So if you wait for Microsoft to deliver Office 14 - and your IT department to roll it out - before you start collaborating in Word, count on waiting until 2011. They didn’t tell you you can get started now, using Plutext and Word 2007

That’s the only real surprise.

There were no surprises re:

• Technology - Office Web uses Silverlight (or AJAX)
• Delivery model - you need Sharepoint or Office Live Workspace to host the service
• Pricing - it is available as a hosted subscription service or through existing volume licensing agreements

It is interesting to see that their collaboration stuff seems to work on a synch-every-few-seconds model (like Google Docs) in OneNote, but in Word the user has to explicitly synch.  I’ll blog in another post why this is the correct design decision.

What happens if you go offline? This probably depends on underlying support for offline in Silverlight.

It’s Monday morning on October 27th as I write here in Australia.

Steve Balmer gave hints in 2 separate reports at the beginning of the month that they’ll be announcing their in-Office collaboration stuff this week.

The first report was in www.cio.co.uk

Ballmer:So we are embracing Software + Services, Cloud Computing as hard as anybody. By the time we finish our Professional Developers Conference this month, I think you’ll have to say that there is nobody out there with as wide a range of Cloud Computing services as Microsoft, including, dare I say it, Google …

CIO: Steve, I guess the $64,000 question from a lot of people’s point of view is, is there going to be an Office for the Web, something that really competes head on with Google Docs, Google Apps?

Ballmer: .. I think what people want is something as rich as Microsoft Office, something that you can ‘click and run’, if you are not at your own desk. Something that is compatible, document-wise with Microsoft Office and something that offers the kind of joint editing capabilities that is nice in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Will Microsoft Office offer that? Yes! Standby for details in the next month.

CIO: So, in the backend of Microsoft R&D, are there people beavering away at versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc, that are purely web based? Or, is it always going to be this hybrid?

Ballmer: What does it mean to be purely Web based? Do we want them to be as only as powerful as ‘runs in a browser’? No. We want software that is more powerful than runs in a browser. Does that mean we will not have some neat stuff that does run in the browser? No.

We think you’ll actually want the full power of Word, Excel and PowerPoint - and you’ll want to be able to get that simply. But, if you just happen to be in an Internet cafe kiosk and you want to do some light editing, perhaps we need to have a way to support you in that as well, inside the browser. ..

In another, in response to a question about Office Live, he said:

“Office Live has a few things left it needs to do. Number one, and probably most important, is to make sure that people using Office have greater ability to collaborate with one another. We have some of that today with [Office Live] Workspaces, as well as that we’ve got SharePoint; we can do more and some of those things will be better than the other alternatives.

Number two, is when we do Office Live, it has to be true to Office; you’ll need to be able to have full Office documents and programs and share them.

Number three, we have to make it so that - most people use Office most of the time from a single machine. But if you’re away from your desk, at a cafe, a kiosk or your school library, and you don’t have Office, you’ll want to be able to do something quickly; we have to make sure you can get it easily, stream it down, put it in a browser, something like that there… details coming in a few weeks.

I’m not going to write here what I think they are likely to announce.  More sensible to wait a little longer.  It will be interesting though to see what is available immediately, and how much is just vaporware.

PlutextWalkthrough (PDF) is a step by step guide to collaborating on a Word document using Plutext.

It contains more or less the same information as my last blog post, but in a format which allows you to avoid the videos.

Plutext enables everyone on your team to make changes in Word, at the same time (ie it lets you collaborate just as you can in Google Docs, but in your familiar Word environment, with formatting, change tracking etc).

Here is a short screencast of the gist of it:

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If you are working on legal documents, government reports, or other formal deliverables you’ll probably want to make the process more structured.  Here is an excerpt from an old screencast showing our features for lawyers and others requiring accountability:

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If you want to give it a try, the easiest way to try it out is to download our Word 2007 add-in, then fire up Word and login to the “public” group with these “tester” settings (on Word’s review ribbon, click our “File” button, then Settings), using password “tester”:

(click to enlarge)

then open an existing document (from the Plutext “File” button on the Review ribbon).

You can get a colleague to work with you on a document. Or you can simulate collaboration simply by opening the document twice on your PC (which is what I’ve done in the screencasts above).

Right now, you need Word 2007.  Next week, we’ll release an updated build of our cross-platform client which you can try.  And Word 2003 support is on its way…

This video shows you how to add your own document to the public space (or your private space):

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But be careful, anyone else can see the documents if you just use the “public” group.

If you’d like a little privacy, you can setup a space of your own on our test server.

We’d love to know what you think, either in the comments, or our forums, or privately (jason@plutext.org).

Please report problems with the Word add-in here, and server problems here.  Thanks.

Naturally, there are a few limitations in this alpha, including:

• the Audit function doesn’t like bookmarks
• adding an image won’t work

Finally, if you want to uninstall the Word add-in, you can do this from Window’s add/remove programs in the usual way.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve released v2.0 of docx4j.

docx4j is an open source Java library for manipulating OpenXML WordprocessingML documents, released under the Apache software licence. docx is the default file format in Word 2007 in Microsoft Office 2007.

docx4j supports the following:

• Open existing docx (from filesystem, SMB/CIFS, WebDAV using VFS)
• Create new docx (just one line of code)
• Programmatically manipulate the docx document (of course), including tables, images
• Import a binary doc (proof of concept)
• Import/export Word 2007’s xmlPackage (pkg) format
• Save docx to filesystem as a docx (ie zipped), or to JCR (unzipped)
• Apply transforms, including common filters
• Export as HTML or PDF
• Diff/compare paragraphs or sdt (content controls), outputting OpenXML with changes marked up
• Font support (font substitution, and use of any fonts embedded in the document)
• Use the power of JAXB to do other cool stuff

Get it from here.

What is it about this release that warrants being labeled v2.0?

The new features include image support, diff, and xmlPackage.  A factor is the version numbering convention Microsoft has chosen for their Open XML SDK: its v2.0 which will first contain an API for WordprocessingML.

So think of a “level 1″ API as one which handles the Open Packaging conventions (basically, the unzipping step), but leaves you to handle the document (part) content using low level XML (DOM, SAX, etc).

A “level 2″ API is one which gives you a higher level API to manipulate the part content.  At the very least, this would include objects to represent paragraphs, tables, styles etc.  But you’d also expect it to be easy, for example, to add a paragraph using a specified style (maybe this is “level 3″?  In any case, docx4j can do it)

Given that docx4j brought a “level 2″ WordML API to the Java world 6 months ago, it is appropriate that it be labelled version 2.0.

Last Thursday I demo’d our Plutext collaboration system to an audience of lawyers and legal technologists and some old friends at the Victorian Society for Computers & the Law’s Legal Technology Conference 2008.

The accompanying presentation is here (pdf).

Our approach to collaboration means you will never be told your document is locked or checked out by someone else.

This in itself is a great step forward for many long-suffering users of traditional document management systems.

I’m collecting screenshots of locked / checked-out messages from different document management systems.  So next time this happens to you, please email it to me.  I’m jason, that’s at plutext.org.  Thanks.

Jo and I are pleased to have just uploaded a new version of docx4all for you to try.

We’ve added quite a few features since I last blogged about docx4all (21 Feb).

New features include:

• font handling
• editable source view
• VFS file chooser (including WebDAV)
• incoming document filter

The VFS file chooser allows docx4all to open documents not just from the local file system, but also from a WebDAV server (such as Alfresco), and potentially, CIFS etc.  To do this, docx4all uses VFSJFileChooser, and webdavclient4j (a project we’ve started to address the gap left when Apache retired Slide, including its WebDAV client).

The incoming document filter is used to convert certain features of WordprocessingML which docx4all can’t yet handle, into something it can.   Examples include proofErr, hyperlink, and lastRenderedPageBreak.  This behaviour relies on a feature of docx4j, which makes it easy to apply a transform to a docx package (by converting it to pkg:package format).

Docx4all can’t yet render tables (let alone edit them), but we’re working on changing that.

We’ve been tweaking the schemas - especially wml.xsd - to make the Java classes generated by JAXB’s xjc more user-friendly.

I’m satisfied that this is permitted by ECMA, so I’ve put the modified schemas into subversion .

For anyone interested in the reasoning, the Ecma website says:

“Ecma Standards and Technical Reports are made available to all interested persons or organizations, free of charge and copyright, in printed form and, as files in Acrobat (R) PDF format.”

For this to apply, it needs to be an “Ecma Standards or Technical Report”.

That page says “A Standard or a Technical Report is a formal document prepared by an Ecma Technical Committee and approved by the Ecma General Assembly.”

Office Open XML was so approved.

So the only possible glitch would be words to the effect that the schema aren’t part of the official standard.

I’ve checked the language in parts 2 and 4 (of the Ecma TC45 Final Draft) which says “This Office Open XML specification includes a family of schemas … The normative definition of these schemas reside in an accompanying file named … which is distributed in electronic form only.”

Which makes it clear the schemas are part of the Standard

So the ECMA standard’s XSD are “free of copyright” - an explicit waiver of copyright. So no problemo in creating derivative works.