A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

You can check out their website for more details, screenshots and download links.

Post from: EveryJoe

Nvu, the web authoring tool alternative

All that aside though, if you’re interested in learning more about the functionality of Office, but don’t have time to sit and read, this may just be the thing for you.

There are lots of topics now available, check the list out at the The IW Center, A community portal for information workers….

Jensen Harris is to be thanked for this heads up as well.

I’m downloading and listening to one on Windows Mobile 5.0 right now, I’ll let you know what I think of it and some others specifically related to Office 2007 soon.

Post from: EveryJoe

Office 2007 Prodcasts

David Gainer has a great post that introduces all the details and specifics of SmartArt and it’s goals. I’m just not sure how worked up I get about it. I personally abhor Clip Art, unless you take it and greatly modify and combine it with other items in a graphics program so it doesn’t look so much like clip art anymore.

I’ve used some of the diagram stuff in Word and PowerPoint, but overall I’d say all of those items are some of the most rarely used features for me when using Office applications. At this point, I’m guessing SmartArt will fall in that group as well.

If I had to come up with a reason, it’s because I don’t want my document looking exactly like someone else’s document. Which is one of the reasons (not the main) I was never interested in Frontpage themes. You can spot them from a mile away!

I’d love to hear what you all think about these features. Do you use them? Do you think it’s a great new addition to the feature set? Let us know in the comments.

Post from: EveryJoe

SmartArt

The full features of the subscription option I chose are:

• A company domain name
• A hosted Web site with 30MB of storage
• Five free e-mail accounts with 2GB of storage each
• Basic Web analysis tools

My biggest beef so far is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to access the site with a 3rd party web development tool like Dreamweaver. This makes a little bit of sense though as then Microsoft would just be giving away a free domain name and hosting, and not really promoting their soups-to-nuts service. It almost seems to be replacing the basic functionality of Frontpage and combining it with the functionality of Sharepoint services.
The other item is that the free package doesn’t offer much more features than your standard online webpage authoring site. I will say that a nice feature is the integrated e-mail though. This alone makes it very easy for a company to have easy to use e-mail functionality that is web-based and accessible from any internet connection. It amazes me the number of small businesses that have @aol.com or @whatever.com e-mail on their business cards. Even if you don’t want a full-blown website, the cost of domain name and e-mail functionality is so cheap, and worth the impression it provides over an @aol.com or other ISP provided e-mail address.

If anyone would like to try out the Office Live beta, just leave a comment. I’ve got one product key available to someone if they want to use it. Thanks to Jesse.

UPDATE–The free product key has been given away! Thanks everyone!

Post from: EveryJoe

Office Live Experience

The SharePoint Portal Server is an example of a large collaborative web application that is built on top of WSS, and we recently shipped a set of 30 simple application templates for collaborating on WSS for things like project tracking, equipment and room reservations, or managing marketing campaigns.

Being able to easily build some web-applications with FrontPage12 and SharePoint may be something I need to really invest some time in. For at least one of my clients, the room reservations feature would be a great asset.

I’m a big Macromedia Dreamweaver user right now, but with their buy-out by Adobe, I’m wondering what the future holds for them. Maybe it’s time to start playing around with FrontPage again! Gotta get my beta software installed on my machine!

Post from: EveryJoe

FrontPage 12 w/ SharePoint

There was one paragraph that just got me to thinking about something, web standards.

Another trend we’ve seen is that the desire to build web sites around web standards, specifically the use of XHTML and CSS has increased dramatically in the last few years (refer to the IE team’s blog for discussion about IE’s improving support for standards). There are several reasons driving this, but certainly the desire to support a range of browsers and platforms, a variety of devices, and accessibility requirements (section 508 and WCAG) are all contributing. There is also a certain of amount of this change due to maturity in the technology (browsers and standards) and design practices used by web professionals – the XHTML/CSS approach is just a better way to build sites compared to HTML/tables/spacer gif layout – easier to maintain, better performing, more accessible.

The specific line that caught my attention was “…for discussion about IE’s improving support for standards).”

I’m probably oversimplifying this, but why do we need to improve support for web standards. The W3C has already established standards that are widely accepted as “standards”. Why wouldn’t every browser, whether it be Firefox, IE7, Opera, Safari, etc., completely support these already defined standards?

Is it a question of backwards compatibility? What if you had a feature within each browser to display the site using the rendering engine of a previous version? I’m sure that would probably significantly bulk up the code, but wouldn’t it be worth it? If you visited a site in IE7 that didn’t render correctly, you could just go to your “View” menu and choose an earlier version to display the site in. Windows XP kind of has this function by being able to run a program in an earlier version of Windows.

Are the problems because of all the sites that have been developed that don’t follow the standards? Would there be so many broken sites that the public backlash is worse than a browser that doesn’t support the standards. Wouldn’t that force everyone (myself included) to design and develop sites that better adhere to the standards already established?

Now it’s your turn…Ready, Aim, Fire those comments back at me!

Source: A higher bar by Rob Mauceri’s FrontPage Blog

Post from: EveryJoe

Web Standards