Because of the recent lawsuit threats from Adobe, Microsoft has announced that it would remove support for saving files in PDF from Office 2007, as well as dropping its own rival format XPS from the productivity suite and Windows Vista. This news comes from betanews.com and is kinda strange because Adobe claims PDF to be an open format. It is even already integrated into OpenOffice and Mac OS X! Although MS is not really a good example for open standards, I think this is a very strange action from Adobe, who apparently sees Office 2007 as a real threat. Program …read more

MA has released the Windows Vista Product Guide, it provides a comprehensive overview of the innovative features and functions that make Microsoft® Windows Vista™ the next-generation Windows client operating system and successor to Windows XP… This guide also provides information the benefits Windows Vista offers diverse users as well as information about the different editions (SKUs) available. It’s about 300 pages, and contains a lot of really great information about Windows Vista.
Download the Windows Vista Product Guide from here (43.3MB), rename the file to .xps afterwards (from .zip).
The document can be viewed with the XPS viewer, on XP …read more

Windows Vista will incorporate a reader for XPS, an XML Paper Specification, codenamed “Metro”, Microsoft’s proprietary rival to Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format).
Office 12 applications, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Visio, OneNote, and InfoPath, will include a “Save As XPS” option, said Jeff Bell, a program manager on the Office Development Team.
“This Office feature provides a one-way export from Office client applications to an application- and platform-independent, paginated format. To view, and print, an XPS document, users will need a viewer utility, which Microsoft itself will produce for Windows Vista and an unknown number of earlier editions of the Windows …read more