office 2007

Blogging from Word 2007

Submitted by wojo on Thu, 2006-07-13 03:08.

For the past few months I’ve been raising the issue of Microsoft Word integration with developers of my favorite CMS (content management system) Drupal. There were several reasons why this wasn’t happening, or likely to happen soon. A major one is that most developers view Microsoft as the Evil Empire (Google is king with their “don’t be evil” motto), and can’t imagine why anyone would use the vendor locked resources provided by Microsoft, when much better alternatives were available from open source (free) providers. In short, the kind of person that possesses the skills to create such integration between a website and Word is not the kind of person who would use Word in the first place.

My argument is that despite developer’s desire for users to post content through the web interface or through great third-party applications made for web-posting, people will stick to what they know. I can confirm this through experience. I’ve offered several great options to clients including powerful WYSIWYGs and posting by email. Yet, I still end up with users wanting to simply upload a PDF, or cut and paste from Word. This led me to the conclusion that the system that could offer Word integration, even of a very simple nature, would be the one that would move from the development world’s flavor of the month, to the business world’s must have web system. Well, the wait is over, and hopefully the days of running a code clean up script to rid posts of offending Microsoft Word tags are as well.