Is the Office 2003 File Format Going to Change ???

Note: This article is based on analysis inference and nothing concrete from Microsoft.  Still it makes a lot of sense.

News.com has a very, very interesting article on Microsoft expanding their rights management tool, RMS.  And what it makes me think is that we could well see the file format for Microsoft Office 2003, the next version of Office, change dramatically.  What they are doing is allowing a document to have an access control list (ACL) associated with it so that only users identified in that ACL will be allowed to read the document.  Specifically when I read this:

"What we've done here is put persistent protection in the document itself," Nash said. "Even if the file is no longer part of the file system or the infrastructure of the company, the protection is still there as part of the file."

What I have to think is that the underlying file format for an office document is going to change because of this.  How else will this new feature be supported?  And this will be both a financial godsend for Microsoft and an absolute disaster for their customers.  I've lived through this before and here's what happens.

1. Microsoft releases new version of Office with new file format.  We saw this in Office 97 which had a different Microsoft Word format than Office 95.
   
2. Every new computer comes bundled with the new version of Office and manufacturers (like Dell) that bundle Office don't even offer the old version of Office.
   
3. Joe Worker or worse Job Boss gets his new computer from IT and creates a new document.  He emails it out to 10 people who need it.  Unknowingly he uses a feature which requires the new file format.
   
4. The people that get it can't read it and go scream at IT.  IT screams at its management.  And the company ends up being dragged unwillingly to Office 2003, updating hundreds if not thousands of desktops in the process.

Think that's an imaginary scenario?  Nope.  I was at a software company from 1996 to 1999 and that exact scenario played itself out and cost us tens of thousands in license fees.  And for what?  The bulk of us didn't use 95% of the features in Office anyway.

Oh and this statement also pretty much confirms this:

The same restriction in one sense applies to other Windows users. "If you shared the document with another Windows user and that Windows user hadn't installed (RMS), that other Windows user couldn't open the document as well," Nash said.

Now this statement could be interpreted that RMS is an add-on and will work with any version of Office.  Still I've been a Windows programmer and I've read file format documentation for most of the Office document types and I don't think the ability to do this exists within a current .DOC / .XLS / .PPT / etc file. 

Oh and don't think that you'll be able to work on a laptop offline -- at least initially:

But one important protection mechanism could cause headaches for companies that don't implement RMS carefully. A user's computer must be able to access the Windows Server 2003 running RMS on first opening a document to authenticate the rights and decrypt the document. Otherwise, the document cannot be opened. In the future, Microsoft plans to offer an "offline" rights authentication mechanism, but not with this version of RMS.

Sigh.  Can you imagine the amount of technical support work that this is going to cause?  And can you hear the screams when a manager is offline planning on reviewing a document that was emailed to him just before a trip?  Or when the sales staff gets a new PowerPoint just before leaving for a demo?  And you can argue that these features have to be intentionally turned on and I'd agree with that.  But people make mistakes and you can guarantee that people will use this incorrectly with the end result being losting access to data when you really need it.

My guess?  You'll see a new file format for Office 2003 and that will force upgrades and revenue dramatically.  Good for Microsoft and bad for users.

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The Unbearable Perverseness of Kitties

Ah, yes.  Nothing like spoofing the title of a movie that you've never even seen in full.  Anyway I was at the grocery store Saturday night* picking up cat litter when I actually found digital cat toys!  That's right -- its a cat toy with a microchip.  They call it a "Play-n-Squeak" and it is described as a "Microchip Sound Toy with Catnip".  They could also just say "A Mouse that Squeaks".  So what do you think?  Yes -- I bought it and brought it home only to encounter the Unbearable Perverseness of Kitties. 

As any cat owner knows, cats have a true disdain for the toys we buy them.  And, while they did enjoy this one, they also found true joy in a cast off milk top that I had thrown on the floor for them a week earlier.  I have two cats and while one enjoyed the Play-n-Squeak a lot, the other seemed acutely disturbed by it.

*Which in itself, that I was at a grocery store Saturday night, says either that I'm a devoted father to my cats or that my life is, shall we say ... lacking ? ;-)

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Looking for Library Weblogs?

I mentioned the Redwood City Liblog recently and here's their new location.  [_Go_]

 

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Who Reads What?

Imagine if you could walk around the world unobserved and snoop into what people are reading and caring about enough to talk about.  Now you can -- BlogStreet's new Top Books feature extracts from the blogs it indexes links to books on Amazon.  So by going to just one page you can see which books are influencing what people write about.  Now this is very, very cool because you have to care about something a lot to bother actually writing about it.  And if you look at the list of books being covered, there isn't a lot of "fluff" here -- it is serious books like Fast Food Nation (which I talked about back in July), Smart Mobs, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, The Tipping Point and more.  Most of it is non-fiction although there is a smattering of fiction like Lovely Bones and Snow Crash.

Oh and my thermal challenge seems to be fixed.  I've had heat for two days in a row without coldness.  Being warm?  Recommended.

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