PDFs Native to The New Office

PDFs Native to The New Office: "The next version of Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) popular Office suite is going to include native support for PDF (define) documents, according to one of the suite's program managers over the weekend.

Brian Jones, a program manager for Office, wrote in his blog Sunday about the inclusion of the popular archival and presentation format in Office 12, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio and InfoPath.

'We've really heard the feedback that sharing documents across multiple platforms and long term archiving are really important,' Jones wrote in his blog.

While the blog doesn't explain exactly what features will be available with the upcoming PDF support, it's almost certain to include the 'Save as...' option to save files created in Office as a PDF document.

It's also uncertain how this upcoming support will affect Microsoft's own work on a persistent document file format similar to PDF, code named Metro.

Microsoft officials were unavailable for comment at press time.

PDF is a popular archival and presentation document format because of its neutrality. Documents saved as a PDF file look the same regardless of operating system or application when viewed through a PDF reader, keeping all formatting as the author originally intended.

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at research firm ZapThink, said the support is a realization by Microsoft that PDF is an important part of the workflow process for many organizations. Many use Office for their content and collaboration work and go to PDF to archive their work in a format everyone can use, he said.

Microsoft's decision to include PDF natively is also going to put the pinch on Adobe (Quote, Chart), the document format's creator, Schmelzer said.

Adobe announced it was acquiring Flash platform creator Macromedia (Quote, Chart) for $3.4 billion in April, setting the stage for a direct confrontation with Microsoft's own graphics software initiatives.

"I think [Microsoft] sees the Adobe/Macromedia combination as a formidable challenger in the market, especially in the Office side of things, and by embedding PDF, they're cutting off one form of revenue that Adobe gets, which is obviously from Acrobat," he said.

Adobe officials were not available for comment at press time.

To a much lesser extent, Microsoft's native support for PDF is also a hedge against its recent setback with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' new IT requirements.

Starting Jan. 1, 2007, government employees in the commonwealth will only be able to use applications that save files by default in the OpenDocuments format, a file format Microsoft has said it won't support.

PDF documents, however, are an appropriate archival format, according to the latest version of the commonwealth's Enterprise Technical Reference Model.

Jones indirectly reiterated the company's stance refusal to support OpenDocuments. Microsoft officials have said their decision to stick with Open XML as its file format of choice in the future was a matter of maintaining backward compatibility.

In this case, Jones' blog states its a matter of customer feedback. Where Microsoft officials have seen more than 30,000 searches every week for PDF support on its OfficeOnline Web site, the requests are not nearly as much for other file formats.

"I've heard some folks comment asking the question: 'Why is Microsoft going to so much effort to not support the format I'm interested in?' " he noted in his blog. "This is to be expected, because every customer has unique views that we want to respect; but it's work and cost to build and support a format ... work and resources that go on for a long time.""

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