Blogs

My initial vision for this site was to be a place where we could discuss the technology and office productivity markets. However, I find that I am doing a lot more customer support than I had anticipated. I am going to try and get back to more of an industry perspective for a while so please excuse any latency in post responses that you may experience. But, there is so much going on (not just in technology...

Last week we quietly announced a newly designed iFilter . An iFilter allows search technologies (think Windows or Google Desktop search) to understand documents you produce so that they can index them. So, keywords (frequently occurring words like, for example, "engine" or "vapor lock" in your documents) and metadata (like author name) can be used to search for documents. I was surprised by the lack...

I still am looking for the future of o2.0. I believe in the future, but still have concerns over the path we suppose will happen. We talk about all of the great web tools that are developing. But, the biggest customer stories are all around the adoption of interaction hubs - wikis, self service, etc. I think that these are noble and worthy projects, but it feels like so much more should be happening...

I am not going to wear flowers in my hair. But, there are some interesting parrallels between this song and what is going on at Office 2.0 in San Francisco next week (for Gen Y's - the reference in the title is to a Mama and Papa's written piece in 1967 sung by Scott McKenzie - youtube it because you will probably recognize it). This song became the anthem for the hippie generation and has been used...

One of the big challenges in product launches is communicating the value of what we are releasing. Sometimes we get too flowery I think. So let me take a non-marketing approach and try to capture the value in a sentence or two. "WordPerfect Office was always a good suite. With X4 we made the office suite better and on top of that added a bunch of other tools that people are currently paying hundreds...

I was struck recently by the divides in software from two examples close to me. On the one hand I received an invite to the Office 2.0 conference in San Fran. I have attended the past few years (we sponsored last year) and the conference is all about taking Productivity to the web. Wikis, web apps, etc. - very futuristic stuff. On the other hand, I was asked by my uncle-in-law this week to help him...

Let me add to Tom's comments with some additional information on the business model introduced with this release. While I am very pleased with all the new user driven features in today's beta, I am very excited by our new Word Processing Module for WordPerfect Lightning, which, for $49, will allow Microsoft Office users use WordPerfect Lightning in much the same way as users of WordPerfect Office X3...