Skillz esports platform is now publicly traded

 Beginning today Skillz started trading. Skillz is the leading mobile platform for gamers. It combines mobile gaming with sports that enables everyone to share in the sports competition. The mobile gaming market is expected to grow by 2025 to $150 billion according to Skillz site (https://www.skillz.com/skillz-becomes-first-publicly-traded-mobile-esports-platform/)

If you are a game developer (iOS , Android, Cardova, Unity) you may be interested in the following information,

Office Online Server (OOS) is rolled out

Office Web Apps are scaled down versions of  Excel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote,. They are  Browser based.
Office Web Apps was free for consumers that Microsoft rebranded Office Web Apps free for consumers as Office Online apps.

OfficeOnline.png

Recetnly Microsoft rolled out Preview of Office Online Server which supports running Office Web Apps through the Organizations servers on the premises instead of a cloud service  such as Microsoft Azure. This supersedes the presently used Microsoft on premises product called Office Web Apps Server 2013. Now you have a new acronym to deal with, Office Online Server (OOS).
OOS will also work with (SharePoint Server 2016 (also backward compatible with SharePoint Server 2013) and Exchange Server 2016.

According to Microsoft OOS brings with it the following improvements

• Improved co-authoring support
• Significant additions to authoring features
• Heavy investments in performance and stability

You can download the OOS (.ISO) Preview here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2f1c21a0-54d3-44e5-8e35-a29f21bdc647

This preview works with a line of Microsoft products such as Sharepoint Server 2016, Skype for Business and Exchange Server 2016. Of course there is OOS farm to address multiple hosts and scaling out.

While you are checking out OOS Preview you sould also download SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview Management Pack here.

 

OneDrive goes overdrive to provide 15GB free storage

Smart Phone cameras, videos, documents and apps have created an unprecedented appetite for storage more than ever before. Both free and paid storage options have surfaced. Besides storing the stuff the companies like Microsoft and Google have other stuff from which they want to make money. Ideally they want all your stuff in one place and you use the other services to work with your content assets. They all provide syncronization; upload/download features and sharing.

Beginning July 2014 Microsoft increases free storage from 7G to 15GB, an equalizer-move to match Googles 15 GB. The paid storage of Office 365 users can now look forward to 1TB instead of the 20GB, that's a big jump. The paid storage limits of non-Office users is also increased.:
Read the full story here of this post,"Massive increase to OneDrive storage plans: 15 GB free for everyone, 1 TB for Office 365 subscribers"
https://blog.onedrive.com/new-onedrive-storage-plans/

Apps that work with OneDrive:
https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/apps-that-work-with-onedrive/

As of 13 March 2014, storage plans offered by Google are as follows(source: Wikipedia)
Storage
Price
15 GB Free
100 GB         US$ 1.99 per month
1 TB              US$ 9.99 per month
10 TB            US$ 99.99 per month
20 TB            US$ 199.99 per month
30 TB            US$ 299.99 per month
Free storage may come with some restrictions as to image resolution, video size, document type etc.Of course if you are paying you will certainly read the fine details.
 

LibreOffice gets launched to the cloud

LibreOffice Writer is a wizard driven, On-line (you can have a shortcut to the APP on your desktop/phone) word processor and publishing tool similar to other similar word processing products (MS Office etc.).

There were to Office related products on tne cloud, Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs. Now there is a third one. Will it make substantial difference to MSFT it is hard to tell in the long run but probably just one more program on the internet for now.

Key features noted from the web site  are the following:

•    Templates and styles
•    A spelling and grammar checker
•    Word and character count
•    Page-layout methods, including frames, columns, and tables
•    Embedding or linking of graphics, spreadsheets, and other objects
•    Built-in drawing tools
•    Master documents—to group a collection of documents into a single document
•    Change tracking during revisions
•    The ability to import and edit PDF files.
•    Database integration, including a bibliography database
•    Indexing
•    AutoCorrect and AutoComplete

Here are some details of the shortcut.

You need to spend $0.99 to try it out

Converting EXCEL Spread Sheet to XML format using Open XML SDK 2.0

Binary encoded WORD, EXCEL, Power Point presentations can be implemented by multiple applications on different platforms, adding to portability.This decoupling will be of great value to render existing documents into a portable open format.

You can get immediately into the heart of the matter by downloading Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft office from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5124

These are the kinds of stuff you can ho:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/19032efe-80af-4a16-b954-1f5a6d2f2236/open-xml-sdk-v2-faq-part-1#x_Q5

The download will bring in two MSI files:
OpenXMLSDKTool.msi(106.4 MB) and OpenXMLSDKv2.msi(3.8MB)

You need to run these MSI files to work with document conversions.

Now if you have Visual Studio (VS 2012 is used for this post) then you can work with WORD, EXCEL etc after installing the MSIs as shown in the previous link.

For example, I tried to create XML from EXCEL using one of Microsoft's examples quoted here (the comment is from Microsoft,'s how to convert EXCEL to XMl module)
"
/****************************** Module Header ******************************\
* Module Name:  ConvertExcelToXml.cs
* Project:      CSOpenXmlExcelToXml
* Copyright(c)  Microsoft Corporation.
* 
* This class is used to convert excel data to XML format string using Open XMl
* Firstly, we use OpenXML API to get data from Excel to DataTable
* Then we Load the DataTable to Dataset.
* At Last,we call DataSet.GetXml() to get XML format string 
*
* This source is subject to the Microsoft Public License.
* See http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/licenses.aspx.
* All other rights reserved.
* 
* THIS CODE AND INFORMATION IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, 
* EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED 
* WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
\***************************************************************************/
"
When you open this file in Visual Studio,

and run by hitting F5 you can display a user interface where you can insert a EXCEL file reference and generate XML as shown.

I browsed to Simplest.xlsx (Microsoft Excel 2010) and it converted as shown.

The problem with this is the conversion is not correct. The Simplest.xlsx file is the following:

If I add one more row below with values 7,8,9 I get the following.

I suppose the code needs some fix.

Even more weird was how the following EXCEL,

was converted to XML.

May be I need to go into the C# file and find out what is happening.

Look at details of code  in object browser:

Once in VS2012, Object Browser is your best friend to get acquainted with the required information: