Welcome to the 4th edition of the Beta Experience newsletter for Windows Vista and 2007 Microsoft Office system.

In this issue we take a close look at XPS the ‘Electronic Paper’ specification used in 2007 Microsoft Office system and in Windows Vista. This technology promises to simplify the process of printing and previewing documents as well as significantly improving the quality of the final output.

Have you ever needed to create and manipulate Office documents on the server? If you have then you will have either had to write directly to the binary file or automate the Office client applications on the server – an unsupported and risky option. Well now we have a brand new open format for Office documents based around zip compression and XML. Patrick Tisseghem walks us through the new format. Click here for the demo. Patrick also shows us the new features of InfoPath with 2007 Office System in Building InfoPath Solutions. Click here...

While the new UI on the client components is the first thing that you see when you try out the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2, that is just the tip of the iceberg. We have invested heavily on the server side components of 2007 Microsoft Office system. So in this issue Ted Pattison concludes the second part of ‘Building Portal Solutions’. Click here for the demo. Also Ted goes into detail about the architecture of SharePoint Services Version 3.

Dave Webster
Chief Editor for Microsoft Office content
Developer & Platforms Group
Microsoft EMEA Beta Experience Team