IE 6 and 7 to auto-update to IE8 »

Starting on or about the third week of April, users still running IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Server 2008 will get will get a notification through Automatic Update about IE8. This rollout will start with a narrow audience and expand over time to the entire user base. On Windows XP and Server 2003, the update will be High-Priority.

Users can decline the update, and Corporate IT groups can block it, but this is a promising move to bring users up to date, and so to increase web-development efficiency.

NSW Department of Education going to Gmail »

The NSW Department of Education is migrating its email system for 1.5 million students from Exchange to Gmail.

They’re going from a $33M contract that gave users 65 megabytes of storage, to a $9.5M contract that gives at least 6 gigabytes.

Microsoft releases pre-07 Office file specs »

Microsoft has released the specifications to the file formats in the pre-2007 Office suite.

The Microsoft Office binary file formats documentation provides detailed technical specifications for the .doc, .ppt .xls, and .xlsb file formats as created by the following Microsoft Office applications:

• .doc: Microsoft Word 97, Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2007
• .ppt: Microsoft PowerPoint 97, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• .xls: Microsoft Excel 97, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• .xlsb: Microsoft Office Excel 2007

Pragmatism vs. Idealism: IE8 »

Joel Spolsky on web standards, and the Internet Explorer 8 team’s decision to default into backwards compatibility (or not):

As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that.

Secretly? Here’s what I think is going to happen. The IE8 team going to tell everyone that IE8 will use web standards by default, and run a nice long beta during which they beg people to test their pages with IE8 and get them to work. And when they get closer to shipping, and only 32% of the web pages in the world render properly, they’ll say, “look guys, we’re really sorry, we really wanted IE8 standards mode to be the default, but we can’t ship a browser that doesn’t work,” and they’ll revert to the pragmatic decision. Or maybe they won’t, because the pragmatists at Microsoft have been out of power for a long time. In which case, IE is going to lose a lot of market share, which would please the idealists to no end, and probably won’t decrease Dean Hachamovitch’s big year-end bonus by one cent.

This is a great, entertaining article from Joel that explores the legacy of browser (non) standards and backwards compatibility, and Microsoft’s tough choice between idealism and pragmatism.