When I joined Technical Computing, now part of External Research, we wanted to create an ecosystem of tools and services to support researchers worldwide. Today we announced the results of some of our efforts; there is still more going on.

A tool that was discussed was the Creative Commons addin for Microsoft Office XP/2003. We got feedback from researchers that they really liked the functionality but were very surprised that Microsoft didn’t release an update version for Microsoft Office 2007. Well, we contacted the team responsible for it and found out that they had no plans to update it so we requested and got ownership of its future.

I started prototyping some new ideas around a ribbon-based interface, allowing you to create Creative Common licenses that can be shared between Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. The plugin uses the Creative Commons web service when generating new licenses. Finally, we wanted to make the license machine readable so we are including the RDF representation of the license in the OOXML package.*

Download the Creative Common plugin for Microsoft Office 2007. The updated version for XP/2003 (fixing some reported bugs) will be released very soon.

* Unfortunately, due to timing constraints we didn’t get around to avoiding a feature of Office where document properties are URL-encoded. This is mentioned in the documentation that comes with the plugin so you can build crawlers/indexers.