During the Open Repositories 2009 conference I attended the Microsoft’s “Tools for Repositories” workshop.  At the workshop Microsoft was able to get down into the details of their new products and how they are intended to work together. I was impressed by the breadth of work that Microsoft is engaging in to support scholarly publishing use-cases within their tool set. The workshop lasted about 4 hours, longer than most of the other workshops at OR09. The bulk of time was given to the two developers Savas Paratatidas and Pablo Fernicola, along with the team leader Alex Wade.

Microsoft announced their intention to engage with the repository community at last year’s OR08 conference in Southhampton. The OR09 workshop featured the tools that Microsoft has developed in the intervening year starting with new authoring tools in Word, publishing via SWORD, a new peer-reviewed journaling service, and the new .NET based repository. It’s clear to see that Microsoft will have a huge impact on scholarly publishing in the future. We, as the repository community, will need to adjust our services to ensure they work smoothly within the Microsoft ecosystem. After the jump read about the three big features that were presented.

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