Hoo boy... I know I'm gonna catch a lot of flack when my non-IT friends see this video . Come dig the musical stylings of Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band, as they belt out their no. 1 hit - "Rocking Our Sales"!!   Wonder what...

Friends, Romans, Office developers... lend me your ears! A new version (2.0) of the Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map has been released. If you've never seen it before, it's a nifty little WPF application that allows you to drill down into any...

As you may have seen in my last post , ISO had yet to release a public statement confirming that Open XML had indeed been approved as an ISO/IEC standard. Here's the beef straight from ISO's website today. ... and a choice quote ( emphasis is mine )....

    The results are in.  Office Open XML , otherwise known as DIS 29500, has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard!! Although ISO has not formally announced this to the public, it has released the results to it's members, the national standards...

It's that time again... Microsoft tech-ed South Africa 2008   has been announced! The site is up and running and registration is open! It's going to be very interesting this year, as our venue has changed from Sun City to the Inkosi Albert Luthuli...

After the close of voting at midnight, March 29th, ISO has been tallying the votes on Open XML, officially called DIS 29500 (Draft International Standard). We've seen a lot of positive activity since the conclusion of the BRM, but will have to wait for...

Tomorrow ( March 29th 2008 ) is the final day in which national bodies can reconsider their position on Open XML becoming an ISO/IEC standard. Since the BRM's conclusion , the countries which had initially voted "Disapprove with comments" (...

Open Source Developers - this is great news for you! Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP) grants royalty free access to patents on specific technologies to implementers. Open XML is one of the ( many ) technologies included in this list . This...

Anti-Open XML lobbyists have long been crying foul on some of the flaws in the specification. Two main points emerge from their perspective: ODF is already an ISO standard, therefore there is no need for Open XML. Open XML has a number of flaws which...

Hewlett-Packard, or HP, depending on how old you are, has just released an official statement which describes it's support for the standardization of Open XML at ISO. More importantly, HP believes that Open XML will co-exist with other document formats...

Patrick Durusau is the project editor of ISO/IEC 26300 (the Open Document Format (ODF) specification) , as well as the ODF Technical Committee Editor in OASIS . As such, he has highly respected, and relevant insights into the world of document formats...

One of the ( many ) blogs I track is that of Wouter Van Vugt . It's a great resource for all the technical issues and goings-on in the wonderful world of Open XML. I even had the pleasure of meeting him at the Office Developer Conference in San Jose,...

The roadmap for the Open XML SDK was unveiled yesterday, which plots the path of the SDK all the way into the Office 14 timeframe. The original CTP version of the SDK was released in June 2007.The updated CTP is expected next month (April 2008), with...

Office development got you down? Dreaming of OBAs, but just can't seem to get them off the drawing board? Well, never fear, cos I've got good some good news for you! If you haven't already heard, Microsoft has released a set of power tools for VSTO/VSTA...

The Ballot Resolution Meeting for DIS 29500 (Open XML) has concluded on a very positive note. I hear a long, collective sigh of relief. Like I mentioned in a previous post , the BRM is intended for national standards bodies to reach consensus on the technical...

Here's some interesting news with a dash of local flavour. The hardworking guys over at getdeb have just ported the Open XML Translator plug-in for OpenOffice.org to Ubuntu Linux ( arguably one of South Africa's greatest contributions to open source ...

It's ironic. I've been busy with Open XML related activities since December, so busy in fact, that I haven't blogged about anything related to it! Call it what you will, lack of discipline or surplus of work, either way, I'm blogging now. As you probably...

This has got to be one of the funniest videos I've seen in a long time! Bill Gates delivered this at the last keynote he'd deliver at CES 2007 (Consumer Electronics Show). Bill Gates' Farewell - Microsoft at CES 2007 Bill doesn't take himself...

Hello. My name is Aatish Ramkaran. I'm a Technology Specialist with Microsoft, concerned primarily with Office Business Applications (OBAs), Groove and the Open XML document standard. Being a developer at heart, I will be posting a number of sample...