As mentioned earlier, I went to Open Publish 2007 today. Standardised document standards are a pretty hot topic at the moment, but it is rare that you get to listen to people knowledgeable about the ISO process, ODF and OpenXML all in the same room at once. It made most online discourse on the topic look like the antics a playground of kindergarten kids after too much sugar (perhaps rightly so?).
Rick Jelliffe opened the day with an overview of standards, great and small dating back to the 1960s (ouch) which was quite interesting. He has quite a pedigree when it comes to standards, having been on the SGML committee and authoring Schematron. After that, there were two talks by people that had implemented solutions for ODF and OpenXML. It was really cool to see some non-vendor people talk about real world uses for these technologies and share some of their tips, gotchas, heartbreaks and triumphs.
Jason Harrop had a cool demo of real time collaboration on legal documents - basically he'd written a system to manage locking and auditing of a OpenXML word processing document at a section level. What was even more interesting to see was his technology stack: VSTO for extending the Office 2007 GUI, Java and Apache tomcat on some flavour of *nix on the server side.
Ian Barnes presented a tool to convert word processing documents (in this case ODF) to "useful preservation and access formats" such as DocBook XML, XHTML and PDF. The interesting thing was the way the application minimised the user interface requirements so that this conversion process just happened automagically in the background.
Some other interesting points were made during the day (apologies if I misquote anything here - don't cite these as facts!):