Here are a few interesting links I came across this week:

• Open XML in Science and Nature - Murray Sargent gives another update on the discussions we've been having with the folks from Science as well as Nature. They have some really cool publishing processes, and unfortunately we're only now talking to them about how to integrate the new file formats and the new math functionality into their existing process. In the end we should see some pretty cool functionality, but it's still a bit too early.
• Deploying Office 2007 – The word team blog has a post with some details on how to ease the transition over to Word 2007.
• More on the IBM support of OpenXML – Stephen McGibbon has a couple posts now talking about both the IBM article which describes how you can easily build solutions on top of OpenXML; as well as some information on potential OpenXML support in Lotus notes. The article on building solutions on top of OpenXML for some reason is no longer available, but Stephen has a copy you can still get to: http://notes2self.net/pages/stephen-s-cache-of-google-s-cache-of-ibm-s-openxml-document.aspx
• Open standards advocate comes out in favour of Microsoft - The Bangkok post has an interview with Rick Jelliffe where he disputes the arguments currently being used against OpenXML.
• Microsoft opens up its data format – Interesting article from the National Business Review that talks about the shift we made a couple years ago from proprietary binary formats to open XML formats.
• Package Explorer 3.0 – Wouter van Vugt has updated his package explorer tool with added functionality for creating new documents and parts; signing documents; viewing signatures; and some loc work.
• More on Word's mediocre XML – Good writeup, and super valuable discussion in the comments section. I need to pull together some information on this one for a future post. Bob's done a lot of thinking here and put down some really good information on the design of the WordprocessingML format. I think that a key area of confusion though comes from the initial design goals. The wordprocessingML format wasn't designed to be the ultimate XML format for representing documents. There are already tons of formats out there that do just that. The purpose of wordprocessingML was to be an open xml format that could fully represent the existing base of Word binary documents. We wanted to take everything from that world, and bring it into the new world. That's why I've always said that we have no issue with ODF, or any other format for that matter. ODF was designed to achieve different goals, and it's perfectly acceptable to have both formats exist as standards. The work that DIN is doing to create translations is super critical for this same reason.