Brian Jones: Office Solutions

Gray just recently started blogging and has an interesting post about the number of downloads we've seen to date of the compatibility pack. It's a free update that allow people with older versions of Office to read and write the Open XML formats. There...

Ecma is posting a new status update today. We’re in progress updating 500+ new national body comments. As we head into a brief holiday break, we’re pretty happy about the progress we’ve made so far. I think the comments this week are the most significant...

Alex Brown, a long time member of SC34 and the convener of the upcoming BRM for DIS 29500 provided some additional insight into the ISO/IEC rules behind keeping the national body comments confidential. National Bodies submit their comments as part of...

SP1 for Office 2007 is now available for download. One of the interesting fixes we made was based on some problems we found when you tried to use the ODF translator that Sun has built for Office. Malte Timmermann pointed out on his blog back in the summer...

I had mentioned that the members of Ecma TC45 all met last week in Kyoto to continue working through the national body comments we received as a result of the ISO ballot for Open XML. We've been making a lot of progress over the phone the past couple...

Last spring, we saw some positive developments in the file format world. We started to reach a critical mass of tools that support open formats. There were millions of downloads of the compatibility pack which allowed existing Microsoft Office customer...

I'm heading home from Kyoto tomorrow after some very productive Ecma meetings. I think you'll all be impressed with the work we've done (more on that next week when I get back). I'm so excited though I just had to dance (and share it with all of you)...

I saw this blog from one of the current chairs of the ODF committee in OASIS: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/12/bait-and-switch.html So, ODF was adopted as an ISO standard about a year ago, and since then there has already been a new version of ODF...

Ecma TC45 and the project editor are making great progress in the resolution of comments we received from the national bodies a few months ago. The result will be an even better spec than we had last year, and this really helps highlight the benefits...