Brian Jones: Office Solutions

I wanted to call everyone's attention to a few interesting developments in Ecma's proposed disposition document related to the Office binary formats. There were a few comments from national bodies that asked about the documentation of the Office binary...

I noticed this last week but forgot to blog about it. If you do a google search and the result is an Open XML file (.docx; .xlsx; .pptx) they give you the ability to view them in the browser using their own rendering technology. They support all three...

Yesterday night Ecma TC45 and the Editor of DIS 29500 were able to publish the final drop of our responses to the 3,522 national body comments. The Ecma status report just went live today, and you can access it here: http://www.ecma-international.org...

There were a number of comments raised by national bodies about the password hashing (encryption) support defined in Open XML. There were some extra hurdles that we had initially put to ensure that we could upgrade an existing binary documents properly...

Lately I've been wondering if the discussions in the comments portion of my blog would be more productive if everyone involved identified who they were, and also make it clear if they represented a company. I know a lot of people have appreciated that...

I know a lot of people were worried about a subset of the compatibility settings in wordprocessingML that specified the behavior of an older application should be used (such as "suppressTopSpacingWP"). While the vast majority of the settings were fully...

A few interesting links I wanted to point out: Content Reuse with Open XML and XSLT – Alexander Falk (Altova's CEO) has a great post giving examples of how to work with Open XML files using XML Spy: "This is the first article in a series of blog postings...

There have been some discussions over the past several years about the harmonization of Open XML with ODF. In reality the world of formats is clearly much broader than just ODF and Open XML, but given the political climate the focus lately has been specifically...

In looking through some of the work Ecma has done to identify in a clear way how existing standards are leveraged, I found the blog post from Jesper Lund Stocholm about the use of SVG within ODF to be very interesting. This is an example of how difficult...

Very cool video with the DAISY Consortium's Secretary General George Kerscher discussing DAISY and the project for converting Open XML into DAISY: http://blogs.inquirer.net/techaddicts/2008/01/17/ivdo-daisy-makes-reading-documents-easier-for-the-blind...

A few interesting links out there today: A Closer Look At Those "Single Standard" Policy Mandates – Great post from Oliver Bell, as he provides a look at the actual facts in terms of Policy Mandates around file formats. Altova's Alexander Falk...

A few interesting and entertaining links to end the week: IBM's Stance Against OpenXML Is Increasingly Confusing – Oliver Bell has a great post where he drills into the history the FUD approach. He also points out how easy it is for a large organization...

Reed announced today that the first alpha build of the OpenXML to DAISY translator is now available up on SourceForge: http://blogs.technet.com/reedblog/archive/2008/01/25/open-xml-to-daisy-v1-is-live.aspx This is awesome. It's another example of the...

This is very cool. It looks like the OASIS committee is looking at coming on board to help out with the work going on in DIN to help understand the translation between Open XML and ODF: http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200801/msg00040.html ...

We had all the noise last week about IBM supporting Open XML in a number of their products. Today I learned that Adobe's Buzzword, a web based wordprocessor, now supports reading and writing .docx files. Very cool: http://forum.buzzword.com/viewtopic...

One thing we had to think about in TC45 when dealing with the national body comments was how to deal with requests for additional features or functionality. It's important to make sure at this stage to only fix issues in existing functionalities and that...