Brian Jones: Office Solutions

Norway has also decided to change their vote to "yes" for DIS 29500 (Open XML). http://www.standard.no/imaker.exe?id=18594 Norway had initially voted "no with comments" in September, so it's great to see that they now feel Open XML is ready to be an...

Here's the official statement, although it's in Finnish: http://www.sfs.fi/ajankohtaista/tiedotteet/20080327195555.html Finland had initially voted "abstain" back in September, but they have now decided to change their vote to "yes" in support of DIS...

Oliver Bell just informed me that South Korea has decided to vote for approval of DIS 29500 (Open XML) as an ISO standard. This is a change from their original "no with comments" posisiton they took back in September, and is great news. South Korea was...

Jesper Lund Stocholm is reporting that Denmark has decided to change their initial vote of "no" in September to "yes" for ISO approval of DIS 29500 (Open XML). Here is a pointer to the press release: http://www.ds.dk/4225 As Stephen McGibbon put it...

Interesting post from Miguel today: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Mar-26.html I have been reading the OOXML storm in a teacup for more than a year now. Am looking forward to the approval of OOXML as an ISO standard and to be able to move the...

I try to keep the discussion on this blog primarily focused on the area I care most about, the technology behind Open XML. Every so often I've mentioned ODF, especially when discussing the translation and harmonization updates, but in terms of discussing...

BRM Summary I wanted to take the time to give a narrative of what actually happened in the BRM, since we're now moving onto the final phase and I wanted to get this all in writing before I forgot. I wanted to give an overview of the topics discussed...

We're a couple weeks away from the final decision on whether DIS 29500 will become IS 29500 and if ISO will take on the stewardship of the Open XML formats. We already had a good preview of the type of work we can achieve within the SC34 group over the...

Doug has a great post today that helps get us back to what really matters in this whole file format discussion (at least if you're a developer). He links to a number of existing resources that can help folks who are just now getting started with Open...

Here's a bit more information on the results of the BRM last week, and where we go from here. There were about 1,000 comments/issues raised last year with the spec, and starting last fall Ecma began posting responses and proposed changes to the specification...

Oliver has a post today discussing this, as it's come up a lot in the discussions he's been having: http://osrin.net/2008/03/27/the-osp-will-apply-to-future-versions-of-dis29500/ -Brian

If you want to get an idea of how the add-in works, Pablo has posted a short video: Pablo suggested skipping to about 4:40 into the video to see the actual solution. For more information on the add-in, check out the blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/exscientia...

Just saw this on Pablo's blog : Covering yet another set of scientific disciplines, last month the folks from ArXiv (the largest repository for Physics, also very popular for Math and Computer Science papers) posted the news that they now accept OpenXML...

Via Stephen McGibbon: http://notes2self.net/archive/2008/03/31/din-responds-to-quot-incorrect-and-misleading-quot-reports.aspx -Brian

I wanted to talk about some of the comments I wish we could have dealt with but we didn't have enough time. We'll need to follow up with the national body for more information, and deal with it in maintenance. Here's the full list if you are interested...

There were some concerns raised earlier on that the Open XML format required a specific object embedding to be used (OLE). While it's true that the tag names in the format have "OLE" in them, the embedding is actually generic, and can use other technologies...

I just saw this on Stephen McGibbon's website: http://notes2self.net/archive/2008/03/25/czech-republic-votes-to-approve-dis29500.aspx The Czech Republic has decided to change their vote to "yes" for DIS 29500. The Czech national body (led by Jirka...

Gray looks into some of the recent thoughts from Patrick Durusau: http://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton/archive/2008/03/12/within-minutes.aspx Accessibility update from Reed, and some news on the activities so far at CSUN: http://blogs.technet.com...

There was an article published last week that describes the results of the voting in the technical committee of the German National Body for Standardization (DIN). DIN has been leading the way on a number of areas relating to file formats including the...

Doug Mahugh just posted about a call this afternoon where the U.S. V1 technical committee reviewed the results of last week’s BRM and has voted to approve DIS 29500: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2008/03/07/us-v1-technical-committee-votes-to-recommend...

Pablo Fernicola has the news today that we've released a tech preview of an article authoring add-in for word 2007. This add-in leverages the Open XML formats to translate into the XML formats defined by the National Library of Medicine. http://blogs...

Patrick Durusau, the editor for ODF 1.0 and 1.2, as well as the chair of INCITS V1, has a new post where he talks about his change of opinion. He is now in support of the ISO approval of DIS 29500 (Open XML). http://www.durusau.net/publications/onbeingheard...

Via Stephen McGibbon: http://notes2self.net/archive/2008/03/24/durusau-quot-opendocument-among-others-will-lose-if-openxml-loses-quot.aspx " Patrick Durusau has posted another thoughtful contribution to the document formats standardisation debate"...

www.hp.com/go/officedocumentstandards "In the current vote on OOXML at JTC 1, HP is supporting an affirmative vote in those national standards bodies in which HP is active." -Brian