Brian Jones: Office Solutions

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...

Some interesting links from the past few days: File Formats Why China's UOF is good - O'Reilly XML Blog Very interesting post from Rick Jelliffe about how there are often needs for multiple formats, in order to properly meet the needs of the industry...

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...

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...

This is shaping up to be a pretty cool month. Last week we finally had the first public draft of Ecma's Office Open XML format standard released. Now today the first public beta of Office 2007 has been released. I'd really encourage everyone to head...

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...

A few months ago I blogged about a company called Mindjet who had built OpenXML support into their mind mapping software . It allows you to visually map out your thoughts, and then you can convert that into a Word document using wordprocessingML. Tomorrow...

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)...

More on Doug's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/04/17/is29500-is-an-american-national-standard.aspx -Brian

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"...

There are now well over 500 registered members on the Open XML Developer community site, and from what I've heard there were over 20,000 unique visitors last month alone. I'm not sure if you guys have been out to the site lately, but there are a ton of...

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...

The member list over at OpenXMLCommunity.org is definitely growing rapidly. I think they've already more than doubled the number of registered supporters since it started last month. I recently saw this statement from HP about the standardization of...

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

I talked with Jon last week about XML in Office and he just posted it up on Channel 9 today: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=279550 -Brian

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...

Test message... haven't used the blog in awhile, so want to make sure it still works! :-)

We're going to have a few posts this week up on the Office Next blog that drill into the new app model from three perspectives: the end user; the developer; and the administrator. This first post that goes into the end user experience is now live: http...

On Monday, I posted on the Office Next blog about the experience from an end user perspective around apps for Office and SharePoint . Yesterday, I posted about it from the developer point of view . Tomorrow, I'll post from the IT/administrator point of...

Vivek announced a contest we're kicking off for people who are building apps for Office or SharePoint. Here's a link to the post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2012/08/07/game-on-win-big-prizes-in-the-app-contest.aspx The short of it though...