Brian Jones: Office Solutions

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

Well, the BRM is over and I can only describe the week as a lot of technical work and a lot of great people I was lucky enough to meet and exchange ideas with. The objective of the BRM was to work with all of the National Body delegations in the room...

I'm traveling right now and don't have a lot of time to go really deep on this, but today's interoperability announcement is great for Microsoft for a lot of reasons. Gray Knowlton posted on this today , it's a great read if you want to understand how...

For folks excited by the availability of the binary file format specs last week , but concerned about the long term availability of those documents, this should be good news. The British Library has archived, and now made them available to the public...

As promised last month , the binary documentation (.doc, .xls, .ppt) is now live. In addition to this, the project to create an open source translator (binary -> Open XML) has now been formed on sourceforge, and the development roadmap has been published...

A few interesting links today:     Burton Group's Response to the ODF Alliance (Part 1) – A great set of responses to some of the ODF Alliance's criticisms of the Burton Groups " What's Up .DOC " report. Native Open XML support on Apple's Mac OS X...

Here's a cool video showing the rich Open XML support available on the iPhone: http://youtube.com/watch?v=oNcAjS7LqKM There are a number of videos available related to Open XML if you are interested: http://youtube.com/user/OpenXML -Brian

Interesting post from Stephen McGibbon: http://notes2self.net/archive/2008/01/31/sun-standards-as-quot-strategic-weapon-quot.aspx -Brian

I know Rob Weir has been traveling a lot these days lobbying against Open XML across the world, so when I saw this post yesterday I assumed it must be jetlag. I think he completely misunderstood some of the responses from Ecma related to the issue of...

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...