As announced yesterday, this week represents the kick-off in a series of technical labs and roundtable discussions that we will be driving focused solely on interoperability between open standards based document formats, including ODF, UOF, Open XML and others. The location selected for round 1 was Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The second goal (of equal importance) was to discuss how we as a community can work together improve the overall quality of implementation thereby improving interoperability. The questions that were discussed (note: this is an initial set and are really working to see how this can be improved) were the following:

• What document interoperability issues exist with your product today?
• Where and how should we collaborate as a community to solve issues?
• What tools, test suites, sample document libraries etc. will enable developers to better implement open standards-based formats?
• What types of templates should be created that can be optimized for interoperability across formats?
• Where are customers demanding interoperability? (applications, formats, platforms)
• What other questions should we be asking/discussing in future roundtables?

Some common themes that emerged from the discussion are:

• Customers want high fidelity with no data loss
• We need to carefully consider both presentation/authoring/exchange scenarios AND enterprise server scenarios (back office, unstructured data, schema across supply chains)
• Test suites are critical to ensure quality, reduce development time
  • We need to think creatively to solve this; these could be desktop, web or web-service based etc.
• Speed of document rendering is important to customers (esp. in mobile) and view and edit modes may need to be treated differently to accommodate.
• Access to an accepted library of quality test documents is a gap.

I am very happy with the outcome of these discussions and the technical engagement for the first go-around. This credit goes to the great set of partners who participated and their willingness to really collaborate on this key issue. We have a lot of work to do and will continue to evolve the approach to ensure maximum benefit for all the participating companies and their customers. The next stop on this "train" is Seoul, Korea next week where we will bring in another handful of ISVs with common goals of improved document format interoperability, then on to Germany in early April.

I want to call out here that this is open to any vendors who are implementing open standards based document formats and are interested in working with a broader set of folks with common goals. If you are interested in participating, please feel free to contact me directly (ckitter@microsoft.com) and we can work together to see how to integrate your company, product and ideas into the next session.

If you cannot participate directly in one of the events but would like to add your comments as to what kinds of things we can and should do as a community in the interest of document interoperability, please feel free to comment or shoot me email.