The Office interoperability team will host a Binary File Format Plugfest on October 19th and 20th in Redmond. The event will target a developer level audience. Microsoft subject matter experts from both the support organization and the product team will...

The latest DII workshop was focused on digital signatures, and took place here in Redmond on Tuesday of this week. This was the first event for which there has been a web participation option (via LiveMeeting), and we had 18 virtual attendees in addition...

I blogged recently about the upcoming digital signatures DII workshop , which will take place in Redmond on June 8. We’ve been working with a variety of volunteer speakers to finalize the details, and it’s shaping up to be an interesting event...

Here’s another Plugfest event coming up here in Redmond to let everyone know about. It’s a SharePoint interop event, where developers can test interoperability, get answers directly from the SharePoint team, set up up 1-on-1 meetings, and generally do...

The next DII workshop will be on June 8, 2010 in Redmond. This event will focus on digital signatures and a new technical signing standard supported by Office 2010, called XAdES (XML Advanced Digital Electronic Signatures). XAdES consists of a set of...

There has been some interest expressed lately regarding how soon Microsoft Office will offer full read/write support for the Strict conformance class of ISO/IEC 29500. I can certainly understand the interest in this topic from those involved in the standards...

The SC34 plenary and working-group meetings took place in Stockholm last week, hosted by Swedish Standards Institute (SIS). Alex Brown has posted already a summary of some of the meetings that I didn’t participate in, and I’ll cover the here the activities...

Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  Another characteristic of advanced technologies is that they often contain intellectual property (IP) that may be covered by patents. When...

One of the more interesting aspects of my job is meeting people who are developing software that interoperates with Office through the various formats that we support.  It’s exciting to hear their plans, work with them on the details of how our products...

Last week I participated in the DII workshop that took place in Brussels.  Attendees included a variety of document-format experts from the ODF and Open XML worlds, including members of SC34 working groups, the OASIS ODF and OIC TCs, ODF and Open...

I’ve spent the last week in the city of Orvieto, perched atop a hill in Umbria, Italy. Monday and Tuesday I particpated in the second ODF Plugfest, and then Wednesday through Friday I attended OOoCon, the annual OpenOffice.org conference. I gave a presentation...

The next DII (Document Interoperability Initiative) workshop will take place in Brussels on November 12.  As always, the goal of the DII workshops is to share information with the developer community and solicit feedback on how we can work together...

If you’re using the Office 2010 Technical Preview and you’re the type of person who likes to look closely at the markup of documents that you’ve created (as most readers of this blog are), you may have noticed some new namespaces that Word, Excel, and...

WG4 has been meeting in Bellevue, Washington the last three days, as part of a full week of activities around the upcoming SC34 plenary here this Thursday.  We wrapped up the meeting with a half-day this morning (Tuesday), after meeting all day on...

We’ll be hosting another DII workshop soon, and this one will be of special interest to those who want to understand the inner workings of MCE (Markup Compatibility and Extensibility) as defined in Part 3 of ISO/IEC 29500.  We’ve used MCE for new...

I recently returned from a long business trip, and while working through my email backlog I’ve come across several questions from developers who are working with the Open XML formats.  I’ve responded to each of them with some tips on how to best...

I’ve just returned last night from a week in Copenhagen, where I attended the SC34 WG4/WG5 meetings that were hosted by Danish Standards.  As usual, it was several days of non-stop document format discussions, in the meetings as well as over breakfast...

Over the last two days I’ve been attending the ODF Interoperability Workshop, a fascinating event that brought together ODF implementers from many countries to talk about the issues and collaborate on interoperability testing.  The workshop web site...

In this blog post, I’m going to cover some of the details of how we approached the challenges of testing our ODF 1.1 implementation that was released in Office 2007 SP2. Adding support for a new document format such as ODF to Office is a large and complex...

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately in the blogosphere about various approaches to document format interoperability.  It’s great to see all of the interest in this topic, and in this post I’d like to outline how we look at interoperability...

When I blogged about the release of SP2 with ODF support two weeks ago, I mentioned that I was planning to blog about a few of the tough decisions we faced in our SP2 implementation of ODF, such as the decision not to support tracked changes. I’ve spent...

Does 1 plus 2 equal 3? After last week’s sometimes acrimonious discussion about formulas in ODF, you may be glad to hear that IBM and Microsoft appear to agree on that answer to this simple question. But OpenOffice.org is not so certain – maybe the answer...

Rob Weir posted on his blog a couple of days ago an Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability .  I think it’s great that he has brought up spreadsheet interoperability, and specifically the issue of formulas, which seems to be the main thrust of...

PHPPowerPoint 0.1.0 was released last week, as an open-source PHP API for generating PPTX files, much like the PHPExcel API for XLSX files.  Maarten Balliauw has a blog post with more information, download links, and sample code. A new post at OpenXMLDeveloper...

For those of us on the Office Interoperability team, as well as our colleagues throughout Office, today is a big day. We’ve released SP2 (Service Pack 2 for Office 2007), which includes a bunch of updated features. Gray Knowlton has a roundup of what...