Brian Jones has some good news today for developers who want to work with both the binary Office formats (doc/xls/ppt) and the Open XML formats: one of the proposed dispositions to the DIS 29500 comments describes how Microsoft is going to make it easier to get information about the binary formats and provide open-source tools and guidance for translating binary documents into Open XML.
All the details are in Brian's blog post, and here's the key portion of one of the proposed disposition:
To make it even easier for third party conversion of Binary Format-to-DIS 29500, Microsoft agreed to: Initiate a Binary Format-to-ISO/IEC JTC 1 DIS 29500 Translator Project on the open source software development web site SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/) in collaboration with independent software vendors. The Translator Project will create software tools, plus guidance, showing how a document written using the Binary Formats can be translated to DIS 29500. The Translator will be available under the open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, and anyone can use the mapping, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the Project. The Translator Project will start on February 15, 2008. Make it even easier to get access to the Binary Formats documentation by posting it and making it available for a direct download on the Microsoft web site no later than February 15, 2008. The Binary Formats have been under a covenant not to sue and Microsoft will also make them available under its Open Specification Promise (see www.microsoft.com/interop/osp) by the time they are posted.
I appreciate your hard work. Why don't you hand the binary spec over to Rex to add is in the annex of the DIS spec? Public publication cuts a lot of unnecessary red tape and would help to please the competition authorities.
The Cleverage translation project didn't look very good, the technical approach was wrong. Hope it is meant serious this time.
As of the OSP I think most market players trust it even less than the CNS. Microsoft needs to present something better to get the market confidence.
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>Make it even easier to get access to
>the Binary Formats documentation by posting
> it and making it available for a direct download
>on the Microsoft web site no later than
>February 15, 2008.
mmm, why don't you post *just* now the link? do you need help changing those HTML pages?
a tip: use Apache and PHP, they will speed up your productivity ;-)
karl
mmm, where is the link