Open XML links for 02-18-2008

Binary documentation and translator project. On Friday Brian Jones covered the availability of the Office binary formats documentation as a free download, as well as the new Office Binary (doc, xls, ppt) Translator to Open XML. Brian also announced availability of freely downloadable documentation for several supporting technologies that may be useful to Open XML developers, including the Windows Compound Binary File Format Specification, Windows Metafile Format (.wmf), and the Ink Serialized Format (ISF) Specification. Stephen McGibbon lists the planned milestones for the translator project.

Developing Solutions using Open XML and VSTO. Wouter Van Vugt has a blog post covering some of the thinking behind one of his sessions at Office Devcon last week, on building server-side solutions for managing structured content. I also see that Wouter, like David Shuster, has recently used a P-word inappropriately.

The anti-Open XML Alliance. Speaking of P-words, fans of propaganda will enjoy Gray Knowlton's analysis of a recent ODF Alliance "report." Being a typical ODF Alliance report, it's not actually about ODF.

IVA Interoperability Lab. The Interop Vendor Alliance has published the results of their recent Open XML interoperability lab, incuding a video and a whitepaper available in DOCX (Open XML), PDF and ODT (OpenDocument) format.

Preparing for the BRM. BRM convenor Alex Brown has posted a list of ten things for BRM delegates to remember as they prepare for next week's meeting in Geneva. There's nothing new there for those of us who are on various delegations (I'm on the US delegation along with representatives of IBM, Oracle, BP, DOD, and Farance Inc.), but for others there may be some useful information about what will be going on in Geneva next week.

Learning the lingo. Speaking of Geneva, my favorite "troll" Oliver Bell has some timely information about how to decode the lingo used by the professional lobbyists who will be working the corridors of the convention center in Geneva next week. Oliver's observations reminded me of a post by Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hanson a few months ago.