I've been following the uptake of the ECMA Open XML standard by our friends in the Java Community for the last couple of months now and I put up this post a couple of months back. It would be fair to say that the reaction has been mixed but lately it has become fairly polarised with some folk becoming very enthusiastic whilst others are becoming the exact opposite.

As an architect working with NZ based Enterprises I'm surprised the adoption of ECMA Open Xml as an international standard is even an issue - fact is that the vast majority of NZ organisations and many of their customer base are using Microsoft Office in one form or another. With the arrival of  ECMA Open / XML it has just become a whole lot easier to work with the latest version of Microsoft Office whatever platform is your preference.

Many larger organisations are using a mix of 'Java' and other technologies - fact is that if your 'platform of choice' supports XML parsing in one shape or another the use of Open / XML provides another opportunity to work with those front line systems based on Windows and Office that the vast majority of Enterprise users are familiar and comfortable with.

At the end of the day as IT professionals we should do what is best for the users, they have chosen a set of tools for which there is now is now a standards based way of working with. We should all embrace that and take it to the next level as an ISO based set of standards regardless of any technical preferences.

This viewpoint is shared by other senior technical professionals  who work in those enterprises which use MS Office and whose customer bases largely use MS Office as well. This is probably best expressed by Bohdan Szymanik, Enterprise architecture manager for Kiwibank who I can quote here as saying

“Kiwibank’s focus on everyday banking means we need to deliver to the office tools our customers are using; the de facto standard is Microsoft Office and this means Open XML is strategically important to our success in the market. The formalisation of this into an ISO standard will be a great enabler for delivering smarter more productive solutions to our customers.”

For more New Zealand based information, views and opinions on this debate check out the blogs of Rod Drury, Sean McBreen, the NZ ISV community;

For more information on using Java with the ECMA Open XML standard see;

OpenXML4J is a Java library dedicated to the creation and manipulation of Office Open XML (ECMA-376) and OPC based documents - http://www.openxml4j.org/

Brian Jones’ blog on Open XML formats  http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/06/01/open-xml-java-library.aspx

Open XML developer http://openxmldeveloper.org/

Channel 9 on MSDN , Open-source Open XML API for Java http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=292715

Channel 9 on MSDN, Linux/Java interoperability with Open XML http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=292752