Craig Kitterman's Interoperability Community Blog

Day 2 was all about Partners – those who we are working with through the Interop Vendor Alliance as well as a host of companies building solutions that interoperate with Microsoft NAP technology.

-C

I am not Ryan Seacrest. With that in mind, here is a quick recap of Tuesday's activities at Interop Las Vegas.

Thanks to Grant Williams and Jessica Evans for putting the video together!

UPDATE: You can now watch Bob Muglia's Interop Las Vegas keynote online here.

Again this year we will be talking interoperability at the Interop Las Vegas conference. The event is next week (Apr-27 to May-2) at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Microsoft will have a large booth presence where we will be showcasing a the work of many product groups as well as that of Interop Vendor Alliance members and other key partners like Novell to foster improved interoperability. Bob Muglia (Microsoft Sr. Vice President, Server and Tools) will be offering a keynote address on Tuesday afternoon at 2pm. As the host of our Interoperability Executive Customer Council, Bob is an outspoken advocate for delivering on our promise of interoperability, and always using customers as the compass for this work.

Additionally, we will be hosting an Interoperability Track during the conference program where we will discuss a variety of technical issues, and how interoperability challenges are being addressed in these areas through product development, community & partner engagement, access to technology, and standards. I will be hosting two of the sessions on Tuesday: one on Document Format Interoperability, and one on the Identity Metasystem. These are two subjects that are near and dear to my heard and to that of the broader IT community so I am looking forward to a lively and fruitful discussion.

If you have not yet signed up for the conference, now is your last chance! If you are coming, stop by and say "hi".

-C

The official ISO press release can be found here: http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123

Martin LaMonica's (CNET) take: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9908939-7.html?tag=nefd.top

Open XML vote results are in – Ecma appears to have secured ISO/IEC ratification of the standard – now known as IS 29500.

It is a great victory for supporters of document choice and flexibility and for those who prefer to use ISO standard formats. It validates the need for additional document standards – for users not completely served by previously existing ISO standards. Ratification also demonstrates that the global community is interested in ISO/IEC oversight of the maintenance and evolution of the spec for such a widely used format. This long process has added tremendous value to the specification through improvements proposed by national bodies around the world and it is great to see the global community working together to build consensus.

I am very happy with this result, but our work continues – not just for Microsoft but for the entire vendor community. We will be continuing to build on the work the community has been doing to improve interoperability between standards-based document format implementations through our Document Interoperability Initiative (DII). The next event will take place in Munich, Germany April 22 and 23 with a collection of vendors from across Europe. Please let me know if you would like to participate in the testing and/or discussion. I am really looking forward to learning more about the needs of the vendor community (or more importantly our shared customers), and together develop process/tools/? to improve our implementations and serve these needs.

-C

Check out the HP Position Statement on Standardization of Office Document Formats. It is a refreshing and pragmatic view - that choice is important and ODF and Open XML will co-exist and interoperate. On the ISO standardization process:

"HP believes that the international standardization process is working. This process has already significantly improved the OOXML specification and additional evolution of it will take place under control of the global community if the specification is ratified by ISO/IEC JTC 1. In the current vote on OOXML at JTC 1, HP is supporting an affirmative vote in those national standards bodies in which HP is active."

Developers can now integrate InfoCards into their PHP-based web projects using the recently released Zend Framework v1.5 with the Zend_InfoCard 1.5 library component. Documentation on Information Card integration can be found here. For more information about Information Cards and the identity metasystem, check out Kim Cameron's Identity Blog.

Here is a quick clip of Bill being asked about Open XML and digital archival by Washington State Congressman Brian Baird during a U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science and Technology meeting last week.

The discussion continued Wednesday the 12th in Seoul, when we sat down with representatives from KANOi, Wooam, ECO and Tomotec. Through these discussions we learned that there are a number of very interesting products in the Korean market that are currently taking advantage of open standards-based document formats. Discussion Wednesday centered primarily on DAISY and Open XML. Vijay took some of his allocated time to demonstrate the ODF translation work being done on Source Forge and showcased how this can be implemented in centralized or distributed scenarios. The discussion was active considering the language barrier and I believe that seeing cross-format translation working in real world scenarios was eye opening to the folks in the room; my sense what that many will be moving forward with ODF and additional format implementations in the near future as well to broaden their offerings and provide greater choice.

Windows Live Spaces

I was excited to learn that the team at Tomotec was already working with the beta Open XML to DAISY translator for their fascinating DAISY reader product. They will be a great showcase for this open source work and have committed to helping test future versions and actively participating in the Source Forge project.

General feedback we received on community needs to improve implementation quality (leading to better interop):

• It would be great to have a developer friendly authoring tool that provides real-time WYSIWYG rendering – developers should not have to use MS Office (or other office package) to validate output
• The community needs to collaborate to develop a "trusted" source of documents. This would be a common library of documents that encapsulate the gamut of capability in each format and can be tested against using batch or manual processes.
• For Open XML, there was a request for better authoring and development tools for working with documents that include data based on custom defined schemas.

On the event itself:

• We need to spend time at the beginning of each event to recap the activities, discussions and action items from previous Document Interoperability events so that the discussion can continue to build & evolve.
• We need to increase the amount of technical collaboration and discussion so that vendors can understand at a deeper level; depending on the # of companies, 1 day may not be enough:
  • Some vendors would like to do deep-dive peer architectural reviews
  • A discussion of challenges and opportunities from all points of view would assist in cross pollination of ideas and solutions
• Future (or regular ongoing?) follow up engagement with regional groups would be useful
• Overall, a great way to share ideas and improve interoperability between products

The next event in Germany in April will take all of this feedback into account and will hopefully result in an ever richer experience for all participants. This event is not meant to be specific to Germany and we are really looking forward to bringing in participants from all over Europe to make this a truly pan-European discussion. If your company is interested in participating, please email me.

Additional events are currently being planned now in other locations around the world and have been discussing about another US event as well. Feedback on locations etc. is always welcome as well.

In this letter, Chris outlines the importance of Office Open XML as a document format choice for customers, the benefits of global stewardship of the format through international standards bodies, and Microsoft's pledge for future support of the open standard.

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.

How do you ensure that somebody, someplace in the world is actually a student (so you can give 'em free software)? This is the challenge that these gentlemen sat down to solve. Through the combined use of Open Source and Microsoft technologies, they have figured out an elegant way to get enrollment verification information. This is a great showcase of the power of interoperability to solve problems, leveraging the strengths of Microsoft products in conjunction with other technologies.

This afternoon we published the specs for the office binary document formats and placed them under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. This means that anyone can now freely use these formats for any reason without any concerns over intellectual property rights.

Enjoy!

With the latest version (4.0) of Quickoffice Premier from Quickoffice® one can open, edit and save as the Open XML file formats on Symbian OS based mobile devices! This is yet another great example momentum of Open XML across a broad array of platforms and devices. See the You Tube video here!

My colleague Jean-Christophe Cimetiere has been working on a lot of demos and these were just posted to You Tube. It is really cool to see very wide spread adoption of Open XML in consumer products like iPhone, as well as in other products on Apple OS X. It is remarkable not only how many products are already supporting the format, but also how many non-windows platforms are supporting it as well!

Here is the iPhone demo to "wet your whistle".  For more, check out www.youtube.com/openxml!