Craig Kitterman's Interoperability Community Blog : Open XML

Interoperability on tap @ Interop Las Vegas!

craigkitterman — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:20:22 GMT

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

ISO: ISO/IEC DIS 29500 receives necessary votes for approval as an International Standard

craigkitterman — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:10:52 GMT

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

It’s Official: Open XML approved as ISO Standard

craigkitterman — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:28:00 GMT

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

Great Endorsement for Document Choice from HP

craigkitterman — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:24:34 GMT

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."

Bill Gates on Document Archival, Standards, and Open XML

craigkitterman — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:42:00 GMT

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.

Document Interoperability Roundtables & Labs - Take 2: Seoul, Korea

craigkitterman — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:40:00 GMT

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.

An Open Letter by Chris Capossela, Sr. Vice President, Microsoft Office

craigkitterman — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:52:00 GMT

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.

Document Interoperability Roundtables & Labs - Take 1: Cambridge, MA

craigkitterman — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:51:00 GMT

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.

Video: Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) - Cambridge, MA

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.

Open XML documents on Symbian Devices!

craigkitterman — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:42:00 GMT

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!

Apple Products Support Open XML: Video Demos

craigkitterman — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:26:00 GMT

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!

IBM and Google Support for Open XML

craigkitterman — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 04:07:00 GMT

I have read a number of blogs posts and articles recently that demonstrate the groundswell of support for the Office Open XML formats. Most impressive in this list of course is support by both Google and IBM (that's right – I said IBM).

Gray Knowlton has a post that demonstrates some of the places that Open XML is popping up on the IBM website (and in their products). It is unclear what the primary driver is for this support but it was not hard to find IBM Customers (and IBM's own "Supportadmin3") agreeing that there is clear customer benefit:

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/supportMessage.jspa?messageID=4007&tstart=0

According to Brian Jones it appears that Google is in fact now effectively indexing Open XML files and in fact is also doing HTML translation on them to allow users to view data directly in a browser!

Back In Action + Burton Group Report on Open XML / ODF

craigkitterman — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:26:52 GMT

After taking a month off for parental leave over the holidays I am back at work. A lot has been happening over this period with the Open XML ISO standardization effort as the process moves closer to the final Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM). All exciting stuff (to geeks like me anyway).

This morning I read the Burton Group report "What's Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications" (registration required to download document). It is a great piece of independent analysis on the much hyped document debate regarding Open XML and ODF and the effects on the IT ecosystem. Definitely worth a read and a discussion if you are at all fascinated with document formats and interoperability.

More details on Interop Track @ XML 2007 Conference

craigkitterman — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 03:17:47 GMT

We have secured a number of great well-known speakers from the industry to help lead the discussions at this year's XML 2007 conference! It will be a fun event and hopefully an enlightening one as well.

The current schedule & speaker list for the Dec 4 sessions is as follows:

09:00 - Document Interop: Ecma Office Open XML and OASIS ODF
- Speakers: Miguel de Icaza (Novell Inc.), Vijay Rajagopalan (Microsoft)
11:00 - Enterprise Interop: Identity and XML
- Speakers: Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Zend), Vijay Rajagopalan (Microsoft)
14:00 - Web Interop: Ajax with XML and JSON
- Speakers: Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Zend), Vijay Rajagopalan (Microsoft)
16:00 - Interop Round Table & Happy Hour – Development Discussion on Interop and XML. (Hors d'oeuvres and drinks hosted by Microsoft).
- Speakers: Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Miguel de Icaza (Novell), Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Zend), Shyam Pather (Microsoft), Vijay Rajagopalan (Microsoft), Craig Kitterman (Microsoft)

I am really looking forward to meeting a lot of passionate XML gurus and sharing some great technical discussion! See you in Boston.

Microsoft Sponsoring Interoperability Track at XML 2007

craigkitterman — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:48:32 GMT

IDEAlliance yesterday announced that Microsoft will be sponsoring an interoperability track at this year's XML 2007 conference in Boston, MA Dec 3-6 (interop track taking place Tuesday the 4^th). Details about the sessions can be found in the press release.

It is going to be a great collection of sessions and I really encourage folks to attend this intimate conference to get the low down on what is happening at the core of the XML community. I am really hoping to get a broad and diverse group of folks to come and talk real-world interoperability on the web, in the document realm, and in the enterprise; this is why we are inviting folks from Yahoo!, Zend, Novell and others to join us. I hope you can too.

I will update you here as soon as we have more speaker names that we can announce…

Java Open XML API Project officially launched!

craigkitterman — Thu, 31 May 2007 23:19:00 GMT

The Java API library project started by Julien Chable (Wygwam France) has officially launched at http://www.openxml4j.org. Java developers now have a nice set of methods which will allow them to create rich Open XML documents for consumption by office productivity software or line of business systems in far fewer lines of code.

This is a great demonstration of the cross-language and cross-platform capabilities of the Open XML format. I have already seen a few great solutions implemented in Java that enable the use of custom schemas in Open XML to move data between nodes in a value chain, consuming and manipulating this custom business data inside and outside of traditional office document editing systems.

Nice work Julien! I look forward to the continued improvement and evolution as the Java community embraces these APIs.