Craig Kitterman's Interoperability Community Blog : XML

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.

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.

XML 2007 Day 1

craigkitterman — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:47:42 GMT

Despite missing 2 flights yesterday (one – snow in my driveway, and one - United Airlines "issue"), I arrived here bright and early at 7:00 am this morning (14 hours later than planned) on 4 hours of sleep (5 hours less than planned).

The joint Microsoft / Interop Vendor Alliance booth is up and running and already had a handful of great conversations with folks during lunch & happy hour this evening. I even had the fortune of running into and chatting for a bit with Sam Hiser and John Gøtze. I hope to run into them again during our roundtable discussions tomorrow.

I heard rave reviews of the Mark Logic session delivered this afternoon by Matthew Turner on Open XML interoperability with the Mark Logic product. I was unable to attend the session but I stopped by their booth to get caught up. Matt and John Kreisa kindly talked me through it again and I must say that this is one of the most compelling demos that I have seen as of late that really takes advantage of the Open XML format including deep custom schema integration. I hope to be able to work with Matt & John make this demo more widely visible as it a great showcase for the power of Open XML as well as great product interop.

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.