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Standards, Patents, and the OSP
24 November 09 07:24 PM

Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  Another characteristic of advanced technologies is that they often contain intellectual property (IP) that may be covered by patents. When Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 1 Comments    

Open XML support in new tools, apps, and custom solutions
18 November 09 03:38 PM

One of the more interesting aspects of my job is meeting people who are developing software that interoperates with Office through the various formats that we support.  It’s exciting to hear their plans, work with them on the details of how our products Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 1 Comments    

DII workshop, Brussels
17 November 09 04:17 AM

Last week I participated in the DII workshop that took place in Brussels.  Attendees included a variety of document-format experts from the ODF and Open XML worlds, including members of SC34 working groups, the OASIS ODF and OIC TCs, ODF and Open Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments    

ODF plugfest and OOoCon, Orvieto
07 November 09 01:42 PM

I’ve spent the last week in the city of Orvieto, perched atop a hill in Umbria, Italy. Monday and Tuesday I particpated in the second ODF Plugfest, and then Wednesday through Friday I attended OOoCon, the annual OpenOffice.org conference. I gave a presentation Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 1 Comments    

DII workshop – Brussels, November 12
13 October 09 10:38 PM

The next DII (Document Interoperability Initiative) workshop will take place in Brussels on November 12.  As always, the goal of the DII workshops is to share information with the developer community and solicit feedback on how we can work together Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments    

DII Workshop on Office 2010 Extensions
23 September 09 08:11 PM

If you’re using the Office 2010 Technical Preview and you’re the type of person who likes to look closely at the markup of documents that you’ve created (as most readers of this blog are), you may have noticed some new namespaces that Word, Excel, and Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments    

SC34 WG4 Meeting, Bellevue
15 September 09 04:33 PM

WG4 has been meeting in Bellevue, Washington the last three days, as part of a full week of activities around the upcoming SC34 plenary here this Thursday.  We wrapped up the meeting with a half-day this morning (Tuesday), after meeting all day on Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments    

DII Workshop: MCE Deep Dive, Redmond
21 July 09 12:49 PM

We’ll be hosting another DII workshop soon, and this one will be of special interest to those who want to understand the inner workings of MCE (Markup Compatibility and Extensibility) as defined in Part 3 of ISO/IEC 29500.  We’ve used MCE for new Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 3 Comments    

Open XML developers: where to get answers
09 July 09 06:10 PM

I recently returned from a long business trip, and while working through my email backlog I’ve come across several questions from developers who are working with the Open XML formats.  I’ve responded to each of them with some tips on how to best Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 2 Comments    

WG4/WG5 Meetings
29 June 09 07:32 AM

I’ve just returned last night from a week in Copenhagen, where I attended the SC34 WG4/WG5 meetings that were hosted by Danish Standards.  As usual, it was several days of non-stop document format discussions, in the meetings as well as over breakfast, Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 3 Comments    

ODF Plugfest, The Hague
16 June 09 11:09 PM

Over the last two days I’ve been attending the ODF Interoperability Workshop, a fascinating event that brought together ODF implementers from many countries to talk about the issues and collaborate on interoperability testing.  The workshop web site Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 4 Comments    

Testing Office’s ODF Implementation
14 June 09 09:32 PM

In this blog post, I’m going to cover some of the details of how we approached the challenges of testing our ODF 1.1 implementation that was released in Office 2007 SP2. Adding support for a new document format such as ODF to Office is a large and complex Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 16 Comments    

Standards-Based Interoperability
05 June 09 07:02 AM

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately in the blogosphere about various approaches to document format interoperability.  It’s great to see all of the interest in this topic, and in this post I’d like to outline how we look at interoperability Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 20 Comments    

Comment Policy
20 May 09 12:51 PM

The posts on this blog are based on my personal perspective, which may or may not reflect official Microsoft position or the opinions of others who also work for Microsoft. I welcome your thoughts in the comment threads, although sometimes I may choose Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 0 Comments    

Tracked Changes
13 May 09 09:52 PM

When I blogged about the release of SP2 with ODF support two weeks ago, I mentioned that I was planning to blog about a few of the tough decisions we faced in our SP2 implementation of ODF, such as the decision not to support tracked changes. I’ve spent Read More...

Postedby dmahugh | 33 Comments