OSRIN.net

I’m surprised I missed this, I’ve been a little distracted by my recent move.

It seems that back on the 16th June OpenXPS, the Open XML Paper Specification, was approved as an ECMA standard by their 97th General Assembly meeting, OpenXPS will be known as ECMA-388.

A basic outline can be found on the specification download page;

This Standard defines OpenXPS, the Open XML Paper Specification. OpenXPS describes a set of conventions for the use of XML and other widely available technologies to describe the content and appearance of paginated documents. It is written for developers who are building systems that process OpenXPS content.

A primary goal is to ensure the interoperability of independently created software and hardware systems that produce or consume OpenXPS content. This Standard defines the requirements that systems processing OpenXPS Documents must satisfy in order to achieve interoperability.

This Standard describes a paginated-document format called the OpenXPS Document. The format requirements are an extension of the packaging requirements described in the Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) Standard. That Standard describes packaging and physical format conventions for the use of XML, Unicode, ZIP, and other technologies and specifications, to organize the content and resources that make up any document. They are an integral part of the OpenXPS Standard, and are included by reference.

Many XML-based building blocks within OpenXPS make use of the conventions described in the Markup Compatibility and Extensibility Standard that is relied upon by the OPC Standard to facilitate future enhancement and extension of OpenXPS markup. As such, that Markup Compatibility and Extensibility Standard is included by reference.

The specification itself has yet to be posted, but will be available from this link once it is.

For those wanting to find out more, Stephen McGibbon provides pointers to an explanatory whitepaper in XPS and PDF format.

For a little while now I’ve been using a really simple service that picks up on a hashtag in tweets and when possible connects travellers who happen to be in the same airprort.

To use the service just tweet your flight number, the airport you are in and the hashtag #boarding in a single tweet. The service does the rest, including adding you to a map of the world that it maintins.

Last night when I was leaving Singapore I thought I would give it a try, the tweet read…

The service quickly replies with a confirmation.

Moments later I see an RT from a bot that appears to have recently started consolidating anything that is said by anybody from Microsoft.

… and then some good news, there is somebody else in Changi on Twitter using the same service.

grrrrrrrrrrrr.

I just completed what will be the last business trip I’ll take in my existing role in Microsoft… my new position will not be hugely different from what I’m doing now, I’ll still be involved in many of the same conversations, I’ll still be with Microsoft, but I will have a slightly different focus. More on that in a later post.

For now I thought it might be worthwhile reflecting a little on 2009 MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference which has been running in Kuala Lumpur this week.

I learned a few things during the week that are probably worth sharing, and I got the opportunity to talk a little about some of the work Microsoft has been doing with open source communities as we have slowly found our feet.

For anybody who is interested, my presentation is linked here as PDF, XPS, PPTX.

I would have posted it as ODP as well, but could not find a tool in OpenOffice.org to strip out personal notes and other none essential data from the file. This function is really important for any organization that is releasing documents into the public domain, especially Government organizations. I’m sure it is in there somewhere, I just couldn’t find it.

Anyway, the first and least significant lesson for me from the event related to the tools that we were asked to use. The conference organizers wanted to have all presentations delivered using a combination of Fedora (or Ubuntu) and OpenOffice.org. I’ve looked quickly at OpenOffice.org several times but never really used it in anger, so I figured this would be a good excuse to do so. I’m a Microsoft guy so you would expect me to say that my experience was not great, it wasn’t and you’ll find some of the details in my twitter stream.

The bottom line is that on the day of the presentation we had to run through the deck on the actual machine that was going to be used for the presentation correcting graphics, fonts and other details to ensure that they all rendered correctly. This was a bit of a surprise to me given all the “beauty, elegance and transparent cross platform interoperability” statements I read on the internet. Actually it was not a surprise at all, but it was interesting to experience it all first hand.

At the end of the day the tools did their job and the presentation seemed to go well enough, so I can’t really complain.

The second lesson, and one that I thought was much more significant was around how closely aligned we are to many of the voices currently supporting an increased level of usage of Open Source Software in the Malaysian government.

The panel session that ran right before my presentation had a title that was along the lines of “Surviving the Economic Crisis using Open Source Software”. Representatives from Sun, RedHat and the BSD project all independently said in one way or another “you can’t pay the bills with Open Source Software, you have to have business model that supports it”, and then went on to explain what their business model was.

In many ways this isn’t dissimilar to Microsoft, in any future I can foresee we will still have our core business model but increasingly we are finding ways that Open Source complements that model, delivering an increased level of value to our customers, partners and to developers.

The final thing I learned at the conference was really a reflection of the way that Open Source is viewed in the marketplace in Malaysia. I’d say that I met with two distinctly different groups at the conference, one group who are building businesses around open source software and are principally pushing for a diversity of skills in the Malaysian marketplace, and a second who want everything to be free and are pushing for a wholesale adoption of open source software across the government and beyond.

For the first group, I think Microsoft has a strong role to play alongside anybody who is building a software businesses in Malaysia, regardless of the way they choose to develop that software or the platform that they choose to develop it on.

Being a Microsoft employee at an Open Source Software conference is an interesting experience, but an increasingly satisfying one. Several years ago when I first participated in such an event it was clear that we were the outsiders (duh!), today things have evolved to a point where these types of conference lead to some really interesting and useful conversations.

All up, I had a great time in KL this time around, I got to spend a little time with a handful of the individuals that have taught me so much about working in this environment over the last few years and I got to meet a few new people as well. I hope that I both added something useful to the overall conversation at the conference, and will get the opportunity to come back and participate again in future years.

At the end of the day, as I said in my presentation, I think these conversations are all about co-existence which includes open engagements from everybody involved. The collective good and progress of the industry inevitably means progress for all concerned. That’s evolution. History has proven this time and again.

A little while ago I wrote a piece that talked about why I believe large system integrators often fail to meet the needs of public sector customers, exploring what it takes to build skills within their own organization and help their customers make best use of new and evolving technology.

I thought it might be useful to look at the other side of that coin and consider the same issue from the perspective of a smaller systems integrator looking for ways to break into the public sector market.

Initially it is worth thinking about the segmentation of projects that are available in the public sector marketplace. I outline a few below, this is nowhere near an exhaustive list and in many cases you can choose to opt out of the complexity and simply consider the public sector to be a microcosm of the wider marketplace with some unique scaling challenges.

a. The proof of concept project. Almost every government department has one or two of these running at any given time. These types of project generally end up being established and let to smaller companies to overcome the lack of innovation found in larger SIs. They are a good opportunity for a small company to get their name known in public sector circles. Unfortunately, if the project proves to be success you will generally find yourself bidding against a larger company for the wider scale deployment.

b. The major application redesign. These are hard projects for a small company to win. Just about any government business process demands the support of a large scale computing environment. Without both specific expertise and the ability to scale across a large deployment these projects will also often fall into the hands of larger companies.

c. The technology deployment project. These types of project often come up towards the end of a major systems or business process redesign. There is rarely anything complex to these projects, you just have to have a lot of people (generally contract staff) turn up and complete repetitive deployment or training tasks across many hundreds or thousands of users. This can be good business for some smaller companies but is high volume and low margin project work, and often tendered solely on price which means you can lose a customer as quickly as you won them.

Maybe you are starting to see a theme emerge. Where large systems integrators often have an inability to innovate, smaller systems integrators will have a similar inability to scale.

The obvious answer for your company appears to be to partner with a larger one, at least as you build a set of capabilities that that will allow you to win and deliver these complex government contracts on your own. Few small companies appear to manage these types of partnership well or manage to make the evolution into being a larger and successful service provider.

There are no magic bullets, but there are a couple of things that I think are key to engaging and growing in public sector markets.

1. In the early days partnership often is essential, make it as equal as you can. The balance of any partnership is often judged by the financial size of the contract and who carries the ultimate liability for delivery, from a purely legal point of view this makes sense and will obviously often put the larger partner in a position of power. Your challenge as a small systems integrator is to ensure that there is a clear understanding in the partnership of the benefits that are brought by your ability to innovate and be agile, you need to be able to measure the output from your efforts across the entire project and to be able to clearly represent those benefits back to the program leadership team. (of which you have to be a part!).

2. That ability to innovate will always be important, even when you are the big guy. I don’t know what the point is when larger systems integrators start to fail to realize the importance of innovating around how they deliver service and how they adopt and sell new and emerging technologies, but most do appear to lose sight of this at some stage. The history of our industry is littered with examples (I’ll share a few over a beer or two if you’re short of ideas!). There are examples of a handful of successful service based companies that have managed to hang onto this part of their business, and it continues to feed the rest of their organization – for many years both IBM and HP have been a pretty good examples of this.

As a side note it has been fascinating to watch IBM outsource some of their required software innovation to the open source community in recent years, it is a tidy way for them to externalize part of their business without losing it completely and an interesting departure from the way they have traditionally operated. A company the size of IBM has some pretty unique dynamics around their size and scale that probably makes this move possible for them. Regardless, it remains important to recognize that innovation in the software that they use will ultimately drive their services business and their continued growth and profitability.

The bottom line for a smaller systems integrator is that you are unlikely to start winning public sector business overnight, and  initially you are unlikely to win it on your own. When you do start to win public sector contracts the rewards are significant, at that point it is easy to lose sight of who your are or what your business is doing.

If you can hold your focus, scale at a speed you can cope with and find ways to continue to innovate (with or without your partners) at a pace that is ahead of your larger competitors then you are on a road that will eventually lead to the success that you are looking for.

There is a whole story to tell here around how I believe Microsoft’s business model is helping our 1m+ partners around the world do exactly this as they solve customer problems using our platform as a source of both software and innovation– but I’ll leave that for another article, this one is probably long enough already!

Over the last three years I have had cause to visit a number of telecenter projects around the region, some sponsored by Microsoft and some by NGOs or other multi-national companies. In many cases these telecenters have provided a focal point for their local communities, connecting these communities to a world of services, education and opportunities.

Many of these projects often suffer from similar challenges of both remaining relevant to their local communities, and becoming sustainable over longer periods of time. In many cases a telecenter will be a transitory project, playing an important role as local wealth is generated.

As countries increase their levels of wealth and connectivity we will eventually see many of these telecenters disband as people move towards using devices that they own and can make use of as part of their day to day business or in their homes.

Today many telecenters are built for a particular purpose, and frequently under the stewardship of a specific sponsor. Sometimes we see a focus on local micro businesses, sometimes on broad education and frequently with a narrow focus on ICT literacy.

Over the longer term the problem here is that either the relevance becomes diminished as individuals acquire the skills that the center delivers, or the sponsor loses interest as they move onto focus on another project. In either cases the telecenter itself is rarely sustainable in its own right, nor is there a clear understanding around what will happen to the center as the local community gets to a point where it just is not needed any more.

A conversation with a entrepreneur in Nepal a couple of months ago got me thinking about ways that we might be able to encourage more value out of telecenter projects, while at the same time looking for models that make them independent and sustainable.

The entrepreneur I was talking with was Jenara Nerenberg, she has started a project based out of Kathmandu that she calls BOPSource. Her idea is a simple one, it is to use social networking to connect potential service providers at the bottom of the pyramid with potential customers and employers in the middle and at the top, using the power of crowd sourcing to help people build wealth and success.

As with most traditional internet based applications Jenara is not deploying infrastructure to reach her potential users, instead she is encouraging existing telecenters to introduce their local communities to the service that she provides while at the same time promoting BOPSource in more developed countries, essentially connecting the top and the bottom of the pyramid together using infrastructure that they already have access to.

As we look at the future of telecenters this model makes a lot of sense. I would like to think that we are moving past an era when a telecenter was a unique project in a given community to a point where it becomes part of the local infrastructure. Assuming that this is the case then it opens up  new markets for an array of applications that have the ability to make use of that infrastructure and advance the telecenter concept.

Visitors to telecenters should no longer be expected to participate in a single predefined program, instead they should be able to decide for themselves which applications they want to make use of and how they want to derive value from visiting the center. In some cases they will choose education, in some cases they will use the tools available to build their business and in others they will simply choose entertainment.

At this point the telecenter has evolved into being a platform, not just a host for a single application. Sites like BOPSource are the early examples of this new genre, and I’m confident that over the coming years we will see hundreds or thousands more.

As a platform it is much easier to envisage models for sustainability, scenarios where visitors choose to migrate onto their own personal devices and many new applications for these important community focal points.

Jenara has started something that I think will become a market changing trend over time, and has the potential to redefine the way we think about the value that rural connectivity brings to the more remote parts of Asia.

For those who subscribe to this blog via RSS I thought it might be worth highlighting a few  recent changes that I have made to this site;

1. A complete change of site template, hopefully the site is now more aesthetically pleasing and easier to read. I liked the old template a lot, but its simplicity sometimes made things a little awkward. Many thanks to mg12 for an excellent WordPress theme.

2. Language translation. This is done using Microsoft’s Translator service, you will find a drop down box at the bottom of the right hand side bar that will allow you to translate blog posts and comments into several languages in real time.

3. Addition of tweets to the right hand sidebar. I’m not really sure what true value this brings, but it was an easy addition. I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now and have grown to really like it, I find myself following all sorts of folks who I wouldn’t usually get to chat with. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/osrin.

4. email subscriptions. Again this is on the right hand side bar, just tap in an email address and hit subscribe (the same process to unsubscribe) and you’ll get instant notification when I post a new blog entry or add something to the site. Once again, I’m not sure what the real value of this is, but it was an easy additional and a couple of people seem to be using it already.

Enjoy!

Government’s around the world seem to be fundamentally missing at least one of the key tenants of how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to enhance eGovernment programs, not for lack of trying, more likely because it is hard not to think like a government when you are a government.

I spent a chunk of this morning looking at some of the Gov2.0 experiments that are appearing on the web today.

In my view there are three core components that make up Web 2.0 – Communication & Collaboration, Transparency and Empowerment.

Communication & Collaboration. Gov2.0 properties generally do a good job with this part, an increasing number of ministers and senior civil servants are starting to use twitter, blogs and other technologies to talk directly with their constituents. In many cases these tools are being used for a conversation between government and citizens rather than government participating in community discussions – it is a nuance, but a significant one.

Transparency. With direct contact comes transparency, we are already starting to see some members of government who are better at this than others. It will take a while, and some courage, before we see government officials willing to share their inner thoughts in what is essentially a public space. Today we’re learning more about what our representatives and civil service are thinking, and we are gaining the ability to talk and share ideas directly with them.

Empowerment. In my view, by far the largest benefit of Web 2.0 comes from the empowerment of constituents to debate and solve their own issues. This is the piece that I have yet to see any government implement successfully. It will be a major shift, in the more significant examples it will involve handing over the process and business of government to citizens.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but it was a post by Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio, titled “US Federal Government Blesses ‘Government 2.0’” that really crystallized it for me.

In his post Andrea talks about the core pillars of the US Government’s Gov 2.0 initiatives;

The first one is USAspending.gov, a web site that  will allow citizen to verify “when, with whom, and on what the Government is spending taxpayer funds, and whether or not that money is delivering results”. Data will be made available in such a way that users will be able to “combine them into different data sets, conduct analysis and research, or power new information-based products and businesses”.

The second one is Data.gov, the much discussed repository to access public data from across the whole federal government to help unlock the so-called “power of information” and to create value by mashing up public and non-government information. As I mention in earlier posts, this has already triggered initiatives by vendors who are (or want to be seen as) proactive.

The third one is Recovery.gov, which applies the same principles as USAspending.gov to the tracking of funds coming from the Stimulus Package.

As far as participation & collaboration, the document says that “the Federal IT agenda is focused on helping agencies use developing technologies to inform the work of Government” and “Agencies will be called upon to take creative action in developing new approaches to citizen involvement, including the utilization of social and visual technologies, such as Web 2.0 tools.

The US government appears to be on the right track, although there is still a strong leaning towards a government that is transmitting and receiving data between the institutions of Government and citizens.

The building blocks for more significant initiatives are evident in the US strategy, in particular the idea of opening up significant silos of government data for use by constituents. Citizens will find new and exciting uses for this data that will solve social, economic and other issues in ways that policy makers are not even considering.

Delivering Gov 2.0 will involve presenting citizens with a new type of tool that empowers them to make their own decisions around how projects are established or how changes are made to the workings of their own government. Often these new types of tool will not involve government officials directly, government will simply provide the platform and citizens will be the ones who are in control.

It will be a major shift for many of our government leaders and policy makers, it won’t be an easy shift, but Web 2.0 has shown us that it is a shift that has the potential to bring significant value.

Imagine how little success would have been enjoyed by sites like facebook or twitter if the principal use of these tools was to communicate with the employees of those companies.

Back in June last year I posted an entry on this blog titled “My way or the highway…” at the time I was exploring the parallels (or lack of them) between the way that we “debate” as a technology community and the way that ministerial and other senior policy makers deal with ambiguity. I was reminded of that post today as I watched the discussion around the implementation of ODF spreadsheet formulas play out on various blogs.

For anybody who has not been following the discussion, you will find a neatly potted history by reading over a few of those posts. Rob Weir’s post on formula interoperability appeared within a few hours of SP2 being released, Doug Mahugh expanded the conversation by outlining how we got to where we are, and PSC’s John Head has a very balanced post titled “And in this corner…” that brings a much needed element of reality back to the conversation.

One of the few press articles I have seen on the subject comes from Victoria Ho at ZDNet Asia.

Finally my colleague Gray Knowlton posted overnight, questioning the motives of the ODF co-chair in this discussion. Personally I don’t agree with Gray’s conclusions or suggested changes, but I do wholeheartedly agree with the premise of his post.

I’ll explain.

I’ve now spent the best part of two decades working with standards organizations, if there is one word I have heard more than any other during that time it is “consensus”. It is in the spirit of consensus that things get done, agreements are made, compromises are reached and standards are developed and published. The standards professionals that I have met are a unique breed of people, often managing to take dramatically different points of view and find middle ground that meets the majority of the goals carried by those participating in the discussion.

At this point my experience of the discussion around ODF is pretty unique when I compare it to many of the other conversations that I find myself involved in that relate to standards development. On the whole standards development and implementation is full of champions, people looking for consensus around complex issues and demonstrating positive support for the standard or technology that they’re passionate about.

The conversation around formula implementation in Office 2007 SP2’s ODS documents epitomizes the one hurdle that I see as a potential stumbling block for ODF’s overall long term success. Bill Gates once joked that many of our competitors were so focused on competing with Microsoft that they were forgetting to innovate and improve their own products – sitting here in Microsoft and watching the debates around our implementation of  ODF I can see some parallels there.

To succeed ODF needs it champions, I know they are out there, I’ve met a few of them, for what it is worth (and contrary to Gray’s view) I believe IBM’s Rob Weir is one of them – on a good day.

I’m pretty sure that some of the louder voices in the ODF community today are helping corporate compete with corporate, I’m not convinced that the broad implementation and success of ODF itself is at the heart of those conversations – it needs to be.

You may remember that a little under a year ago Microsoft talked about a commitment we were making to support ODF 1.1 in Service Pack 2 for Office 2007.

Since then the subject has come up from time to time as we have discussed the details of this commitment, initially with some discussion around what we described as our guiding principles for implementation of the file format, then at the various Document Interoperability Workshops that we have been running around the world, and then most recently when we released the detailed implementation notes for the work that we have been doing with the ODF file format.

Earlier this week it all finally went live, with full support for ODF 1.1 in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Doug Mahugh has an excellent post where he talks about how to work with ODF in the Office applications, from minor points such as switching style sheets through to offering users the option to select ODF as their default file format.

If you’re looking for more information on Service Pack 2 (there is a lot more in there than just ODF support) then Gray Knowton has outlined a number of other features of the SP, along with the many KB articles that are encapsulated within it.

The final blog post from Microsoft that is worth a look (I’m sure there are others!) comes from Stephen Peront and discusses the new Converter API that is now supported by the Office applications. This API gives developers the ability to build their own custom file format filters for Office, a feature that I think will open up many new options for our users over time.

Over the last year I’ve been involved in several external and internal discussions that have brought us to this point, and I have to say that I am really proud of how far the Office team have come with this and some of the standards (little “s”, non-technical) that they have laid down for themselves and the wider industry along the way.

Building a conformant implementation of ODF1.1 into Office is only one step, the work that has been done to document the implementation notes for this work, build community around the work that is taking place in this space in the form of the DII events and stand up a robust internal team to manage our standards work that relates to the Office applications lay some great foundations for future versions of the product.

Finally I am going to suggest something that I don’t think I ever have before on this blog, nor did I ever think I would, and that is to read through a /. discussion on this topic that took place over the weekend. The discussion appears to have moved on a long way from two years ago when the answer was “if it is open source, and a published open standard then it will just work”. Of course you will still find the traditional Microsoft jibes that you would expect on /., but there is also some discussion around the merit of implementations, some praise for the work that we have done here and some concrete suggestions for work that now needs to be done by other parties to further the overall interoperability agenda.

I’ve talked before about how achieving interoperability is not going to be about just Open Standards, but also about product design, about community and about sharing of information – the goal of achieving interoperability between office suites will need all four of those activities, we need participation and collaboration in all four areas by a diverse array of parties.

The last few weeks have been consumed by a great deal more travel than normal, the most significant output of which will be some fun projects that we’re kicking off in London that I should be able to share with you all soon.

In the mean time I couldn’t resist commenting on a couple of events that took place this week.

The first came to my attention through a blog post of Doug Mahugh’s, and as you might guess some internal discussion on the topic. The ISO approved text for Open XML (IS29500) has made the status of national standard in the USA.

The INCITS Executive Board has approved the adoption of ISO/IEC IS29500 (Office Open XML) as an American National Standard this week (on April 15), and the document will be published soon by ANSI. 

This action taken by INCITS is a relatively routine occurrence, as the US typically adopts ISO/IEC standards as national standards.  As an INCITS V1 member, I was very excited to see this news.  It’s a positive step in the validation and global adoption of IS29500.

The second I only caught as a tweet from IBM’s Rob Weir, and it was that Ecuador has adopted ODF as a national standard.

This is all goodness and as Doug points out it validates the work that is going on at the moment with document standards in general, making the text of the standard available through the local national body to developers or anybody else in the country that chooses to use it.

It is a significant step for any standards text but while I don’t want to devalue that in any way it is worth looking quickly at what it means to be a national standard.

The full and correct answer differs slightly from geography to geography, but in general it means that the National Standards Body in the country has decided to assign the standard a local catalog number and make the text available as part of their own library.

That’s it, in most cases there is nothing more to it.