Oliver Bell’s Weblog

A lightweight post, today is the last day of my ten day vacation. Tomorrow things start to get back to normal again, probably beginning with an over flowing inbox!

As a piece of diversionary reading, a white-paper was posted to the Windows Vista Team blog late last week that outlines what will be coming in Service Pack 1, including details of improvements in the areas of security, reliability and performance. You will find the white-paper at this link.

Additionally you will find a post by Mark White talking about Microsoft Surface technology, this is something that I have seen in demo form a few times now, but have not yet had the chance to play with.

When I’m back in Redmond in November I will hopefully get the chance to take a closer look for myself. I think the technology has a number of potential uses here in Asia, looking it it in the context of support for educational environments, or maybe in a rural computing scenario.

I’m currently preparing for a presentation to the Computer Society of Sri Lanka that will be delivered later this week. As part of that presentation I intend to talk a little about the issue of Interoperability, how companies like Microsoft think about this complex area, and some of the areas where a more collaborative industry is benefiting customers and partners today compared with past years.

There are a number of dimensions to this topic and I plan to go into the detail of a few areas over the coming month as I find the time to do so,  for now I will leave the majority of the story for the presentation and for future posts on this weblog.

As a starting point for the discussion it might be useful to begin by highlighting a guiding text that Microsoft calls the “Windows Principles”.

An important component of providing an interoperable platform for any company, including larger software companies, is the element of being predictable for customers, partners, developers and our own internal product groups.

The predictability is important as it ensures that expectations are set for both users of our technology and for third parties who are developing software or hardware that will interoperate with the Microsoft platform.

With that in mind, a little over a year ago Microsoft announced a set of governing principles that touches on three key areas, delivering important levels of predictability;

• Principle I: Choice for Computer Manufacturers and Customers
• Principle II: Opportunities for Developers
• Principle III: Interoperability for Users

For those who are interested I would encourage to you read the detail behind each of these principles on the microsoft.com website. I had intended to post them here for easy reading, but it makes for a lot of text!

Ostensibly these principles, and the twelve tenants that accompany them, provide a governance structure that ensures that there is predictability in a number of areas that are important to customers and partners - including shared API information, supporting non-Microsoft applications, providing access to technology for companies or communities who have traditionally been competitors and so on.

Obviously these principles cover several aspects of the role of Windows in the wider industry, my experience is that in the context of interoperability alone they provide a great framework for simplifying discussions between industry entities and communities.

There is significantly more to add, but it is Saturday afternoon and dinner is waiting so I’ll draw a line under the topic for now and leave the detail for a later date.

This is probably a good starting point for the discussion, and if you’re attending the session in Colombo I would welcome more conversation on the topic.

Jason Matusow has a posting on his blog this morning that explores some of the discussions around the ability for developers to build independent implementations of the Open XML file format and he pulls out some examples, including one of our own here in Asia Pacific.

The ability for independent developers and software vendors to be able to implement the specification in their own products is obviously one of the key benefits that will come with Open XML being a ratified ISO standard.

Due to the characteristics of the Open XML specification there is an expectation that we will start to see implementations offering a range of options including developer tools, office document management, transactional applications and other data communication and management tools. Some examples of these are in the list below.

• Monarch from Datawatch
• XMLSpy from Altova
• iPhone from Apple
• Mindmanager from Minjet
• Gnumeric from Gnome
• Dataviz Documents To Go from Palm
• Open XML IIS Analyzer from Intergen

You can read the full article here, so far it is drawing interesting commentary from those who have been working with the specification.

A few months from now we will see Bill Gates balance his priorities to focus on his philanthropic efforts, and take more of a back seat at Microsoft.

At that time his role will be divided up between Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. Craig’s title will be Chief Strategy and Research Officer, and Ray will be Chief Software Architect.

Craig was in Australia this week and took some time out to discuss some of the issues that he is currently thinking about with APCMAG.COM, the resulting article shares some insight into the long term picture that Craig sees for the industry and for Microsoft. The article discusses future versions of Windows, multicore computing, Linux, the Microsoft Home of the Future and of course touches on Open XML standardization.

From the article;

One of the things that is changing over the next five to 10 years is that the industry will fundamentally change the architecture of the microprocessor and with that will create a new level of capability in these machines.

I think it is likely that in that time horizon that the current price and power levels that we think of as today’s microprocessors, are likely be 50 or even 100 times more powerful.

A couple of stories to share with you this morning.

The first involves an agreement between Microsoft and Citrix to standardize on a common virtual hard drive format. This will mean increased interoperability between the two companies respective virtualization platforms.

You can read more about the agreement in an article on Information Week;

“Agreement on VHD is a necessary first step we are taking to ensure IT can rapidly adopt the full benefits of virtualization,” Wes Wasson, VP of worldwide marketing at Citrix, said in a joint statement with Microsoft. “Today’s announcement signals our continuing, joint commitment with Microsoft to provide virtualization solutions to create and manage dynamic IT environments well into the future.”

Those of you following this area of technology will know that Microsoft’s VHD format has been available under its “Open Specification Promise” since late 2006. This means that the specification is available at no charge and with no restrictions on implementations.

The second story focuses on the continuing evolution of the relationship between Microsoft and Novell, today sees the opening of an Interoperability Lab that will be jointly staffed by the two companies to look at areas of interoperability between the Linux and Windows platforms.

You will find additional coverage in this Computerworld article;

Two of the lab’s first projects will be to improve virtualization and systems management when the two operating systems are used together.

Tom Hanrahan, Microsoft’s director of Linux interoperability, said that engineers will work on improving existing virtualization technologies, which often don’t let the virtualized environment communicate with the hardware underneath the host operating system. Engineers are working on ways of letting Windows treat Linux drivers as if they were native Windows drivers, and vice versa, which would lead to better performance for graphics, disk input and output and more.

“The lab is open for business, and we are working on interoperability projects that we’ve heard are important from our customers,” Hanrahan said.

I have been on holiday most of this week so have not really been keeping as close an eye as I could be on happenings in and around the world of technology.

One thing I am curious about is who won the Kayak award, and I can’t find an answer as of yet.

To explain, the owners of the web site nooxml.org worked very hard to rally a community to oppose the ratification of Open XML over the last seven months, and as part of their recruitment efforts they offered a cash prize of 2,500 euros to the team that could cause the most disruption to the process in their given country, the winner gets the cash along with the opportunity to present the details of their hard work at the FFII conference in November.

As yet I’ve not seen who the winner is, I guess we will know very soon now as it is almost conference time.

If you know who the lucky winner is of this 2,500 Euro cash prize please let me know, the suspense is killing me!

I’m also a little curious about where the money for the prize came from, but I guess that has nothing to do with me really, so I will probably never know.

I have to say, after several months of living in Singapore my family and myself are loving it. The country is extremely convenient on every front, travel is straight forwards, the people are friendly and we love the wide array of dining options.
I have one problem though… technology, gizmos and gadgets are just too easy to come by.  I’m addicted to gadgets and I have very little self control when it comes to buying something new that I stumble across on the web or in a store.

In the countries where I have been living for the last ten years or so this really has not been an issue. Using handphones as an example, my handset provider would tie me into a two year contract and only allow me to upgrade my handset once every contract period. While I could buy a new handset of an online auction site, there was never really an option to walk down the high street and get a new phone on a Saturday morning.

Here in Singapore there is no such tie, I can walk into Funan Digitalife Mall or Sim Lim Square any day of the week (or everyday of the week) and pick up a great new handset.

While browsing the regular list of news stories this morning I was somewhat er… upset (actually rather excited, but I have to pretend not to be to sustain my ongoing denial issues) to see that HTC are shipping an new version of the Touch, this time with HSDPA support, GPS(!) and a slide out numeric keypad.

You can read a little more more about it on unwiredview.com, and from the notes there it seems that this new device will be available in September, although it isn’t clear which markets will get it first. So far I have seen it refered to as the HTC Touch II, the HTC P5500 and the HTC Nike.

So, it seems that a new handphone is on the horizon for me. My friends in the USA and in Europe will remain jealous of the amount of access we  have to new technology here in Asia, my wife will be a little perplexed about why I need another new phone, and I’ll continue to live very happily and in complete denial of my addiction to new gadgets.

If anybody stumbles over a store that has one in stock please be sure to let me know!

Yesterday morning I was doing a random search for Open XML related articles, I came across one on TechTree in India written by Subhashish Gangopadhyay entitled “The ODF Vs OOXML Debate”, it is a well written article aimed at the general computer user and is worth a read.

The article ends with a paragraph that says;

Trying to restrict a budding market to one set of standards severely affects its development. Observe that this argument is independent of which is the better standard, for, unless we allow both, we will never know!

That got me thinking about another element to this debate that is worth some consideration for any nation with a strong IT outsourcing sector.

A few weeks ago Microsoft released a study that was undertaken by IDC looking at a subset of users in Europe and the USA in terms of document format adoption, what the issues are that those customers consider important and what the landscape might look like a few years from now.

Like all studies the document needs some intelligent interpretation to understand why the data might be relevant to the reader. One of the meta points that the document draws out for me is that there are divergent choices are already being made in the area of document formats, both across geographies and market sectors.

For any economy that carries a strong interest in winning overseas outsourced business it strikes me that the country would be best served by the scenario of multiple standards, giving the IT providers in that country the widest amount of choice in terms of the technology they work with, and as a result the widest global set of customers that are then accessible to them.

Following on from questions I have been asked in public forums over the last couple of days I wanted to share a couple of additional links with you that will offer some clarity around the Ballot Resolution Meeting process, and the discussions that have been taking place around the vote in Sweden.

The first link is to the blog of Alex Brown. Alex will be the guy who convenes the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) that I have discussed over the last couple of weeks. His blog entry from earlier this week talks about exactly what will happen at, and after, the BRM meeting, who attends, how the votes are counted etc.

The second link relates to an issue that Microsoft in Sweden dealt with about a week ago or so. Microsoft’s Jason Matusow has a detailed write up of what happened, and what steps were taken to correct the issue.

As we all know, over the last few months there have been a lot of different individuals and organizations looking at the Ecma Open XML file format specification, in many of those cases and as part of their investigation work this has resulted in projects to trial the use of the specification and the file format.

These projects have been dealing with a wide range of issues such as document security, assembly, archiving, or in the case that I’ll highlight in this post data transformation.

Intergen, a New Zealand based ISV, have today released their project to CodePlex, so now anybody can take a look at the work that they have been doing.

Intergen’s Open XML IIS Analyzer provides the ability to convert log files from Internet Information Server into Open XML format which then allows you to build reports in one of the growing number of applications that support this format.

And from the page, here is the project description

IIS Analyzer is an add-in for Microsoft Excel 2007 that downloads and converts server log files into the OpenXML format. Using Visual Studio Tools for Office and the .NET packaging libraries, IIS Analyzer can quickly create reports in multiple formats, including Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and PowerPoint presentations. Log data can also be exported to any SQL Server database.