Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Back in July Inchone, an e-Learning company based in Singapore, announced that they were going to add Open XML support to their e-Learning products. In their announcement they talk about some of the advantages that they will garner through the use of the file format specification.

From their announcement;

In collaboration with Microsoft, Inchone started on early June 2007 to explore on developing a solution based on Microsoft Excel 2007 file format, which is OpenXML based, to mass upload user profile. Below are the results and clear benefits of the development:-

• Saving on licensing fees as Excel is not required to be installed at the server
• Excel services launching and clean up is not needed
• Better performance, since no need to create Excel object at the server
• Thousands of records can be imported in, by multiple users without impact to performance
• More than 50% file size saving as OpenXML file is in zipped format
• Users will have options to use Excel or other text editing tools to change the file content (e.g.
  notepad)
• Increase in security as the OpenXML file can be encrypted

Inchone is currently also working on using OpenXML for offline assessment engine, mass upload of QTI based quizzes and reusable Content creation. Inchone strongly believe that the adoption of OpenXML will benefit the company, its clients and the IT industry as a whole.

I’ve been a little slow on catching this one, but I think that it is a great example of the types of benefit that organizations will see from the published Ecma 376 file format specification.

As information on various projects like this that I have bumped into over the last few months becomes public I’ll be sure to share it with you.