Oliver Bell’s weblog

Well, vacations can be fun but at some point the holiday has to end and you have to return to work…

I’m sat here trying to catch up on everything from over the last two weeks.

For the first time in as long as I remember this vacation involved me leaving both my laptop and phone at home and in effect falling completely off the face of the digital planet.

It was as good and relaxing as I expected to be away from communication for a few days, but I’m not sure I fully thought through the implications of the workload I would face when I returned!

Several thousand emails, several thousand unread articles on the Internet and what feels like several thousand hours worth of meeting requests hovering around.

Sifting through the OpenXML related headlines not a lot appears to have changed in the last couple of weeks. Groklaw and Slashdot are still faintly buzzing with the same stories as the start of last month.

Jason Matusow has been engaged in a number of vibrant discussions around the role of IP in standards creation and usage, the comments being expressed on several of his recent posts are making for a good overall discussion. His most recent entry brings some of those conversations together.

One of the most challenging aspects to the threads I’ve been reading in the responses to my post (and I see this in the Groklaw post as well) is that many issues are getting squashed together - and that is the very basis of misunderstanding these issues.

He also has posted some details of the next steps in Microsoft’s commitments to the Interoperability Principles that were published earlier this year.

Continuing with the theme of publishing protocol related information for high volume products some 14,000 more pages of documentation has been posted to the web.

The documentation is for:

• Protocols between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office client applications
• Protocols between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and other Microsoft server products
• Protocols between Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Outlook
• Protocols between Microsoft Office 2007 client applications and other Microsoft server products

Alex Brown has written about the process that ISO’s SC34 is going through to take full control of OpenXML following on from the recent SC34 meeting in Oslo;

Now however, the whole process moves forward into a much more significant stage. At the just-finished SC 34 meeting in Oslo a number of resolutionswere passed relating to 29500. The most significant of these is resolution 4, “Creation of Ad Hoc Group 1 on ISO/IEC 29500 Maintenance”, and it’s worth looking at it in some detail. I will go through the complete resolution below with some explanation of my own …

You should read Alex’s full post for further information, as might be expected there is a lively conversation taking place in the comments.

On a “less process, more technical” note, the April CTP version of the OpenXML SDK is now available, and Erika Ehrli has all the details.

The Open XML Format SDK Technology Preview simplifies the task of manipulating Open XML packages. The Open XML Application Programming Interface (API) encapsulates many common tasks that developers perform on Open XML packages, so you can perform complex operations with just a few lines of code. Using this API, you can programmatically generate and manipulate Word 2007 documents, Excel 2007 spreadsheets, and PowerPoint 2007 presentations. The programming model uses managed code, so it’s safe for server-side scenarios.

… Erika goes on to talk a little about the future of the SDK…

The Open XML API will release in two versions. Open XML API Version 1.0 is the updated version of the CTP in June 2007 and will only contain the Open XML Packaging API. Open XML API Version 2.0 will contain all of the Open XML API components, including the Open XML Packaging API with further updates. It will enforce validity of the content either in the original Open XML documents or being generated through this API. The purpose of this plan is to give out the long awaited Go-Live license of the existing Open XML Packaging API to external developers.

She is looking for feedback from developers on the path that the SDK is taking, so please consider joining the conversation on her blog.

Finally, ISO/IEC have published an FAQ that talks about the process that IS29500 has been through, you’ll find it here.

The FAQ looks at many of the questions that have been raised over the last fifteen months and offers a direct ISO/IEC response.

It ends with a high level question about the process itself.

Will ISO and IEC review how ISO/IEC 29500 was adopted?

We reviewed the process before it started, all the while during its course and afterwards as well. While the voting on ISO/IEC 29500 has attracted exceptional publicity, it needs to be put in context. ISO and IEC have collections of more than 17 000 and 7 000 successful standards respectively, these being revised and added to every month. This suggests that the standards development process is credible, works well and is delivering the standards needed, and widely implemented, by the market. Because continual improvement is an underlying aim of standardization, ISO and IEC will certainly be continuing to review and improve its standards development procedures.

I guess it is time I stopped hiding in Live Writer and reading other peoples blogs, I should get back to clearing out my overflowing Inbox… more tomorrow.