Oliver Bell’s Weblog

This story has appeared in a number of publications over the last few days, I’ll pick up the copy from iTnews in Australia.

The text is based upon an interview with the current ISO Secretary-General, Alan Bryden, where he comments on the recent process to standardize OpenXML as IS29500.

Here are a couple of choice paragraphs;

On some of the public commentary from the press and from various blogs;

“Some of the negative publicity is quite extreme,” Bryden said in written answers to questions from Reuters.
“It’s not exactly pleasant for me to see ISO vilified, particularly when much of the extreme criticism is based on false assumptions and a lack of understanding of what ISO is and how it works.”

On the Fast Track process;

Bryden said criticisms that a fast-track process was abused to rush through the Microsoft standard were unfounded, and said the process was not new but had been used for 267 standards over the last 20 years, 212 of which were still current.

On what ISO do next with the process;

Still, he said there were lessons to learn. “The experience with ISO/IEC 29500, along with the results of other standards development activities, will indeed assist in determining whether further continued improvements should be made.”

And finally, on the issue of multiple standards in similar domains;

“In such cases, multiple standards can exist and it is the market that eventually decides which will survive,” he said.

I’ll leave you to read the whole article here.

My colleague Gray Knowlton has a post up on his blog this morning talking about our unwavering commitment to OpenXML as an essential component  of the Microsoft Office System.

Many have asked or speculated that the recent announcement of ODF in Service Pack 2 is an indication that Microsoft is quietly stepping away from Open XML. Some ask… “Is Microsoft abandoning Open XML?”

In a word, no.

That should be pretty clear.

He goes on to say;

We will continue to drive adoption of the compatibility pack for Open XML, which has now surpassed 40 Million individual downloads and gaining significant uptake in large-scale deployments. We will continue to develop and ship developer tools, translators, code samples, documentation, MSDN content and other material intended to educate people on how Open XML can help them solve specific business problems. Open XML is prominently featured in many Office Business Applications.

As to why we’re waiting for Office 14 to fully support IS29500, I think Gray did an excellent job of answering this in an earlier post of his;

Office 14 will update our support for IS29500. The timing for this might seem strange, but I do hope the rationale is clear. ODF 1.1 is a completed specification. The final version of IS29500 is not published today. While we do support a significant portion of IS29500 already, the BRM changes and other issues raised in public forums will inform us on how to best move forward with IS29500… and it gives me a little time to address the compatibility considerations that will be an important part of any file format related changes in Office. ODF has a potential upside in expanding interoperability, but as always, business continuity requirements will have a significant effect on our approach to these file format changes. Our customers will accept nothing less…

On a related note, a number of blogs are talking about the release of the 11.5.0 update for Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac this morning, which adds additional support for folks wanting to use OpenXML in that version of office.

Here are some of the changes;

Adds read/write compatibility for Open XML Format (.docx, .xlsx, etc.) files if installed with the Open XML Format Converter, Better stability and printing/page setup fixes for Word, Better paste compatibility with Office 2008 for all apps, Powerpoint fixes for stability with large documents

You’ll find the Microsoft KB article that talks about the release of the update here.

Sometimes you hear a comment that just make you sit up, listen more intently and think.

One such comment was made in passing during the final ministerial panel session of the OECD meeting in Seoul this week, and it was;

“The policy response to complexity is often non-determination.”, Hon. David Cunliffe, New Zealand’s Minister for Health, Telecommunications and Information Technology.

I think there is a really important lesson in there for the information technology industry. Behaviors that we take for granted, and even enjoy on occasions, are tough for many of our political leaders and decision makers to reconcile.

Many (not all) technologists and software developers are a strange hybrid of engineer and artist, using their talents to design and build solutions and often defending their work and beliefs in the way that any passionate artist would.

As a result we tend to categorize each other into groups who believe one thing, or believe the opposite… if you’re for OpenXML then you must by extrapolation be against ODF, if you’re a supporter of free software then you much be against the traditional commercial software industry.

There are plenty of individuals who don’t fit this stereotype, but if you search the web today they’re hard to find. While for many people this is a highly unfair categorization it is one that plays out in the blogosphere and very often in the professional press. We saw a lot of it during the process to standardize OpenXML where the press worked hard to represent the process as an entertaining war between OpenXML and ODF.

During the process to standardize OpenXML within ISO anybody coming out with a middle ground view was immediately categorized and dismissed as having an interest in one side of the argument or the other. Patrick Durusau is probably a good example that will be understood by those who saw the way he was treated in the blogosphere during the later stages of the process. I sincerely believe that Partick carried a helpful and neutral view of the overall landscape of document format standards, but for some that just was not good enough.

The average politician lives in a world of negotiation, give and take and mediation. I’m sure that many of the arguments put forwards by the software communities are nothing short of confusing and mostly useless in their world. When one side declares that their argument is absolutely correct while the other side of the argument declares that they’re the ones who are absolutely correct it is impossible to make a determination - with no middle ground and no room for discussion or negotiation.

For Information and Communication Technology to reach the potential that we all know it carries we need to see some large scale policy commitments from governments covering issues such as technology availability, privacy protection, security education and strong cyber security policy and legislation.

Those big decisions will be tough for political leaders to make while conflicting arguments continue to be put forwards in the way they are today.

Non determination on these issues is probably our worst nightmare.

One of the more enlightening panel discussions in Seoul earlier this week was a discussion between a couple of well known telcos on the issue of Net Neutrality.

The arguments against Net Neutrality have never really been clear to me. Microsoft’s position is to support the drive for continued neutrality of services provided on the Internet, which makes sense to me personally as we deal with issues of connecting diverse communities to the network and see the delivery of services here in Asia that may not be quite so relevant in Western Europe or the United States.

I’ll give you examples of two sets of arguments put forwards by different providers which really brought clarity to the issue for me. For the sake of simplicity (or cowardice on my part!) I’ll just call them “TelCo A” and “TelCo B”, you can easily research (or work out) who holds which position on the issue.

TelCo A was against Net Neutrality, instead putting forwards an argument for what they called intelligent networks capable of doing more caching of data and selectively managing services based upon consumer demand and requirements. The rational behind this argument was based upon a rapidly growing amount of data passing through their backbone services, projected to be around 50,000 terabytes a day by 2010, making it essential to manage data flows to ensure that service would be consistent well into the future.

TelCo B was in support of Net Neutrality, their argument was that innovation on the Internet today is very often consumer and user driven, the role of the TelCo was to provide connectivity not to decide what would run across those connections. TelCo B made a strong case for an open and neutral Internet providing a platform for innovation, increased societal connections and economic growth.

The difference between TelCo A and TelCo B? Simple really.

TelCo A has a substantial investment in copper cable to millions of doorsteps delivering limited bandwidth to broadband users. TelCo B has made huge investments in recent years in delivering fibre to those same doorsteps offering comparably infinite bandwidth to the same households.

A notably simplistic view of the issue, but all the same a clarifying one.

Quite a few sites are carrying details of the Omnia SGH-i900 phone that Samsung have announced at CommunicAsia this week. A sleek looking full featured Windows Mobile 6.1 SmartPhone.

I’ve pulled a few links from different stories on cNet Asia’s site.

They are carrying details of the handset here, they have a first take review here, and Jason S has blogged about it here.

Jason talks a little about the features of the phone in his blog entry;

Omnia is simply stunning as it comes feature-packed with a 5-megapixel camera that has image stabilizer and face-smile detection inbuilt (hope Sony and Nokia are tuned in, too). The party doesn’t stop here. The phone will also support DivX, XviD, WMV and MP4 videos.

It will also have an integrated GPS unit to help you find your way if you are lost–or if you want to explore your neighborhood more. Omnia also has the now industry standard of Bluetooth, USB mass storage and also the more important Wi-Fi.

From cNet’s story;

Notable features:
• Quadband GSM with EGDE and HSDPA
• Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
• 3.2-inch WQVGA display with TouchWiz UI
• 8GB/16GB onboard memory with microSD expansion card slot
• 5-megapixel camera with autofocus
• Wi-Fi; GPS (with A-GPS); USB 2.0; Bluetooth 2.0
• 3.5mm audio jack
• Automatic screen orientation
• Multimedia player and FM radio
• 112 x 56.9 x 12.5mm

Availability: Mid-June in Southeast Asia; July in Europe; August for rest of the world.

It has been a while since I upgraded my handset, I think it is time for a new phone!

Has anybody seen them in stock in Singapore anywhere yet?

Yesterday I shared the outline of a presentation that I made at the OECD Ministerial stakeholder side meeting that is being held in Seoul this week. I thought that it would be worthwhile sharing with you some of the higher level goals of the BIAC day that I participated in.

The goal of the session was for business leaders from around the world to express their views on the topic being discussed, and reach conclusions that will be expressed in a final report to be delivered to the Ministerial Meeting later in the week.

With the permission of the authors of the final report I thought I would share some of these outcomes with you, they make interesting and thought provoking reading;

We, the business community, envisage an Internet that is global in scope, interconnected in fact, inclusive by design, secure, reliable and available, and serving users who are increasingly mobile.

We see an Internet that is a key enabler of:

A virtuous circle of investment and innovation spurred by a growing ecosystem of services providers, application developers, device and hardware manufacturers

Innovation fueled by creativity, enabled by technology and empowering creators and users

Economic growth and social benefit in national and regional economies driven by new business models, technologies and services, as well as by greater efficiency and productivity of existing business models and services

Expanded access to and quality of education and skills development, including from ICTs,from early schooling through life-long learning, resulting in increased employment opportunities and social welfare, both within and across borders

Increased user choice of applications, products and services, provided through a wide variety of high capacity platforms, which are more available, affordable, and user-friendly

Better access to health care, particularly for those in remote areas or with fewer financial resources, through tele-medicine and related services, applications, and capabilities

Increased participation by individuals in the Internet economy not just as consumers but also as producers of information, content and services within the context of evolving uses of the Internet

Greater respect and empowerment for all stakeholders - building upon cultural, social and gender diversity and improved opportunities and mechanisms for greater collaboration and communication between across those stakeholder groups

Increased trust and confidence in the Internet, its infrastructure, and the applications and services that protect all users, especially children and the elderly

Sustainability and an eco-conscious society driven and supported by innovative ICT solutions

The report then goes on to articulate several areas where the business stakeholders felt that Government policy makers needed to act to carry these ideas forwards;

While business has the principal responsibility to bring expertise, investment and creativity to this process, the appropriate balance of government policies can continue to positively drive the future benefits of the Internet.

Therefore, for this vision to be realized, certain framework conditions must be put in place through multi-stakeholder cooperation to support the development of a broad range of sophisticated and increasingly “real-time” services transactions, communications, networks and interactions. Among these conditions are:

Support for innovation and investment

An environment characterized by appropriate incentives and legal protections, where innovation and creativity can flourish across communities, business models and disciplines

Open, fair and competitive marketplaces for new and existing market players

Incentives for investment in high speed communications infrastructure and next generation networks, as well as new media and information technologies, that will provide adequate capacity, security and capabilities for future Internet supported development and connectivity

Respect for Intellectual Property rights, and further development of systems to enforce those rights

Transparent legal and regulatory frameworks that are applied fairly with predictable outcomes

Focus on privacy and security

Continued and enhanced respect for both the privacy of personal information and the benefits of global information flows and practical solutions that might be applicable such as outreach, coordination and accountability across and for all stakeholders

A stable, reliable and trusted infrastructure capable of addressing and responding to emerging risks and threats

Better disaster preparedness in co-operation with the private sector

Market driven standards

Respect for recognized international standards that are established through market-driven, consensus-based mechanisms

As you read this text remember that it is being expressed in terms that are designed to be relevant at a ministerial or national policy level, not to directly address technical issues or debates - although of course the two are closely related. Many of these issues and statements are in the realm of the obvious for the technical community, but it will still take time before policy makers completely buy into the arguments that are being made in support of the Internet as a commerce and service delivery platform.

If you’re interested in reading more then the document can be downloaded from the BIAC site here.

As the week has progressed there have been a few debates that have been both fascinating and enlightening, I’ll try and find time later in the week to document a couple of them.

Earlier today I had the honor of participating in the Business Stakeholder meetings being held in Seoul preparing for the OECD Ministerial Meeting on “The Future of the Internet Economy” that will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

My input to the meeting was pretty straight forwards, the goal was to demonstrate that the evolution of services offered by software has been on a steady trajectory for some years now, and at every stage has offered an increased level of opportunity for those who choose to take advantage of the services offered by the network - then to go on to talk a little about what the future might hold and how government could support that future.

The evolution of the network and the increased level of opportunity that can be witnessed at various points in time is obviously interesting to watch.

Twenty five years ago the PC was a stand alone device offering little or no options for connectivity for the average user or business, as a result data was also stand alone and the effectiveness of your device directly related to the amount of data that you had personally spent time inputting.

Some fifteen or so years ago we moved on a step, the world started to talk about client-server computing and the PC began to integrate with services that were offered by an organizations data center - the PC suddenly became a lot more useful, but in many if not most cases that usefulness still ended at the boundary of your own organization.

Ten years ago the Internet began to become mainstream, some had been using the services of the Internet for longer, many had not. It does not need to be said that this was a pretty revolutionary point in time. Suddenly individuals could search for and obtain information on just about any topic they could dream of. At the same time huge opportunity opened up for business, allowing companies new and old to open store fronts that reached many hundreds of millions of customers.

Then the final stage I talked about was the idea of seamless computing, again a concept that is familiar to many in the technical world, a concept that allows diverse organizations to share data and business processes to build new services that were previously just not possible. This era includes many of the ideas that are still evolving around cloud computing and hosted services.

I chose to talk about the future in the form of three scenarios, looking at the future for the highly connected individual, the highly connected business and the highly connected society. In all three cases we can already see trends and expectations starting to emerge. Much of my presentation focused on extrapolating these trends, predicting the future is a dangerous game, who am I to say what will or won’t become components of how we live our lives in the future.

If you’re interested you can see the details of the presentation here, but at a high level the idea was to provide more empowerment for connected individuals, more opportunity for the connected business and to focus on an increased level of individual participation in the connected society.

The presentation closed with some suggestions for government policy makers around areas that need focus and attention as we create a secure and inclusive internet for the coming years,I outlined the following;

• Provide a framework and foundation for innovation and sustainable growth through the promotion of intellectual property rights, choice and interoperability and a competitive environment for software innovation;
• Promote the open and free flow of people, products, services, and ideas through free and fair trade, preserving freedom of expression online and supporting immigration policies that foster cross-border educational and professional opportunities;
• Create a more trustworthy computing environment by strengthening laws around cybercrime, online safety and privacy in accordance with global and regional norms including the Council of Europe’s Convention on cybercrime and the OECD and APEC Privacy principles;
• Transform education, learning and access to technology and promote innovative IT solutions for healthcare.
• Most important of all… move beyond “The Internet Economy” and return to “The Economy”

The final point is very important here in the Asia Pacific region, and probably other areas of the world as well. I still see many governments in the region segmenting their digital strategy and leaving it to be dealt with by an IT agency or individual technocrats.

The idea of the internet, and the benefits that it brings to individuals, businesses and society as a whole is no longer a new one.

Eventually I would like to think that we will stop thinking about “The Internet Economy” or “eGovernment”, and start thinking about “The Economy” and just “Government” - where technology plays a pivotal but tightly integrated role in the way that services and government business process are delivered.

That statement should be no surprise really, as I am frequently reminded, I’m an employee of Microsoft so I have to be a believer don’t I?

That isn’t totally fair, last time I checked I still carried my own opinions on just about every topic that is up for debate in our industry today, most of which align well with my employer and some that don’t - yet.

As to why I’m a believer I thought I’d share some thoughts from a conversation that I ended up in earlier this week.

The discussion was in Australia and with a long standing and well respected standards expert. We were debating Microsoft’s involvement in standards and if the company could be trusted to stay at the table and follow through with the statements that we have made in recent months, committing us to standards adoption, development and maintenance.

My personal observations of big strategic shifts that the company makes is that they are nowhere near as straight forward as you would assume if you were reading blogs or watching the press. They are rarely unilateral enforced changes that force every employee to do something different today compared to what they did yesterday.

It has been quite a few years now since I joined Microsoft and I remember the culture inside the company being a bit of a shock to me when I first joined. Prior to Microsoft I worked for a well known bank in the UK where we had a very traditional hierarchical chain of management, decision making and change management, if the boss said change was coming then we all changed.

My early days in Microsoft were a little frightening as I watched developers or other individuals push back on decisions being made by management, and then seeing those decisions morph into something more acceptable to most people in the room - something that would have been unheard of back in the bank.

Watching the company make big shifts in technical strategy feels like watching meta versions of those early meetings. Our adoption of open source as a component of our business is a good example.

If I go back about a decade only a tiny number of people in Microsoft seemed to know what open source was, I knew them both well. They worked in my corridor in Building 26 at the time. They were enthusiastic folks, it was obviously an uphill struggle for them to get support for their ideas, but they persevered. Eventually they managed to push WiX out onto SourceForge under the CPL, a small step in OSS terms, a big early step for Microsoft.

What has happened between then and today is that more and more people within Microsoft have taken the time to learn about the opportunity that open source brings, and as a result have worked out how it applies to their part of the business. As OSS projects get kicked off there isn’t a “borg” like way of delivering or managing these projects, individuals make decisions about what works for them, some are spot on, some not quite so perfect as a couple of recent examples have shown. Regardless, everybody learns along the way.

Somewhere along the line senior management throw their support behind these projects and eventually, at some point in the future, an open source element may just become something that Microsoft does as part of the general lifecycle of many products. It is impossible to say when that will be, or speak with any absolute certainty about exactly what it will look like when it happens. Individuals will make the final decisions about the details, and you can’t second guess them.

Like many big changes before it though, you will probably wake up one sunny morning, somebody will use open source and Microsoft together in the same sentence and nobody will notice… it will just be the way of things.

When I step back and look at the companies drive for standards and interoperability I can see a very similar pattern.

You can see the early examples of individuals doing their best to support one standard or another, sometimes getting it right, sometimes missing the mark. You can also see more and more Microsoft people talking about standards, getting involved in developing standards and participating in technical committees that relate to their part of the business.

Internally product groups are starting to talk about the opportunities that are made available by standardizing one piece of technology or another, or what happens if a piece of our existing product is swapped out for, or complemented by, an existing standard or specification.

Finally the public support for interoperability and standards has come from the highest levels in the company in the form of the Interoperability Principles which signals to everybody involved that we’re past the milestone of full support from the business leaders… it is big change in the making.

For me at least, the key is in understanding what it takes to make that level of change real in a company like Microsoft, especially with Microsoft’s culture, and then making a guess about how far along the continuum we are.

It isn’t about a Corporate Vice President standing up and declaring that from today onwards we will all be standards compliant, it is about 70,000 employees all working on diverse sets of products becoming aware of the opportunities that interoperability and standards present to the company, then working out what that means for their particular product or business unit - of course the CVP support helps, obviously it makes a real difference, but it is eventually the individuals that make the decision to embrace interoperability as a part of their everyday activities that makes the change happen.

If I look at the curve that places open source at a point where it is understood by Microsoft as a company then I would guess that we have grown from the two guys in building 26 understanding open source ten years ago to somewhere in the region of 50k employees understanding it today, and as a result you’re starting to see the external effect in terms of products, projects and general behaviors from various teams.

Interoperability and standards is probably a little way behind the shift to understand open source, but internally and externally it is hard to disagree with the statement that it is on the same trajectory.

It will be a while before I expect to see everybody get everything absolutely right in the interoperability domain, you can probably predict that there will be hiccups along the way.

So long as we learn from those hiccups, and the vibrant conversations that are taking place on the topic of interoperability and standards inside and outside of the company continue then, well, I’ll remain a believer.

I see Eric White is carrying details of the release of the OpenXML Powertools on his blog today.

If you want to be able to generate OpenXML documents on the server, without an installation of Microsoft Office, then this is the way to do it.

You’ll find the details on Eric’s blog by following this link;

Processing Open XML documents server-side using PowerShell is a powerful approach for creating, modifying, and transforming Open XML documents. The PowerTools for Open XML are examples and guidance that show how to do this. They consist of PowerShell cmdlets, and a number of example scripts that demonstrate the use of the cmdlets. Examples include automated word processing document and spreadsheet generation, and preparing documents for distribution external to a company, including removing comments, accepting revisions, applying a uniform theme to them, and applying a watermark to them.

His blog links to a video that explains how to install and use PowerTools for OpenXML in conjunction with the release version of the OpenXML SDK.

The three scenarios covered in the linked video are;

• Developers who need to automatically generate documents programmatically. For example, developers may need to generate word processing documents from an XML file containing customer data.
• IT professionals who often need to send reports, charts, and spreadsheets that summarize the state of their network, servers, computers, and more.
• Information workers who need to prepare documents for publication outside of their company. To present a consistent appearance of documents, information workers may want to accept all revisions in the document, remove all comments, give a consistent style to the documents, digitally sign them, add a watermark, and more.

He also has a collection of other information that you will find helpful if you are looking for a way to generate or play with OpenXML documents on the server, or on a desktop without Microsoft Office installed.

Back in March of this year, Doug Mahugh talked about the roadmap for the OpenXML SDK, an important set of tools that will allow developers to quickly develop applications that read and right OpenXML (ECMA-376) documents.

This first version of the SDK, which is available as of today, includes a set of APIs capable of manipulating Open XML Formats at the part level. This version of the SDK is a fully supported release that developers can use to build and deploy shipping solutions.

Version 2 will contain all the necessary components of the Open XML API architecture and the first CTP will be available in late summer on the MSDN download site.

Hundreds of solutions have been created by developers worldwide building on the 2007 Microsoft Office system. There are currently nearly 150 partners who have developed Open XML solutions. You can see profiles of some of them in the MSDN Partner directory, including Captaris, Intergen and Xinnovation just to name a few.

Through the Open XML SDK’s sample code and how-to articles on the programming object model, developers will be able to decrease their development time for scenarios such as:

• Creating documents programmatically
• Customizing parts within documents
• Adding and inspecting custom XML within documents
• Working with and customizing document properties

You can download the OpenXML SDK v1.0 from here, you will find more reading material on the MSDN site here, or you can participate in the MSDN discussion forums for the SDK here.