With the help of Intergen here in Wellington, and with support from a small team of other folks in New Zealand we have released an add-in for users of Microsoft Word 2008 SP2 and above that will allow them to save content that they produce directly to the MediaWiki file format.

We initially did this to support educators locally who wanted to be able to publish their work to the WikiEducator project, but it is obviously equally applicable to anybody else wanting to save from Word on a PC to a Wiki.

The add-in is written to take advantage of the converter interfaces that were added to Microsoft Office 2007 in Service Pack 2. The source code, which provides a reference for others interested in adding custom ‘Save As’ functionality to Microsoft Office, is available under the OSI approved Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded here.

For end users, the installer for the add-in can be downloaded from here.

My colleague Andrew Gordon has written a little more about the project over at Port25.

I’ve talked about the importance of the protocol documentation in past posts, but I think this is the first time we have had things written up and available so far in advance of a product launch.

Tom Robertson announced the availability of the Office 2010 protocol documentation this morning on the Microsoft on the Issues blog:

This kind of open access to information is a central tenet in our Interoperability Principles. The aim of these principles is to give all software developers—including commercial ISVs, open source developers, and developers in customer IT departments—technical information that can be useful in building products that work well with our most popular products. All told, we’ve published more than 33,000 pages of technical documentation relating to interoperability with these Office products, and we’ve seen more than 250,000 downloads of the entire range of our interoperability documentation in just the past year.

This model of transparency through access to developer resources has already enabled real-world interoperability in other areas. In December 2008, for example, Microsoft published detailed protocol documentation for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), as part of the expansion of our EAS IP Licensing Program. EAS is the technology that enables mobile devices to synchronize e-mail, calendar and other information with Microsoft Exchange Server. While EAS had been licensed in the past, the posting of this documentation provided consistent, open access for all developers to the Microsoft protocols built into EAS that enable interoperability. As a result, many leading companies—including Microsoft competitors like Apple, Google, Nokia, and Palm—have licensed the EAS protocol patents, making it possible for their customers to synchronize Exchange data on the most widely used mobile phone platforms in the world.

That second paragraph is a great example of how this documentation is being used.

As citizens we often forget that Governments are our governments, instead we choose to think about them as huge bureaucracies within which we have little or no personal role to play. We pay our taxes, fill out relevant forms, pay for the right licenses and conform to the laws of the land.

The idea of Open Government gives us the opportunity to participate in a more relevant way in decision making while at the same time enjoying more transparency around the actions that government takes and the information that it holds that are relevant to those actions.

I don’t for a moment envy the US administration as it aims to turn these words into reality, with thousands of agencies, tens of millions of government employees and literally billions of government documents.

As they make steps towards making the policy into reality though I do think it is important to think about the roots of transparency and participation.

With that in mind I wanted to share a couple of examples of mine from a recent trip to the UK, one through a personal friendship and another as I walked through my home town of Blackburn on a chilly January morning.

My first example is one that I think represents what it takes to become a real participant in government. Like anything in life sitting on the sidelines poking at things we don’t like rarely makes a difference, getting involved with those issues and working towards goals that you have a personal connection to is frequently a lot more productive.

One of my longest standing friends back home in Lancashire really embodies this. Darren Reynolds is a resident of a town close to where I grew up, he and I met when I was in my late teens through a common interest in computing and later we went on to run a small company together before I joined Microsoft.

While I moved to London, Seattle then Singapore, Darren never left his home town of Burnley. Frequently when we met he would articulate the virtues of the town, he sees significant opportunity there, sees enterprise in his fellow residents and has a deep personal passion for the town.

About four years ago he started to think about what he could do to build on that passion by participating in local politics, today he is an elected member of the town council and in the future I’m sure his passion for the town, the people and the commerce there will carry him on to do great things for his community.

This example is pretty key as we think about participation in government. Darren realized that nobody in government was going to come knocking on his door to ask him for his opinion or to draw upon his expertise, so he got involved for himself. If any type of open government is going to take hold then each and every one of us have to think about the role that we want to play in that.

Some, like Darren, will want to run for office, some may want to contribute expertise and others may actively decide that they don’t want to personally participate. The key is that we all get a choice about the role that we want to play, and we make that choice for ourselves.

The second example was a bit of a shock to me even though it is something that has been taking place in my own home town since I was a kid.

On the Saturday morning I had a little shopping to do, so I headed into the local town center. Blackburn isn’t a prosperous place when compared to other parts of England, but it is a wonderful place all the same. It is a market town and once the center of a thriving cotton industry.

The political process in Blackburn was alive and well that morning, a second good examples of more traditional transparency and participation.

In the square outside of the town hall (stood on an actual soap box!) was Jack Straw.

Mr. Straw has been the local member of parliament for as long as I can remember. Today he is a senior minister and for many an internationally visible politician. 

Throughout that time Mr. Straw has continued to stay connected to his local constituency, and on a regular basis he can be found on that soap box talking to whoever turns up about whatever issue is relevant on the day. On this particular Saturday morning he was talking about the banking bailouts and what it would mean to the people of Blackburn and East Lancashire.

Across the street from Mr. Straw was another example of political participation. A small group of three or four local (I assume) residents who didn’t agree with the Labour governments actions in Iraq. They had turned out to protest, hand out leaflets and ask Mr. Straw some tough questions on his policy positions.

The complete audience for this event was about thirty people, the security presence consisted of one visible police officer. My father tells me that Mr. Straw has been holding these open forums in Blackburn every month for decades.

It is irrelevant if you agree with Mr. Straw’s politics or not, what was really special about this event was that it is a transparent and participative political process in action. Anybody could turn up and participate in the discussion and while doing so they were free to express whatever views they held and have them discussed.

As we chatter on our technology blogs about open government and what we believe it means it is vital that we keep examples like this in mind. In itself a social networking tool or a Web 2.0 technology is not going to bring any more voices to the table unless the people owning those voices choose to participate, just like government won’t become any more transparent unless real steps are taken to make information available to people in ways that they are want and are able to consume it.

To make Open Government work the world needs to see more people like Darren who have real passion for their own community along with the passion to get directly involved, and more Jack Straws who are willing to stand up and openly discuss their former decisions and future plans in front of the people who elected them.

Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).

Additionally Microsoft will be developing additional controls, or widgets, to run on top of jQuery that will be easily deployable within your .NET applications. jQuery helpers will also be included in the server-side portion of .NET development (in addition to the existing helpers) providing complementary functions to existing ASP.NET AJAX capabilities.

The library will ship unchanged with VS2008, will have full intellisense support, will be supported by Microsoft’s Product Support Services (PSS) and licensed via the existing MIT license.

Matt Asay sees this as a big step for us;

Microsoft is too big and too important a company to have ignored the missing ingredient in its open-source strategy: contribution back to existing communities. Open source can be a fantastic complement to Microsoft’s existing products and to its businesses. Open source is a tool. It’s a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

Did Microsoft finally join the open-source community? It looks like it from here.

You’ll find much more detail on Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman’s blogs.

As the announcement happened while those of us here in Asia were sleeping peacefully pretty much everything that could have been said on the topic has already been said, so I thought it might be more useful to present more of a round up of what I’ve been reading this morning.

First of all a little about the announcement itself.

There is a lot more to this than just support for ODF in the Microsoft Office product, although obviously the native support for ODF is a focus for many of the words that have been written overnight.

The company also announced plans to offer greater support for a number of alternative document formats – including Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) – within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.  

In addition, Microsoft will support the future maintenance and evolution of these format standards by participating on the standards committees charged with these activities. This means that Microsoft folks will join the OASIS ODF TC and participate alongside IBM, Sun, Novell and everybody else present.

Finally ODF will be added to the list of specifications that are covered by the Open Specification Promise, ensuring that every developer has access to any intellectual property that Microsoft might put forwards during these maintenance processes.

The Microsoft blogs that first carried the announcement were the usual folks.

Jason Matusow looks at this announcement in the context of the companies continuing commitment to interoperability as a tenant of the way we design products and collaborate with the rest of the industry. Jason and I share views on the issue of so called “single standards” and he eloquently explains that further in his post.

This is not about any one document format “winning” – it is about enabling customers to evaluate and use document formats that make the most sense for them. Just as the MS deal with JBOSS didn’t mean we were saying that J2 was better than .NET – it is that we want our customers to have the most positive experience possible when using our product.

Doug Mahugh talks about some of the more technical details of the announcement, as well as discussing what this means to existing initiatives. He talks about our continued commitment to the translator projects for ODF, DAISY, UOF etc. and links to the ODF Translator team blog where they have just kicked off version two of that project.

Finally Doug answers a question I was asked over dinner earlier this week… we’ll be adding APIs that allow third parties to intercept the ODF load and save paths so if anybody disagrees with our implementation then all the tools are available for them to write their own.

Gray Knowlton digs around the “Why?” question, again one that came up in my dinner conversation earler this week. Why now? Why when OpenXML just got approval? etc.

Success in our industry (like a lot of other industries) boils down to successfully addressing the needs of customers. By offering greater choice for file formats, our products address more scenarios and provide greater flexibility in enabling specific solutions. From a pragmatic standpoint, adding ODF to Office allows us to re-focus Office on product capabilities rather than a debate about file formats. We’re quite comfortable when we compete in the marketplace on these merits.

Looking around the blogosphere this morning the announcement appears to be very well received by just about everybody, as I said earlier in this post most people seem to be focused on the component of this announcement that talks about native ODF support in Microsoft Office, but it is important to recognize that this is bigger than just that one item.

The announcement, in my view, demonstrates a strong commitment to the Interoperability Principles that we shared earlier this year. As always there is still much work to be done, but this is a great step in the right direction.

If you want to read a little more then here are some links that you might find useful. There is a lot more out there, feel free to link anything addition that you find in the comments of this post.

Press: PC World NZ, Information Week, CNet News, SD Times, New York Times, itWire, Slashdot(!)

Blogs: Stephen McGibbon (MS), Jerry Fishenden (MS), Brian Jones (MS), Jesper Lund Stocholm, Richard Koman, Andy Updegrove, Bob Sutor, Ed Brill, GeekZone NZ, Joe Wilcox, Eric White (MS), Savio Rodrigues

On a final note, I feel compelled to pull one paragraph out of Bob Sutor’s (IBM) post;

There is no reason for more governments and organizations not to start mandating the use of ODF. If you are not using ODF today, you should put adoption plans in place.

There is an area where Microsoft and IBM seem to disagree.

My own personal view on this, which appears to be shared by a majority of the customers I work with, is that mandating a single standard for anything IT related is generally not a great move for government.

IT standards, like any area of technology, move on.

Governments need to remain ready to move with the technology that is in use by their citizens and businesses, mandates for information technology standards often do little more than operate as a hurdle to doing this.

This week at MIX’08 in the United States they have done it again, this time releasing a Silverlight 2.0 based OpenXML WordprocessingML viewer.

The work has been done by a small team over the last couple of months, with James Newton-King leading the development work, James talks a little on his blog about what it has taken to build this.

The work is making the headlines both in the New Zealand press, and overseas.

Here is an extract from New Zealand’s Computerworld;

Kiwi software developer Intergen is launching software it claims is a world first at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas this week.

The company’s TextGlow product allows users to view Word documents created in Microsoft’s controversial Office Open XML format without having to download them and without having Microsoft Office or Word installed on their computers.

[...cut...]

As one of the first applications to combine Office Open XML and Silverlight, TextGlow is a technological breakthrough. It works cross platform and is freely available to all users.

This is a really good example of a small team making use of the OpenXML specification to build a really cool tool!

You can take a look for yourself here.

One of those developers is Jason Harrop, who has been working on a couple of projects using the spec. The first was a set of tools that allows users to simultaneously edit documents, using a plugin for Microsoft Office on one end of his applcation, and a set of Linux based backend tools to manage the communications.

His second project is a java based application that will allow users to work with OpenXML documents regardless of their choice of platform, he calls the project Docx4All. Additionally, all of Jason’s code for these two projects  is published under the GPL.

Docx4all is a WYSIWYG editor for docx files which runs on Vista, XP, and linux. Of course, it uses docx as its native file format. It is currently a proof of concept but the application already provides basic formatting and editing (including cut/paste, and styles) and so on.

Jason tells me the WordprocessingML in the docx file is unmarshalled directly into classes generated from the OOXML schemas, using plutext’s docx4j library. In principle this approach allows for 100% compatibility with with other existing office automation applications, since there is no conversion to another internal file format.

There doesn’t seem to be any table support in the current release, but there is basic support for printing, via PDF.

If you want to take a look for yourself then you can launch docx4all from your web browser by following this link. It will install locally, so you don’t have to be online to use it.

If you’re interested in taking a deeper look then a virtual appliance containing a full docx4all development environment is available from here. The appliance runs Ubuntu, a good example of OpenXML development and implementation taking place completely away from Microsoft’s stack.

It turns out that RosettaNet do a lot of their development work in their labs in Malaysia, and we are starting to see fruits of their efforts appear in the market.

This week there have been several stories in the press in Malaysia about the development work that has been taking place, and this morning you will find a regional article on ZDNet Asia.

From the article;

“Having proven itself to be a successful standard with large enterprises and multinationals operating in Malaysia, RosettaNet is now moving into its next phase of encouraging local Small Medium Industries (SMIs) to automate their procurement processes,” Foong said.

“Open XML opens up exciting opportunities for RAE based solutions, such as its support for custom defined schemas which facilitates wider success of e-commerce, while assuring users of long-term preservation of data.

“Another benefit of Open XML for the SMI community is its capability of storing and managing business data in documents, resulting in lower costs for implementing business process automation that enhances global competitiveness,” Foong added.

Foong Heng Huo, is the director of RosettaNet Malaysia.

This work with RosettaNet very clearly demonstrates the value that the Ecma Open XML draft brings to implementation of business process systems, something that you just can’t do with “other” formats.

 A couple of days ago the comments on another post strayed into the area of custom schema support in the Ecma Open XML specification. In my reply I documented a scenario that explained how this functionality might be put to use by developers. This is a really exciting part of the Open XML functionality, so I thought it might be worthwhile pulling the comment out into a post in its own right… so here it is.

The scenario below looks at how the Open XML specification may be used in a medical environment, looking at how some data that starts off being input into a document may pass through a series of systems, both internal and some provided externally.

First of all forget about the file format as an office automation document for a moment, and think about it as a container for data in its raw form. The Ecma Open XML spec defines a way to embed custom schema into the document that can represent just about any data you like, then guarantee that it will remain intact as one application or another opens the document, works with it then saves it out.

Now bringing it back to being a document format again, Open XML allows you to bind elements from those custom schema back to properties in the document if you choose, so not only can the custom schema be manipulated by automated systems, but also by a user through a form in their office automation application.

If we apply that to our health-care scenario then you can imagine the Open XML document being used in a diagnosis process. A clinician opens up an office automation app and documents the patients symptoms into custom fields in the document. When the document is saved the patient data is stored independently as a custom schema in the docx file.

As a next step a billing system picks up the newly created document and embeds a second custom schema into the document that includes invoice information that will eventually make its way back to the patients health-care insurer. An addition to this scenario that is only important in so much as it shows that a single document can have multiple embedded custom schemas. The billing system only needs code to work with the OPC, it does not need to deal with the document, or the diagnosis information.

As a final step, I’ll submit my encapsulated patient transaction to a web service somewhere that analyzes the custom XML document that describes the patients symptoms, and as a result drops a third custom schema into the OPC that details a possible diagnosis and some suggested medication. Again, no office automation involved, and no need for the web service to understand the document or the billing schema.

The original clinician can then reopen the document in their original office automation app and work with all the new information that has been added by various systems.

What is important about the way Open XML deals with this is the segmentation of the data and the ability for the developer to decide up on the structure of the custom embedded schema. This means that the Open XML spec is not dictating how this data is stored, and developers can embed any one of the thousands of XML based business schema standards that exist in the world today. In the example above, for the US, a developer might choose to embed the HL7 schema into the Open XML file.

This capability in itself is a lot more to do with being able to use Open XML in end point systems in a larger SoA environment, and a less to do with what you might traditionally think of in terms of office automation apps, although of course the office automation app still has a key role to play whenever the document reaches a user.

I use a health-care example, but it could be any business process, and I’m already seeing examples of enterprise organizations doing this sort of work in scenarios such as supply chain or banking processes.

Can you do this with other doc formats? Well, most of them just are not designed to do this. The majority of the plethora of document formats that are out there are designed with pure OA or document presentation in mind. For those that do allow the embedding of custom data elements it isn’t clear to me that this data would be protected as it passes through different applications, or that it would possible to implement in a form that allows the segmentation of the data and the conformance to existing business process schema standards.

You can see a demo of how this might look for the user in this video. The demo is based upon work in Microsoft Word, but it could be done in any other application that supports Open XML embedded custom schema.

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.