Oliver Bell’s Weblog

The laziest type of blog post is one that just quotes a bunch of other people and adds little value in its own right, I tend to use this blog as a combination of a place to document some of my own views and a place to store my own notes as various events of interest take place, so I know that from time to time I’m guilty of over quoting.

This post is a combination of the two. Whenever Microsoft makes an announcement that is blog worthy there are generally two types of post that get generated, initially there is quick commentary on the announcement itself, but then shortly afterwards more considered words start to appear as people take time to think though the details.

This morning I thought it might be worthwhile bundling together some of the other posts that are out there, positive and negative.

So, here are a few of the more notable entries that are floating around this morning, for those interested in the topic of Microsoft and our support for both interoperability and document formats I think this makes for a reasonable round up of many of the views that are out there.

In each case I have pulled out a small quote from the posts I have linked, I would encourage you to follow the links and read the whole post though - there will always be more to digest than just my brief extract.

OpenMalaysiaBlog, Yoon Kit Yong - “Microsoft Office Supports ODF? AYE!”

However, I am an optimist, and I do hope that the Microsofties driving ODF support in core Microsoft applications are sincere in their intent. So far, I don’t see too much of the smarmy doublespeak this time in their press release, and I really applaud the guys for that. Although they tried to dilute the ODF subject with PDF (didnt they already have that last year?) and XPS (who really uses that?) and UOF (ni hui jiang ODF ma?), the message is quite clear.

So overall, its very encouraging. I hope Microsoft follows through with this announcement, and does not mess it up when they finally release the patch.

Before today, it used to be very hard in taking these statements seriously  …

“…  it is very important that customers have the freedom to choose from a range of technologies to meet their diverse needs.”
-  July 2006Jean Paoli, GM of Interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft

… but now its definitely reads a lot less hypocritical.

Kudos Microsofties, and I wish your team and efforts well

Strong and supportive words indeed from one of the louder voices driving for ODF adoption here in the region. Yoon Kit and Ditesh (two of the principal bloggers at OpenMalaysia) frequently bring a blunt sense of reality to the way that the work that we do across the region is received by the FOSS community.

I’m pretty pleased to see Yoon Kit carrying a sense of optimism around what we’re doing here, but would encourage them both to keep our feet held close to the fire as we deliver on the promises we’re making!

NOOOXML.org - “Microsoft finally playing nice?”

A press release from Microsoft now promises native ODF support in the next service pack for Office 2007, while full support for the ISO version of OOXML will have to wait until the next major release of Office. Have they finally realized that their “format war” was a lost cause, and that the formal ISO acceptance of DIS29500 was a victory only on paper? If this is an honest attempt to play nice, it is a very welcome move. Of course, only time will tell if they will deliver on this promise, but the tone has changed dramatically, and this might actually be a good time to celebrate. We wish to welcome Microsoft to the party, even though they are very late and managed to make a fool of themselves in the process of trying to fight this outcome in every way possible. Had they only made this move a year ago, it would have saved many people a lot of trouble, including themselves. It is probably safe to assume that it was the strong opposition that forced them to the ODF table.

Pretty encouraging words from a site that was originally set up to oppose the work that we did to standardize the OpenXML file format. It is unfortunate that this is still seen as some kind of “Document Format War”. I still hold a strong view that different document formats serve different purposes. Our announcement yesterday is demonstrable of that point of view, support for ODF adds to the 20+ formats that Microsoft Office already supports, and as additional customer demand comes forth I would not be surprised to see that list continue to grow over the years.

Arnaud Le Hors - “My take on why Microsoft finally decided to support ODF”

One trick they could try and pull for instance would be to put just enough support for ODF to claim that they support it but not enough for people to really use it systematically. They could then tell customers who complain something isn’t working that it’s because ODF isn’t powerful enough, and if they want the full power of Office they need to use OOXML. That’d be a sneaky way to fulfill the ODF requirement set by customers and then force people into using OOXML anyway. Sneaky but not unlike Microsoft unfortunately. So, beware.

Reading assumptions about why we’re doing what we’re doing is always fun, I would like to think that just about everything possible is on the table and out in public view at this point, anything beyond that is just conjecture.

Maybe we’re also planning to take total control of the worlds chocolate supply, after all we do have an office in Switzerland. Next time I’m attending a planning meeting in our secret pacific island volcano I’ll ask around and see what I can uncover.

Francois Ragnet - “Microsoft opens up Office to open document formats”

Interesting to see how Microsoft have moved away from their proprietary document formats, which were previously considered as their “crown jewels”, and now focus their innovation efforts on the applications themselves. More surprising though, is the fact that Office 2007 will not support OOXML, Microsoft’s own competing format for ODF, which they recently “fast-tracked” through ISO approval. In any event, this is great news for the Future of Documents, as this is a major step towards one open document format for easy interchange between applications.

François raises an interesting point. I totally agree, innovation around office suites in general from now on will come through improvements in usability, accessibility and the role of the suite as a developer platform.

Value of an office suite will increasingly be measured thorough a combination of increased individual and group productivity and the role of that suite in integrated and diverse business processes.

Jesper Lund Stocholm - “No reason anymore to mandate anything but ODF?”

A lot of people are now spinning information about this move pulling the rug under OOXML and that ODF should be mandated everywhere - but nothing could be further from the truth. The reason why we approved OOXML still stands and the incompatible feature-sets of OOXML and ODF did not suddenly become compatible. There are still stuff in OOXML that cannot be persisted in ODF and vice versa. The backwards compatibility to the content in the existing corpus of binary documents is still a core value of OOXML and this incompatibility of ODF has not disappeared. You will still loose information and functionality when you choose to persist an OOXML-file in ODF … just as you would when persisting it to old WordPerfect formats. Insisting that having ODF-support in Microsoft Office (12 SP2) makes the need for OOXML go away is a moot point - since I am sure no one would argue to replace OOXML with TXT - simply because TXT is a supported format in Microsoft Office.

Ditto. Microsoft’s support and commitment to the OpenXML format is as strong as it ever was. As Jesper highlights for Denmark, OpenXML provides functionality that is key for customers, partners and the IT ecosystem as a whole. Support for one document format will never negate the need for another that is designed for a different purpose.

Groklaw, Pamela Jones - “Microsoft supporting ODF? –Close, But No Cigar”

I wish I could wholeheartedly applaud the Microsoft announcement about native support for ODF, but I can’t. Of course, it’s better to have native support for ODF, no matter what motives may have influenced Microsoft’s announcement, and I’m glad about that for the sake of end users. But it hasn’t happened yet. Was the word ‘vaporware’ not coined for Microsoft? In any case, I’m in the “I will believe it when I see it” category when it comes to Microsoft. They’ve earned my caution.

Fair enough Pamela, it is up to us to deliver from here, no disagreement there. Enough said. You might want to look up the word ‘vaporware’ though, it wasn’t coined for Microsoft!

Alex Brown - “Microsoft Moves to Support ODF Standard”

Whatever Microsoft’s motivations, users are set to benefit from a world in which MS Office, easily the most used office software, has aligned itself with open, documented standards. But while announcementsare all well and good the true test of Microsoft’s commitment will be found in the byte-by-byte details of the files that Office reads and writes. ODF lays down some strict rules for how these XML documents must be in order to be conformant, and software exists for testing them – I look forward on this blog to holding the magnifying glass to Microsoft’s efforts to see if what is claimed to be Standard really is so. Success will deserve praise; failure will deserve correction.

Alex has an interesting (as in genuinely interesting, not as in curious) role to play in the evolution of both OpenXML and ODF thorough his position in SC34. Ultimately ISO/JTC1 SC34 will be the working group who not only lead both the evolution of these formats, but also help the world understand what interoperability between formats actually means and how it can be best achieved.

Sheri McLeish - “Microsoft Crashing The Party: Announces Intent to Support ODF And Join Standards Boards”

Wow. Microsoft opened up today, taking a nearly 180-degree turn to announce its intent to support ODF, PDF, and XPS. Overall, this is a great, positive move. While unexpected, it’s not surprising. Microsoft has been moving toward more open standards, like with its recent DAISY XML initiative. But it’s also a no-brainer. Sticking exclusively with its competing Open XML was divisive, complicating IT’s efforts to leverage the benefits that open source XML provides.

This is back to that point around the value of Microsoft Office supporting multiple standards. What I see in Microsoft’s moves is a position that is driven by market and customer demands. Following needs of the community of companies and people who use our software seems to be the right route to take, and that is really what the addition of ODF to the list of supported formats in Microsoft Office is all about. 

Glyn Moody - “Microsoft and ODF: Has Hades Gone Sub-Zero?”

As Microsoft well knows, these markets are where most of the future growth can be expected. If they are bent on ODF adoption regardless of ISO ratification for OOXML, Microsoft will effectively be shut out of the hottest markets unless it builds some bridges (one of its favourite metaphors at the moment). Supporting this view is the fact that Microsoft’s latest announcement also includes news support for the less well-known (in the West, at least) Chinese national document file format standard, Uniform Office Format (UOF).

Again - more commentary on following customer and market demand. UOF (Uniform Office Format) is a big deal for us here in Asia, our neighbor to the north is keen to see it as the principal format for documents produced in China.

Rick Jeliffe - “Success has a thousand fathers…”

Developers/standarizers on both sides need to be whacked on their heady heads with a mackeral that Not Invented Here is not acceptable. I think people accept that until now there have been reasonable excuses: that Office could not implement ODF before it existed, that Office could not use ODF as its default format until ODF had even minimal features and completeness, that OpenFormula could be syntactically incompatible with everyone else’s spreadsheet syntax, that ODF’s graphics could cherry pick SVG without really providing actual SVG compatibility (SVG Tiny please?), and so on. (Actually, I don’t mean NIH in the sense that there absolutely cannot be multiple syntaxes or technologies for the same thing if there is some historical reason or feature difference, I am primarily talking about rejecting features merely because of their provenance.) The state of the schemas for DIS 29500 mark 1 and ODF 1.0 just reveal their level of maturity and production-level adoption, and there is nothing wrong with being an adolescent. ODF and OOXML will grow up, and they need the partisan spirit and the NIH attitude to be kept under control to do so.

I left this one until last because I think it goes to the heart of where we all need to go, and how we should think about operating from here.

Choice in document formats isn’t a war, it is a discussion, different people and groups hold different views and none can be considered wrong. Participation in the development of ODF and OpenXML provides a platform for these discussions, and a forum for resolution of the technical, political and in some cases ideological issues that need to be resolved.

I personally think we’re on a good path at the moment, but will agree with Pamela’s comment that it is principally up to us to deliver from here…

It has been a fun week watching the goings on in Geneva, some of the well orchestrated activity outside of the BRM has been fascinating to follow. A little like a high tech episode of The Bold and The Beautiful.

Probably by pure coincidence Google’s Open Source Programs Manager, Zaheda Bhorat, added a post to The Official Google Blog expressing a “wish” for open document standards, Google’s corporate position on OpenXML standardization.

The call to action for the post appears to be a suggestion that OpenXML needs to be “unified” or “harmonized” into ODF. A simple sounding task with a much more complex reality behind it.

It was  a topic that came up frequently during the technical evaluation period of the DIS29500 (Open XML) fast track process, and I thought it might be useful to share some personal thoughts around what I think would need to happen to achieve the (laudable) goal of harmonizing the ODF and Open XML file formats at this stage.

As I say, “Harmonize with ODF” (generally meaning unify) is a straight forward enough sounding task, but in my view the commentators on this topic often discount a lot of reality that would need to be dealt with along the way.

For the purpose of this post I need to take a simplistic approach to the issues involved, ideally any solution to the proposal to unify standards would also have to find a way to encompass the many document formats that exist in the market today, not just ODF and Open XML, but for the purpose of this text I will just address a potential path for IS26300 (ODF) and DIS29500 (Open XML).

There is probably one other expectation that needs to be set before we can begin to think about unification. The market today already has significant enough adoption of both file formats for us not to be able to dismiss any existing store of documents in either format, which means that we probably can’t take the approach of modifying one format or the other.

As a result the simple integration of the two formats probably isn’t directly possible at this stage and any effort to unify them would most likely lead to a third standard rather than the unified single standard that many workshop participants seemed to be looking for during the technical discussions around Open XML. Even if this was to become DIS26301, it would undoubtedly be significantly different from the IS26300 ODF standard, or any of the other revisions of ODF, that we know today.

Assuming that we have some clarity around which formats we are planning to unify we next have to work out where we will manage the project from. Today Open XML is maintained by Ecma, and ODF is maintained by OASIS, two different but not entirely dissimilar organizations. As part of the fast track process Ecma has proposed a joint maintenance agreement for OpenXML within ISO’s SC34 committee, maintenance of OpenXML will end up in SC34 at the end of the current process.

At this point in time OASIS does not have any such agreement in place, instead choosing to manage maintenance of the ODF format outside of the ISO process. We would need to find a common maintenance process and committee, given that this is all about ISO standardization it makes sense (to me at least) that SC34 would be the right place to do that, and giving up the current level of control that OASIS has over ODF would be a small step to take within the framework of delivering a more comprehensive single standard.

As a second step, the newly gathered committee would need to agree on design goals. Currently ODF is designed to be first and foremost an office automation document format, whereby Open XML is designed allow the document format to be used as a container for both office automation documents and a transport mechanism for other data that may be in use in an enterprise environment. The goal for Open XML in this context is that SMEs and Enterprises will be able to build their documents and related management tools into end to end SoA based business systems.

Next, now that we have the committee in place and decisions made around the major design goals, there would need to be a stage of technical unification. There are a couple of issues that would need to be considered here, nothing that would be impossible to deal with, but they would have to be cleared up.

The first is that the architectural structures of ODF and Open XML are significantly different once you open up the ZIP containers. ODF favours a simple structure with most of the XML held in a small number of files within a defined relationship.

OpenXML offers a more complex structure that exists to allow for embedded data from non office automation applications. The XML is broken up into parts of a document and the relationship between the files is created on a document by document basis, this design principal was originally selected for Open XML with the goal of offering more flexibility for scenarios such as server based document assembly applications and document security.

The second is that the XML notations within the current structures are very different as they stand today. It was pointed out in many of the technical workshops that ODF carries a very high weighting on the importance of “human readable XML”, whereby Open XML places a similar level of weighting on delivering the level of performance that is expected to be required in enterprise and data centre environments, this is achieved in Open XML by using notation that is not quite so pleasing to the human eye but is designed to be significantly more efficient for the applications that are expected to process it.

Once these two issues are worked out the committee would then need to look at the XML tags that are defined in each standard and ensure that all requirements from both standards were met. From the public discussions that I have read and participated in on this topic I think there is a general belief that this one step is the only one would be necessary.

Finally the issue of backward compatibility with existing binary documents would need to be addressed. Open XML carries a design goal of allowing the full mapping in XML for the corpus of existing binary documents, created by earlier versions of the Microsoft Office applications, that are stored by individuals and enterprises today.

The new standard would need to also carry forward the tags for the functionality that exists in these documents, only some of which currently sits in the 650+ pages of the ODF specification at this stage. I’m guessing given the increased scope that comes with the single document format goal there would also be a need to look at the binary OpenOffice.org formats, WordPerfect formats and maybe other file formats from applications that have not yet been discussed.

Assuming that partnerships and technical agreements can be reached on all of these points then the next step for the committee participants is to build this work into a document or set of documents and prepare to submit the text of the new third standard to ISO for approval.

In parallel applications would need to start adopting the new format, developers would need to be trained to understand how it works, tools would need to be build to allow testing and format manipulation etc.

All this is achievable, and in the spirit of unification the whole industry would need to be prepared to step up and deliver on this work in a mode of complete partnership and transparency.

Finally,  once this is all done we still need to look back at the other document formats that are left out of the simple scenario that I have sketched out above. This would include looking at the other existing document formats that are in use in the market today SGML, HTML, PDF/A, PDF/X and so on, some would be relevant for further unification work and obviously some would not – just another decision that needs to be made.

Again, I’ll state that these are personal views and not in anyway an official position of my employer.

Over the coming years we will see how the industry and the standards processes answer this question, assuming it really needs to be answered.

The reality is that none of this can even begin until there is a really clear understanding of the relationship between some of these document formats. For OpenXML and ODF there is a project underway in Germany to look at what these relationships are which will get us all off to a good start, delivering some real data upon which decisions and activity can be based.

This project will give everybody involved a much stronger view of what Interoperability between these two file formats looks like and how it can be delivered. Until then everything else is just supposition.

A short while ago I mentioned that Microsoft had committed to releasing the file format specifications for the Microsoft Office Binary files under the Open Specification Promise and making them generally available, removing any of the complications that developers previously had to go through to get hold of these documents.

So, the only remaining question to answer is where you have to look for these documents. There are a few organizations stepping forwards to hosting and archiving these documents.

The first location is an obvious one, and it is Microsoft. The documents can be found on Microsoft.com by following this link.

There you will find;

• Word 97-2007 Binary File Format (.doc) Specification PDF | XPS
• PowerPoint 97-2007 Binary File Format (.ppt) Specification PDF | XPS
• Excel 97-2007 Binary File Format (.xls) Specification PDF | XPS
• Office Drawing 97-2007 Binary Format Specification PDF | XPS

Additionally, Microsoft also made specifications for a number of supporting technologies available, also under the OSP, these include;

• Windows Compound Binary File Format Specification PDF | XPS
• Windows Metafile Format (.wmf) Specification PDF | XPS
• Ink Serialized Format (ISF) Specification PDF | XPS

The other part of the announcement about the binary file formats was the creation of a translator project on Sourceforge that would look at the translation of older Microsoft Office documents from the binary file format to the new OpenXML format.

The project is now live, and can be found here.

At the same time there are two other organizations that have agreed to host these specifications. The first of these was the British Library, below is a small excerpt from the page that they are hosted on;

The British Library believes that it is essential to archive and, where possible, provide access to the specifications of digital file formats.  These specifications are important today for people developing applications that work with digital file formats, but archived copies will be even more critical in the future when today’s applications are long obsolete.

You will find the specifications on this page on the British Library site.

The second 3rd party organization who will host the documents is the United States National Library of Congress, and here is an excerpt from their site that that again highlights the intention to preserve access to these documents for generations to come;

Listed here are selected specifications made available for downloading by the Library of Congress with the permission of their owners and the intention of ensuring permanent access to the specifications for the digital preservation community and other users. Also listed are URLs for sources of freely downloadable specifications for digital formats from standards organizations.

You will find the documents on the Library of Congress digital preservation site here.

All in all this means that the documents are available for developers who want access to them today, and are preserved for future generations by a combination of the perpetual nature of the OSP and the effort of the Library of Congress and the British Library to host this specification documentation on an equally perpetual basis…

The technology world is one of many buzzwords and phrases, one that you hear a lot at the moment is “Service Oriented Architecture” or “SOA” which sounds like a highly technical methodology for systems design, in reality SOA techniques can provide a very effective way of dealing with organizational complexity and divides as we work towards delivering cross departmental government services over the web.

During the final months of 1995 I found myself involved for the first time in an eGovernment project. The goal of the project was a simple one, we were tasked with providing a single “Smart Form” that would allow an individual to register as being self employed. Delivering this involved working with business processes in three government agencies, two involved in taxation and one involved in employment registration.

We looked at the challenge ahead as technologies and developers and decided that this would not be a complex system to design or build. After all, it was just a single form, digitising a single well defined process…

About two weeks into the systems analysis phase of the project the enormity of the challenge ahead started to become clearer. Simple data like a name or an address was not stored in the same way across the three agencies. The processes that we were concatenating into our single form were all being run with different service level agreements and delivering on each agreement was quite rightly something that was taken very seriously by the owners of each service. Finally it was also clear that the small amounts of addition overhead of work that would be need to run our single service just didn’t belong in any of the three agencies, and in turn didn’t have any manpower or budget in place to run it.

As a technology company the project soon began to look more like a nightmare than an opportunity, of course for the government we were working with these were exactly the types of lessons that they wanted to learn as they planned for a broader set of projects across the wider civil service.

It is interesting to look back on projects like that today and consider what has changed in the world of technology and how we might approach the project differently in today’s world. The simple answer is that these are exactly the types of challenges that information technology and large systems design principals now take in their stride.

The industry today talks a great deal about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which is a technical term for breaking systems into their constituent parts, and then publishing them so they can be used elsewhere while having minimal impact on the organization that provides the service.

In a Government context the advantages are clear. In a SOA world it is no longer critical that data needs to be managed in exactly the same way in every department, or that business processes need to be redesigned with the workings of the rest of the government in mind.

Today every government department can look at the services that it offers, be it licence issuance, tax collection or any other process, and then use simple web service technology to enable those services to be used by other departments or external commercial providers seamlessly.

The benefits are easy to see. Services are less complex and less costly to design and provide. With the right planning around national level architecture and data management, cross government services can be built without the need for costly and complex systems integration projects.

In some cases an agency who makes their particular line of business application available as a web service will find it being used in useful new ways by other government departments or by commercial organizations to provide services to citizens and businesses in ways that had not previously been thought about or funded.

My former team in Redmond put a lot of time and effort into looking at the right high level framework for this sort of environment would look like, the resulting work was called the “Connected Government Framework” or CGF for short. Today you will find the basic framework that the team delivered integrated tightly into many of the solutions and service offerings from Microsoft and our partners.

The lessons from this complex fifteen year journey help us deal with some of tougher issues that just about every government is facing today as they put their own plans in place for the delivery of online and electronic services. Not least of which are the still those same issues of shared service level agreements and data harmonization. Service Oriented Architectures and the technologies involved assist us in delivering complex business systems without the need to closely couple organizations or data in ways that may otherwise be less natural.

23/1/08 additional: Government Computer News this morning carries information on the release of Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform, an announcement that was made at the Government Leader’s Forum in Berlin yesterday. Follow this link to read more;

Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform incorporates the company’s work with local and regional governments over the past several years, and consists of templates designed to run in Microsoft operating environments for the most commonly deployed e-government services.

Microsoft will offer the initial set of online services to governments for customization and integration into their current environment later this year.

What a complex and confusing world we live in.

This is a really good step for all involved. IBM and Google are starting to support OpenXML, Microsoft provides access to ODF files from Office…

…customers get choice, all is well with the world!

Maybe.

It has been a busy week on the OpenXML front, I have been travelling for the last few days and have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to catch up on the long list in my inbox. Three of the items stand out;

1. Accessibility. A group of accessibility experts have worked on reviewing Ecma-376 (DIS29500) and have produced a set of guidelines for developers wanting to use the rich set of accessibility features contained within the spec.

The report itself can be downloaded from the OpenXMLDeveloper site by following this link. The abstract from the start of the document reads;

This document is a guide for applications that support DIS 29500 (ECMA 376 Office Open XML) specification with the goal of encouraging the creation of accessible Office Open XML documents. Office Open XML provides a rich infrastructure for creating content that meets the needs of people with disabilities. This document’s guidance must be followed in order to ensure Office Open XML implementations are consistent with respect to their support for accessibility at both the application and output level. Authors and developers are encouraged to follow these guidelines in order to enable users with disabilities to consume content or to extract the full meaning of Office Open XML documents.

2. The Burton Group look at OpenXML and ODF. Mary Jo Foley covers this for ZDNet. The Burton Group have issued an independently generated 37 page report that looks at the state document formats in the context of OpenXML and ODF, the conclusions reached by the two authors are very favourable towards the work that we have been doing with OpenXML in recent years. The ZDNet coverage opens with;

Market researchers with the Burton Group have issued a 37-page study–not commissioned by Microsoft or any other tech vendor–that finds Microsoft’s OOXML document format to be more useful than the rival ODF format backed by Microsoft’s competitors.

The report is called “What’s up DOC?” and can be downloaded from The Burton Group here. (registration required)

3. DIS29500 Proposed Dispositions Complete. Finally, several blogs are reporting that Ecma International’s TC45 working group have hit their milestone of responding to all 3522 comments with proposed dispositions. The full report from Ecma can be found here, and Microsoft’s representative on TC45, Brian Jones, talks about the milestone here. From Brian’s blog;

It’s been a ton of hard work over the past several months, and it really feels great to move onto the final stage of this process (I need some sleep). It’s unbelievable how much work we’ve been able to accomplish within TC45. Similar to how we moved from a 2,000 page spec to a 6,000 in 2006, in 2007 we were able to respond to 3,500 comments and generated a 2,300 page document (a bit less that a page per comment) where I believe we were able to successfully handle the national bodies comments.

Doug Mahugh is a member of the INCITS V1 Committee in the US, in his review of the the proposed dispositions he characterizes them in the following way;

• Addition of useful information for developers, such as the thorough documentation of compat settings. Want to know what it means to “autospace like Word 95″ or “truncate font heights like WP6″? That’s all spelled out now, so that any developer can implement these behaviors.
• New flexibility in the formats, such as extensible page borders, support for new types of content, and new options for date handling. Want to use ISO 8601 dates in an Open XML spreadsheet? Now you can.
• Standards support. Dozens of international standards are normatively referenced in the proposed changes, making DIS 29500 a well-socialized and well-connected member of the international standards family. A good example is the use of ISO/IEC 14977:1996 (Syntactic metalanguage – Extended BNF) notation for spreadsheet formulas and fields.
• Structural changes to allow for selective re-use of specific portions of the standard. One of the proposed changes would make OPC (Open Packaging Convention) and MCE (Markup Compatibility and Extensibility) separate parts, so that other standards can normatively reference these useful technologies separately from the rest of DIS 29500.
• Clarification of numerous details, including conformance requirements, algorithms, syntactical details, and much more.
• Correction of errors and typos that have made some of the details confusing in the past.

The next six weeks will be spent preparing for the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, which will be held at the end of February. Several delegations are attending from various national standards bodies here in Asia.

The compatibility pack comes up in conversation pretty frequently these days, in past years when Microsoft has upgraded to a new file format users of older versions of office products have had to deal with some well document issues when files are sent to them in the newer format.

With the advent of Open XML and the implementation that we have in Office 2007 Microsoft took one further step and delivered a piece of code that we call the “Compatibility Pack for Open XML”. The compatibility pack provides functionality for users of Office 2003 and Office XP that allows them to work with Open XML files without any need to upgrade to newer versions of Office. 

The program owner for this work in Microsoft is a lead by the name of Gray Knowlton, some of you will have met him as he got involved in several technical discussions around the region, including the technical workshop in New Zealand last August.

Gray has a wealth of knowledge in the office productivity and file formats space, he has spent a few years with Microsoft now and before that was with Adobe working in similar areas. A couple of weeks ago somebody finally managed to talk Gray into starting his own blog, he is more of a product type and less of a standards type so we should start to see some useful info from him around the impact of Open XML and related technologies.

One of his first posts covers the download stats of the compatibility pack, mentioning that we just passed a milestone of 20 million successful downloads.

In many of the public debates that I have participated in around Open XML I frequently get told that Open XML isn’t being adopted, the example cited is usually based on the number of DOCX files Google has indexed or some similar measure. Given that most users are more likely going to be using the files produced by Microsoft Office inside of a firewall, then if the document is going to be used externally converting them PDF or some other publishing format, these numbers from Google and other search engines are not really much of a surprise or of much real use.

Watching the download counters on the compatibility pack, the converter projects on Sourceforge and a number of other real metrics does show us that the usage of Open XML is high, users are choosing to install the compatibility pack to either create and manage Open XML documents of their own or to exchange documents with the many millions of users of Office 2007, other office and other software packages that support Open XML that are out there now.

Anyway, Gray’s post on the topic is a lot more interesting than mine, if you want to have a read for yourself it is linked here, and I’ve copied a small excerpt below;

We decided to make it available as a manual download, and not as an automatic update, and during the first 12 months of its release, the compatibility pack has been successfully downloaded over 20 million times. This means that 20 million people have elected to manually download this 26.2MB software to their computer. This is a significant number of people adding Open XML to their environment.

Now is a good time to get past the denial phase that some quarters still seem to be stuck in and accept that Open XML, like PDF, ODF and a number of other office document formats have broad adoption in the market today.

Standardizing Open XML alongside these other formats provides a strong base from which we can collectively start to look at conversations such as interoperability and document fidelity in a way that will help our mutual customers.

Earlier this week Korea’s largest producer of Office Automation software announced that they will support both Open XML and ODF in the next version of their product.

This is extremely significant for Korean users of Haansoft’s Hangul package, where as I understand it the number of users of Hangul outweighs users of any other office package.

You’ll find an English version of the announcement on ZDNet’s Korean site;

On Thursday 13, it announced that it planed to support not only ‘ODF’(Open Document Format), the standard of International Organization for Standardization (IOS), but also ‘Open XML’, promoted by ECMA International, in its next version of Hangul software. 

By supporting internationally recognized open type documentation standards in its new version of Office, Haansoft plans to cultivate its competitive power and lead the standardization of domestic office documentation.

There is substantial coverage of this in the Korean press, if you are interested in reading more then the following links will help. (in Korean)

Chosun, Money Today, ETNews, FNNews, ZDNet, DDaily, HeraldBiz, INews24 and eToday.

Like many other recent weeks, most of the last seven days has been consumed by travel and interspersed with real work at a couple of really interesting events. On the plus side, I did get to undertake part of that travel on SIA’s new Airbus A380, a stunning plane and a stunning experience, returning home on one of their 777s from Christchurch next week just won’t be the same.

Anyway, the first part of the week was spent with colleagues from the United Nations University in Macau attending their ICEGov event, the second part in Sydney where I got the opportunity to participate in the symposium that the University of New South Wales were hosting, looking at the technical and legal aspects of Open XML as they pertain to the needs of Australian users, developers and business.

And to round things off I’m now sat in a hotel room in Sydney, trying to catch up on the events of the week and clear my inbox down to a point where it becomes manageable again, as I am sure you have read before we exchange a LOT of email inside Microsoft.

The ICEGov conference was pretty unique in its makeup, we have been working with a couple of members of the faculty for a little while now on some research questions around eGovernment and Interoperability but this was the first opportunity I have had to visit the school and gain a wider view of the work that is going on there.

Unfortunately I could only stay for the first two days of the event, the sessions I attended looked at elements such as applying formal engineering techniques to eGovernment development, Interoperability through decisions around architecture and technology, eGovernment policy management, and a session on eParticipation which is an area of eGovernment where I personally believe we will see an increasing focus in years to come.

Usually at this type of conference sessions consist of various government or industry leaders presenting best practice based upon recent projects that they have been involved in. These types of events are interesting, it is always good to learn what is going on elsewhere in the world, but every government differs in terms of technology use, social structure, culture and related government policy so it is sometimes hard to see how these best practices can be picked up and put to good use in another jurisdiction.

The format of ICEGov was far more academic in its approach, with each of the sessions being closer to half a day and the format of the content being constructed more as a topic tutorial, drawing on occasional cases where needed. I found every session I participated in helpful, and in every case walked out of the session with a handful of new ideas that I hadn’t walked in with.

Great stuff, and a big congratulations to the organizing team who I know put a lot of effort into pulling this together.

The second event was equally as interesting. The symposium at the University of New South Wales’ CyberLaw Centre has been arranged for some time, about 30 people took part in both halves of the day. The first half was a technical discussion, the second half was looking at the legal coverage for the specification.

As is always the case with these events it was a spirited but constructive discussion with Rick Jelliffe and Matthew Cruickshank facilitating conversations around the technical aspects of Open XML and then Colin Jackson presenting the views of the New Zealand Government on the topic of Open XML and open documents in general.

The conversations during the afternoon session were led by Ronald Yu and Microsoft’s Steve Mutkoski. Good points were made all sides of the debate, and several of us agreed that a post-February beer or two might be a good idea.

I would really like to see more of these types of event in the region. The debate on the Internet sometimes consists of one side throwing a grenade over the wall at the other, then the other side throwing one back. Events like the one at UNSW give everybody a chance to spend time getting into the technical, legal and standardization questions. I know that I learned a few things on the day and I would like to think that some of the other participants did as well. It was good fun, there is always a lot to be gained from open conversation.

In discussions about Open XML one of the questions I get asked most frequently is one that was originally presented by noooxml.org and our colleagues at a large and well known competitor. “We already have an international standard for document formats, why do we need another?”

The answer is a straight forward one, Open XML has different design objectives to other document standards, those differences are defined in the first few paragraphs of the Office Open XML specification.

• Open XML provides for the migration of existing Microsoft Office binary documents to the new XML format, providing new levels of transparency and access to existing data.
• Open XML provides a mechanism for the use of Custom XML schema as part of the document format.

When you look at those two unique requirements the first is backwards looking, protecting the huge existing investment in binary documents, the second requirement is not only very forward looking, but for the developer community it is probably one of the most exciting features of the Office Open XML specification.

I’ve talked a little before about custom schema in Open XML, but only recently realized that it was not obvious what this unique proposition is that is offered by the Ecma-376 specification.

Two weeks ago I was in Beijing where I was presenting at an international standards conference organized by OASIS, I was presenting on Open XML and how Microsoft proposed to interoperate with the Open Document Format and the Chinese office document standard, the Uniform Office Format.

After my presentation I found myself chatting to a well known blogger in the standards and open document space, and as part of the conversation he and I were discussing the difference between ODF and Open XML at a very conceptual level. He drew a diagram on a piece of paper that looked a little like the graphic below, personally I think it gives a very clear picture of the role that custom schema plays, one of the key differences between Open XML and ODF, and how the two document formats could interoperate in the longer term.

The graphic talks about the role that Office Open XML compliant applications have in wider business processes within an organization, moving well beyond the traditional office automation file format that we have all become used to over the last twenty or so years. It also shows how converter technology will assist users of the ODF file format (along with other file formats) who want to convert their documents to Open XML or vice versa.

The same applies to UOF for which conversion tools between Open XML and UOF already exist, the Beijing event was a great opportunity to demonstrate this additional converter to a few people working in this space in China.