Oliver Bell’s weblog

According to Wikipedia the term FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instil in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.”

As Eric S. Raymond writes: “The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors’ equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors’ equipment or software. After 1991 the term has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.”

The FUD machine has been hard at work for IBM throughout this whole process,  despite loud and frequent protests that this isn’t the case.

My colleagues at Microsoft have asserted all along that much of this debate is principally driven by a competitive position between a small number of vendors, something that has again been denied by IBM.

As usual though reality does not match the words.

As an example, one by one discussions with national standards bodies here in the Asia Pacific region have been quietly moved by mysterious third party lobbying from a positive collaborative effort into a beauty competition or face-off, generally with Microsoft and our partners on one side of the table and IBM and a small collection of their allies on the other, sometimes the allies change but the pre-agreed talking points rarely do.

Events have played out in the media and in the blogosphere over the last couple of weeks that represent a breakdown of some of those anti-OpenXML arguments that have been played back so frequently over the last year.

Arguments that there is a lack of demand for Open XML, the specification is too complex to implement, the specification can’t be deployed cross platform and the long running but baseless claim that the Ecma-376 specification might be encumbered by IPR and patent threats all appear to have been cast aside as big blue steps up to meet the demands of their own customers and the market in general.

Here is a blow by blow review of the relevant activity over the last two weeks…

Thursday, 17th Jan: Brian Jones posted a blog entry talking a little about the support that Google is adding to their search products to render OpenXML documents to HTML for simplified viewing. One of the comments on that post added some facts around IBMs own support for OpenXML in some of their products, something that we had not gone looking for, nor did we expect to find given IBMs fierce anti-OpenXML stance.

Friday 18th Jan: Several of my colleagues found this point interesting enough to blog about… so Doug Mahugh, Stephen McGibbon,  Gray Knowlton and myself all went ahead and did so.  Stephen (who, like myself, heralds from the north of England and wields a great northern English sense of humour) hypothesised in his post that we might be about to see an announcement from IBM at Lotusphere in relation to their growing support for the OpenXML file format.

Sunday 20th Jan: In an article titled “Whoops! IBM products support Microsoft’s Open XML doc format” Computerworld’s Eric Lai picked up the story, to quote his article;

Nobody has invested more in defeating Microsoft Corp.’s Office Open XML document format than IBM.

So why is IBM supporting Open XML in a handful of its products?

According to technical documentation on IBM’s own Web sites, the company already supports Open XML, the native file format of Microsoft Office 2007, in at least four of its programs.

Monday 21st Jan: This is where the wheels start to come off the IBM strategy a little. Rob Weir, one of IBMs standards experts and their Chief of creating anti-OpenXML news, went out of his way to post a lengthy protestabout what he had read on the “Microsoft Blogger echo chamber”, he argued that although IBM clearly supports OpenXML in a number of their products that they actually don’t. A confusing position at best.

Wednesday 23rd Jan: In yet another confusing post Bob Sutor, a senior vice president of IBM, posted an article on his personal blog entitled “While you’re waiting, don’t save in OOXML format“, the premise of his article was that the ballot resolution meeting in Geneva may change the specification of OpenXML so whatever you do don’t save any documents in the current format, if you do the sky might fall.

If we apply Bob’s argument to the Open Document Format (ODF), or any other document format for that matter, then it just isn’t safe for us to save documents and probably never was. ODF 1.0 is the version that the world knows as ISO26300, it is ODF 1.1 and 1.2 where there have been some significant advances in the file format specification (adding many accessibility features, working hard on adding spreadsheet formula support, etc) so I guess that they probably shouldn’t be used either due to the fact that one day they will be deprecated, according to the argument.

Of course this makes no sense, technology and standards evolve, they always have and always will. It is safe to use ODF today, it is safe to save in legacy binary formats today and of course it is safe to use OpenXML as your document format of choice.

Thursday 24th Jan: It seems that Stephen’s comment around an announcement at Lotusphere about IBM’s growing support for OpenXML was less to do with humour and more of a prophecy.

This morning Stephen blogged about an announcement that has indeed filtered out during Lotusphere confirming that IBM will support OpenXML in their Lotus Collaboration and various Portal products. Martin LaMonica was the source of this story, an entry in his blog titled “IBM to take Lotus Symphony apps ‘Beyond Office’“.

LaMonica quotes Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM collaboration technologies;

“We strongly believe that an enormous amount of innovative potential has been held back by the network effects around the file formats and the proprietary control that Microsoft has had around those formats,” he said.

IBM favors ODF as a file format because it is “truly open” and technically elegant, Heintzman said.

But IBM will support Open XML, which is the current document format in Office 2007, in its Lotus collaboration and portal products. IBM already supports older versions of Office.

It is hard to know exactly how to interpret that… it appears on the face of it that Heintzman approves of the steps that Microsoft is taking to open up what have traditionally been proprietry document formats, and it is great to see confirmation that OpenXML will indeed be supported by the Lotus Collaboration and Portal products.

I need ask Stephen to suggest some lottery numbers for me…

The ODF Alliance published a report on 20th December last year that puzzled me a little. The document talked about the steps that governments globally are taking in the debate around XML based document formats, and specifically tried to outline a number of geographies where a governments had made a selection of one standard over another.

This is a debate that I have been intimately involved with over the last couple of years, and reading through the report it struck me that the data didn’t match my own experience of what was taking place in several of the countries represented in the document, presenting a slightly more one sided view than I would have expected.

When I talk to ISVs and our customers I get a picture that aligns far more closely to an interview published in Redmond Developer News today with Alexander Falk, the CEO of Altova.

One of the questions in the article does a good job of characterizing the conversations that I have been having in the commercial and public sectors recently;

Redmond Developer News: You mentioned in our previous talk that Altova has had plenty of inquiries about OOXML support, but none at all for ODF. Does that remain the case today? What kind of interest in ODF are you seeing from your customers and the broader industry?

Alexander Falk: That is still largely the case. In terms of actual customer inquiries regarding need for ODF, we have not seen any interest from our customers. What we did start to see — although very rarely — are questions from customers who are already using our OOXML features and have read articles about OOXML vs. ODF in the press and want to know if we also plan to add ODF support. But I would categorize those few questions as more out of interest rather than out of need or actual plans to implement, from what I can see.

Looking at the list of current policy positions at the bottom of this post and aligning them with recent experience, I think the following three points are worth some ongoing consideration;

1.Technology and Standards will continue to evolve, is is vitally important for any government defining policy in this area that all options are open for exploiting any new innovations as they become available to the market.

2. Achieving interoperability is rarely as straight forward as selecting a single technical standard, and many of the policy positions around the world recognize this. Applications need to be designed to work together, groups need a solid framework for collaboration and the standards need to be ready to support these two objectives.

3. There are plenty of examples from history where the selection of a single standard has not worked out well for organizations. I have some personal experience of this having spent a few years during the 1990s assisting with the deployment of several agency wide x.400 email systems.

Nicos Tsilas and I did a little further research into some of the claims made by the ODF Alliance in this document, from what we could find the majority of countries do seem to be supporting multiple standards.

I’m not sure that the ODF Alliance have mischaracterized anything in their report, but they do seem to only be telling half of the story in most cases.

Below is a round up relating to many of the countries listed in the 20th December report, you’ll find more information in a recently published fact sheet over on openxmlcommunity.org;

Switzerland: Standards group includes Open XML and ODF in policy

Switzerland has adopted updated technical guidelines for the implementation of e-government applications and recommends using both ODF and Open XML. The two standards were approved by Switzerland’s eCH expert committee following a public hearing on June 22, 2007.

Denmark: Broad-ranging national agreement embraces both Open XML and ODF

In September 2007, the Danish Government, Local Government Denmark, and Danish Regions concluded an agreement on the use of mandatory open standards for software in the public sector. Under the agreement, all public authorities, starting on January 1, 2008, are to use seven sets of open standards for new IT solutions, including Open XML and ODF for document formats.

Malaysia: Refuses to mandate a document format standard

According to reports, Datuk Dr. Mohamad Ariffin Aton, Chief Executive of the Malaysian standards body, Sirim, said there is no chance of ODF or Open XML being made a mandatory standard in Malaysia, for two reasons. First, a standard can only be mandatory when public health or safety is at stake, which is clearly not the case here, he said. Second, a mandatory standard would constitute an illicit non-tariff barrier against software products using other document formats. Ariffin said this would violate Malaysia’s commitments to free trade under the World Trade Organization. He added, “Ultimately, it is up to the general public and users in both the public and private sectors to decide which format they want to use.”

Sweden: Official inquiry considers but rejects ODF preference

An officially sponsored inquiry into standardization in the IT field resulted in this report which considered but rejected an ODF preference.

Poland: Requires neutrality and prohibiting preferences in technical procurement decisions

The National Computerization Program (“NCP”) for 2007-2010, which is a regulation implementing Poland’s IT Act, establishes technological neutrality as a central requirement. The NCP establishes this key priority to ensure equal treatment of different IT solutions in public administration systems, and to avoid preferences and discrimination among any of them.

Japan: Urges consideration of multiple standards in procurement decisions

Japan issued new procurement Guidelines for IT in July 2007, establishing compliance with “open international standards” as one criterion among others to be considered in awarding government contracts. In a public statement, the government agency in charge of drafting the new rules stated that the Guidelines did not specify one standard over another and that there was no intent in formulating the Guidelines to rule out procurement of Microsoft products.  Separately, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (“METI”) circulated a draft “framework for interoperability” that lists ODF as an example of an “open international standard,” but the document was not adopted as government policy.  Moreover, the framework specifically urged the consideration of “multiple standards” in reaching procurement decisions.

Italy: Repeatedly rejects preferences in open document formats

Various regional governments in Italy have been looking at open formats generally. None of those bills has gained much support, however. At a central level, there has also been some discussion of the adoption of ODF, but no formal action has been taken. Several organizations in Italy have considered ODF preferences, but decided against them. The National Trade Association recently made a public statement on format neutrality.

Korea: Makes ODF optional

While Korea approved ODF as a national standard, the ODF Alliance has acknowledged that Korea has refrained from making its use by government agencies compulsory.

The Netherlands: Multiple document formats can coexist

In November 2007, the Netherlands announced an inclusive approach to open standards, under which ODF will be used alongside “other document formats already in use.” Specifically, the central government must be able to read, write, and exchange documents in the ODF format by April 2008. However, ODF use is not exclusive, and the government will create a series of lists of recognized standards using a definition that should sweep in competing formats, including Open XML, culminating in the complete list by mid-2008.

Russia: Supports “widely used standards”

Russia has not implemented a national document format, but instead has taken steps to mandate use of software that supports “widely used standards.” Russia’s broad language provides the freedom to allow competing standards to thrive. In this spirit, Russia voted Yes for ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Ecma Office Open XML) and has also agreed to include ODF as part of an updated National Standardization Program.

Norway: Chooses an open-minded preference for open standards

The Norwegian government has decided to promote the use of open standards in the public sector through a gradual, phased-in implementation and expansion of an “Open Standards List.” While Open XML is not yet included in Norway’s list of approved standards, the government did not mandate the exclusive use of ODF and remains open to evaluating and including other standards. Microsoft is working with the Norwegian government and expects Open XML to join the list of permissible standards by January 1, 2009 (the date when the mandate for use of open standards takes effect).

Belgium: Enacts a transition to interoperability

In Belgium, the government approved use of ODF in July 2006. Since then, the government has been using plug-ins to enable Microsoft Office to read and save files in ODF — an even-handed approach that acknowledges that different formats can coexist and interoperate to meet different needs. Contrary to the suggestions of the ODF Alliance and others, the Belgian government’s decision on ODF is not preferential or exclusive, and Open XML, once standardized by ISO, will be considered as a new open standard and added to Belgium’s list.

France: ODF Alliance mischaracterizes government as favoring ODF

Although the ODF Alliance has claimed that France has established a preference for ODF, this is not true and is just the latest example of this group and other ODF enthusiasts playing fast and loose with the facts. The reality is that, while there is indeed a debate about mandating ODF inside the French e-Government interoperability framework task force, local and state governments and their national professional organizations are deeply hostile to such a policy given its likely negative impact on their total cost of ownership for software purchases. This is why the last meeting of the e-Government interoperability framework committee (10/12/07) ended with a lack of consensus. The next meeting is not expected to take place until the spring of 2008.

Croatia: Is open to Multiple Standards

As part of its eCroatia program, Croatia announced that it will adopt ODF and PDF as a basis for electronic document exchange by public administrations. While Open XML is not yet included in Croatia’s list of approved standards, the government did not mandate the exclusive use of ODF and remains open to evaluating and including other standards. Microsoft is working with the Croatian government and expects Open XML to join the list of permissible standards over the next several months. Croatia’s approach here is consistent with its established policy of technical neutrality and choice in the purchase of open source and proprietary software.

Germany: Allows technology-neutral advancement of standards

In August 2007, Germany voted to approve with comments ISO’s adoption of Open XML. Gerd Schürman, Director of the Fraunhofer FOKUS eGovernment Laboratory, favored Germany’s decision: “The standardization process of Open XML as an ISO standard will start now and result in the technological advancement of both standards, Open XML and ODF 1.0.”

U.S. STATES

Massachusetts: Supports open document format standards without vendor or commercial bias

In August 2007, Massachusetts added Open XML to its Enterprise Technical Reference Model’s (“ETRM”) list of approved standards, defeating calls for an ODF-mandate. In a joint statement, Massachusetts undersecretary of administration and finance, Henry Dormitzer, and the commonwealth’s acting chief information officer, Bethann Pepoli, explained that concerns about competing document standards were “outweighed substantially by the benefits of moving toward open, XML-based” standards. The ETRM articulates a vision of a service-oriented architecture where information can be shared, reused and repurposed based on XML technologies … The availability of open, standardized XML document formats without vendor bias will move us further along in realizing this vision.”

Texas: ODF implementation costs too high and credibility too low

High implementation costs helped to scuttle legislation that would have required ODF for electronic documents in Texas. A Financial Impact Report put the five-year cost of documents and applications connected to ODF in the hundreds of millions of dollars. While press reports indicated that ODF proponents privately relayed “gleaming” reports about ODF implementation in Massachusetts to Texas legislators, the same proponents refused to clarify publicly under oath that only a handful of computers in Massachusetts had actually been converted to ODF. This lack of credibility led Texas legislators, including Jonathan Mathers, chief clerk for the Committee on Government Reform in the Texas House of Representatives, to start to “question the whole bill.”

Florida: Interoperability, not premature snap judgments, should be key

In November 2007, the Florida Senate Committee on Governmental Operations acknowledged that the “most important issue for agencies choosing technology is not whether that system is proprietary or open source but whether that system is interoperable.” The Florida House Committee on Audit & Performance agreed and asserted that it is “premature” to adopt a document format standard “before an industry-wide national standard has been established.”

Minnesota: No standard mandates without careful study

The need for careful study trumped the urge for premature mandates when the Minnesota legislature opted to engage in careful study of document format standards instead of requiring state agencies to use ODF. Don Betzold, an original sponsor of the bill, questioned whether he and other Minnesota legislators had enough expertise at all to choose the technical standard: “I wouldn’t know an open document format if it bit me on the butt,” Betzold said. “We’re public policy experts. [Picking technical standards] is not our job.”

Oregon: ODF is too expensive to implement

The high costs associated with conversion to ODF contributed to the failure of legislation introduced in the Oregon House after Oregon’s secretary of state questioned the cost of converting to applications that support open formats.

Others States: Saying no to document format preferences

Efforts to require use of certain open document formats failed to gain support in California and Connecticut as well.

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.

You might have caught a story in the press today about a translator project that Microsoft and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium are establishing on SourceForge that will provide both some new functionality in Microsoft Office along with an offline capability to convert Open XML files into DAISY format for use with a range of accessible technologies.

Here is a link to one of the stories from this morning from eWeek, the quote below is from Reed Shaffner, the Program Manager in the Office group who has been working on this from the Microsoft side;

The project is being hosted on SourceForge, with the first beta code expected by early next year and release by March 2008, Shaffner said, noting that the plug-in will work with all Word documents created with Office XP, Office 2003 and the current Office 2007.

“Essentially what will happen is that the plug-in will convert an Open XML file to an intermediate Daisy XML file in the Talk Book format. Customers can then use one of many tools, which are already available, to create a bunch of different accessible outputs, be it Braille or a really rich audio file that allows them to navigate by heading or page number and navigate tables with much more detail than they would typically be able to,” he said.

George Kerscher, secretary general of the DAISY Consortium, explains the DAISY translator plug-in project this way:

“Microsoft’s announcement is monumental in greatly facilitating the availability of text in DAISY books. It provides a clear, production path for organizations and universities who will be able to use the Microsoft plug-in to move into DAISY XML. Putting tools in the hands of people who create content is a giant step toward creating equal access to information … It’s going to move DAISY … from the niche of the libraries for the blind community into the mainstream.”

This project provides both a capability to convert Open XML based documents to the intermediate DAISY format, but will also deliver an open source based reference implementation that any other developer can use when building their own similar translators.

Doug Mahugh has a short post this morning that highlights some resources for the “Office Migration Planning Manager” on Channel 9. This is a great set of tools for anybody looking at mass migration of their older binary office files to the Open XML file format.

The post is short, so I’ll make it easy and quote the whole thing.

As more organizations are moving to Office 2007 and the Open XML formats, I’ve started to hear more questions about how to work with the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM), the set of tools that helps manage bulk conversion from the legacy Office binary formats Open XML.

Here’s a resource on Channel 9 that I just learned about: the “Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) Contributions” page. It covers some tips about how to determine which documents have macros, by directly querying the OMPM database. Check it out if you’re planning to use OMPM to manage your deployment of Open XML.

Over the years the industry has learned a great deal about the cost and pain that is inflicted through the introduction of a change to an existing file format, or the introduction of an entirely new format.

With the introduction of Ecma Open XML support in Office there are a couple of important sets of tools that have been made available to help make it easier and more cost effective to migrate to the new XML based format.

OMPM is one, another tool that is worth looking at for any organization considering using the Open XML format is the Office Compatibility Pack which allows earlier versions of Microsoft Office to read and write the new file format without the need to upgrade to a later version of the Office software.

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

From their announcement;

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

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

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

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

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