For anybody who has not been following the discussion, you will find a neatly potted history by reading over a few of those posts. Rob Weir’s post on formula interoperability appeared within a few hours of SP2 being released, Doug Mahugh expanded the conversation by outlining how we got to where we are, and PSC’s John Head has a very balanced post titled “And in this corner…” that brings a much needed element of reality back to the conversation.

One of the few press articles I have seen on the subject comes from Victoria Ho at ZDNet Asia.

Finally my colleague Gray Knowlton posted overnight, questioning the motives of the ODF co-chair in this discussion. Personally I don’t agree with Gray’s conclusions or suggested changes, but I do wholeheartedly agree with the premise of his post.

I’ll explain.

I’ve now spent the best part of two decades working with standards organizations, if there is one word I have heard more than any other during that time it is “consensus”. It is in the spirit of consensus that things get done, agreements are made, compromises are reached and standards are developed and published. The standards professionals that I have met are a unique breed of people, often managing to take dramatically different points of view and find middle ground that meets the majority of the goals carried by those participating in the discussion.

At this point my experience of the discussion around ODF is pretty unique when I compare it to many of the other conversations that I find myself involved in that relate to standards development. On the whole standards development and implementation is full of champions, people looking for consensus around complex issues and demonstrating positive support for the standard or technology that they’re passionate about.

The conversation around formula implementation in Office 2007 SP2’s ODS documents epitomizes the one hurdle that I see as a potential stumbling block for ODF’s overall long term success. Bill Gates once joked that many of our competitors were so focused on competing with Microsoft that they were forgetting to innovate and improve their own products – sitting here in Microsoft and watching the debates around our implementation of  ODF I can see some parallels there.

To succeed ODF needs it champions, I know they are out there, I’ve met a few of them, for what it is worth (and contrary to Gray’s view) I believe IBM’s Rob Weir is one of them – on a good day.

I’m pretty sure that some of the louder voices in the ODF community today are helping corporate compete with corporate, I’m not convinced that the broad implementation and success of ODF itself is at the heart of those conversations – it needs to be.

Since then the subject has come up from time to time as we have discussed the details of this commitment, initially with some discussion around what we described as our guiding principles for implementation of the file format, then at the various Document Interoperability Workshops that we have been running around the world, and then most recently when we released the detailed implementation notes for the work that we have been doing with the ODF file format.

Earlier this week it all finally went live, with full support for ODF 1.1 in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Doug Mahugh has an excellent post where he talks about how to work with ODF in the Office applications, from minor points such as switching style sheets through to offering users the option to select ODF as their default file format.

If you’re looking for more information on Service Pack 2 (there is a lot more in there than just ODF support) then Gray Knowton has outlined a number of other features of the SP, along with the many KB articles that are encapsulated within it.

The final blog post from Microsoft that is worth a look (I’m sure there are others!) comes from Stephen Peront and discusses the new Converter API that is now supported by the Office applications. This API gives developers the ability to build their own custom file format filters for Office, a feature that I think will open up many new options for our users over time.

Over the last year I’ve been involved in several external and internal discussions that have brought us to this point, and I have to say that I am really proud of how far the Office team have come with this and some of the standards (little “s”, non-technical) that they have laid down for themselves and the wider industry along the way.

Building a conformant implementation of ODF1.1 into Office is only one step, the work that has been done to document the implementation notes for this work, build community around the work that is taking place in this space in the form of the DII events and stand up a robust internal team to manage our standards work that relates to the Office applications lay some great foundations for future versions of the product.

Finally I am going to suggest something that I don’t think I ever have before on this blog, nor did I ever think I would, and that is to read through a /. discussion on this topic that took place over the weekend. The discussion appears to have moved on a long way from two years ago when the answer was “if it is open source, and a published open standard then it will just work”. Of course you will still find the traditional Microsoft jibes that you would expect on /., but there is also some discussion around the merit of implementations, some praise for the work that we have done here and some concrete suggestions for work that now needs to be done by other parties to further the overall interoperability agenda.

I’ve talked before about how achieving interoperability is not going to be about just Open Standards, but also about product design, about community and about sharing of information – the goal of achieving interoperability between office suites will need all four of those activities, we need participation and collaboration in all four areas by a diverse array of parties.

We have been talking for a while now about running one of those workshops in South East Asia, and we finally have a date for it. The intention is to run a DII workshop in Singapore on March 16th and 17th.

For now we are starting to think about topics that would be valuable to discuss during the time that we have. Initial ideas include looking at China’s Uniform Office Format (UOF) and how it interoperates with other document formats, along with spending some time looking at the extensive work that has been taking place with DAISY in the region.

Any other ideas are welcome, please feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments of this post or hit the “contact” button on the right and send me an email.

I’ll share the venue details a little closer to the time, it will most likely be in a hotel somewhere in Singapore’s CBD. Like previous workshops attendance is open to anybody who is interested, and conversations will be as interactive as possible.

I’m sure he will blog about the details later today. In the mean time the Q&A in the press release makes for interesting reading.

As those who build standards into their own products are well aware, as you turn a specification into code you have to make choices along the way, and in line with the commitments that we made in the Interoperability Principles Doug’s objective is to make the details of those choices transparent.

Doug highlights an example in the Q&A;

Mahugh: Bold text is a good example. The ODF specification supports a wider variety of “font weight” or boldness than other formats that Word supports. Therefore we sometimes adjust the font weight in a document to match the specific values that Word supports. The implementation note on this topic will help other implementers understand the coding behind that adjustment.

You will find the notes published on the Document Interoperability Initiative site, just follow this link. You might also want to take a look at a post of Doug’s from earlier this year where he outlined our guiding principles for our ODF implementation.

Finally, there is one more point from the Q&A that is worth raising. We believe that what we have done here is a best practice for the industry. In the same way that standards specifications are persistent over time, these notes will also help not only those who want to deliver interoperable document solutions today but also those who are wanting to fully understand the document markup many years from now.

Again, from the Q&A;

PressPass: If the goal is interoperability, it seems like this is something that every vendor should do.

Mahugh: We agree and encourage all implementers of standards to be fully transparent about the solutions they develop. This, along with shared stewardship of evolving standards and open collaboration among vendors, will help achieve the level of interoperability that customers require.

update: Doug’s post is up.

When I came into the office this morning I knew there was a backlog of such announcements building up that I wanted to talk about, but hadn’t quite grasped how much has gone on over the last couple of weeks.

Below is a round up of news around multi-platform development for Azure, the document interoperability initiative, ODF support in Wordpad (!), working with the Samba project, participating in the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) WG, SAML 2.0, and OpenID.

First of all is news of what we’re doing for developers around the Windows Azure and Azure Services platform that I talked about yesterday. Up on microsoft.com you’ll find pointers to the SDKs that are already under development, not only for .NET but also for Java and Ruby, and a whitepaper that explains the objectives of these projects.

From the whitepaper;

The Azure Services Platform has been built from the ground up with interoperability in mind. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple Internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and “plain old XML” (POX). This interoperability opens up opportunities to build new or enhanced applications using existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework, or with other developments environments such as Java, or Ruby.

For a product that is still only a community technology preview (CTP) I think we’re off to a good start.

Next is news of the latest Document Interoperability Initiative workshop that was held in Redmond last week, this time focusing on plans for Open XML. The DII workshops are an important component of our commitment to engage more openly and more thoroughly with the community, this is the second workshop to be held in Redmond, the first one looked predominately at our plans for ODF support in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2.

Jesper Lund Stocholm has his hands on the beta for the SP2 code, and has posted about his experiences with it earlier this week.

Doug Mahugh has a comprehensive write-up of the latest DII workshop;

The latest DII workshop took place in Redmond over the last two days. There were presentations at this event from a variety of people, including members of the Office product groups at Microsoft and developers and consultants from several other companies. Topics covered included planning an IS29500 document test library, server-side document assembly strategies, various approaches to document validation, use of content controls in e-courseware, and goals for future DII events. John Head already blogged a few thoughts from the workshop, and I expect we’ll see more in the days ahead from John, his colleague Andrew Schwantes, or other blogger attendees such as Dennis Hamilton and Alex Brown. The DII we site has an event summary, and you can find downloadable copies of most of the presentations here.

Doug’s post is lengthy and gives really good insight into the discussions that took place at the event, I’d encourage you to follow the link and read the whole report. There are also a couple more posts on the topic that I’ve seen, John Head of PSC has shared his presentation, and Alex Brown has declared Open XML boring, in the nicest possible way of course!

Finally on DII, for those of you who are really interested in digging into the depths of the topics discussed, all of the Microsoft led presentations have been posted on the Document Interoperability Initiative site.

In other brief document format related news, you might have caught Stephen Sinofsky earlier today mentioning that the version of WordPad in Windows 7 will support both ODF and Open XML, Stephen McGibbon has promised some screen shots.

Applets. “We’ve also decided that once every 15 years or so we’re going to update the applets in Windows,” Sinofsky said, showing off his bone-dry wit. That means updates to Calculator, Paint, WordPad, which will now support open document formats including Open XML and ODF.

Next up is a post from Samba’s Andrew Bartlett in which he discusses the significant progress that has been made between the Samba Project and Microsoft’s Server devlelopment team over the last year, it was Brett Roberts who brought this to my attention, as a tangential point Brett also has some discussion about a recent event he ran alongside Google discussing our respective approaches to Software + Online Services.

Back to Samba, Andrew’s post is here;

This has been an amazing year of changes for those of us with an interest in interoperability with Microsoft, and these two events are an excellent example of the change in practice.

In short, Microsoft organised an industry plug fest for CIFS and AD technologies and then invited the Samba Team to it’s home campus for a week of hands on testing with their engineers. This follows up on documentation of over 100 protocols delivered, well over 100 requests for clarification answered, Samba code debugged and fortnightly conference calls held.

There can be little disagreement that this is night and day from the position we had with the Samba team three or four years ago. I think we probably have a way to go before the company as a whole pervasively understands the value of this type of relationship, but there are certainly a growing and significant number of individuals in the company who “get it”.

Fourth on the list is our recent decision to get involved in the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol Working Group.

From Sam Ramji’s blog;

Messaging (and I mean enterprise messaging, rather than email) is an area that is of keen interest to customers like JP Morgan Chase and Credit Suisse. As they run their businesses on real-time messaging, they need to be deep experts, and drive changes in their messaging platforms to fit their business. Along with companies like Cisco, Novell, iMatix, RabbitMQ, WSO2, and Red Hat, these industry leaders have built a standard for ubiquitous messaging: AMQP. 

The Advanced Message Queueing Protocol is an open specification supported by open source communities and currently implemented by Apache QPID, RabbitMQ, and OpenAMQ.  The contributors established the AMQP Working Group as a body to manage the process of developing the specification.

It’s my pleasure to announce that Microsoft has been invited to join the AMQP working group  by the six founding members. We have committed to participate in the development of the specification and are keenly interested in the developing need for interoperability in enterprise messaging.

This is a great standards story, and a great interoperability story.

Fifth on the list is support for the Web SSO profile for SAML 2.0 in “Geneva”, a code name for our upcoming claims based access platform.

Don Schmidt has the following;

At the Professional Developers Conference this week Microsoft is announcing the beta release of “Geneva”, the codename for its new claims based access platform. This platform helps developers and IT professionals simplify user access to applications and other systems with an open claims-based model. “Geneva” helps developers to externalize user authentication and identity processing from application code by using claims that are obtained with pre-built security logic that is integrated with .NET tools. “Geneva” helps IT professionals to efficiently deploy and manage new applications by reducing user account management, promoting a consistent security model, and facilitating seamless collaboration across departmental, organizational and vendor boundaries. User access benefits include shortened provisioning lead times, reduced accounts, passwords and logins, and enhanced privacy support. “Geneva” implements the Identity Metasystem vision for open and interoperable identity, and includes built-in support for standard federated identity protocols.

SAML 2.0 support by Microsoft has been a big discussion point here in the region, especially in countries such as New Zealand where SAML plays key roles in the government’s national authentication program.

Finally, and equally important, an announcement from the LiveID team at PDC yesterday that they will be supporting OpenID.

TechCrunch has some info on this announcement;

Login standard OpenID has gotten a huge boost today from Microsoft, as the company has announced that users will soon be able to login to any OpenID site using their Windows Live IDs. With over 400 million Windows Live accounts (many of which see frequent use on the Live’s Mail and Messenger services), the announcement is a massive win for OpenID. And Microsoft isn’t just supporting OpenID – the announcement goes as far as to call it the de facto login standard.

…as does Microosft’s Peter Galli;

This means that Windows Live ID accounts will be able to be used to sign in to any OpenID Web site. The Windows Live ID OpenID Provider (OP) enables anyone with a Windows Live ID account to set up an OpenID alias and to use that alias for identification at an increasing number of OpenID 2.0 relying party sites-for example: Plaxo, Pibb, StackOverflow.com and Wikispaces.

Putting around half a billion LiveID users to one side. this is good news for me personally, next time I want to post a comment on Harish Pillay’s blog I won’t need to do it anonymously!

That should be more than enough for one post, as I’ve said before it is evidence that we’re delivering on the public promises we have made around interoperability that will eventually make a difference to the way that developers, ISVs, customers and other partners perceive us.

This week feels like it has delivered a pretty strong set of evidence to support those public statements… and it is still only the second day of PDC!

Following on from one of the sessions that took place as part of the DII workshop on ODF and Office SP2 in Redmond Doug Mahugh has written up what was described as the guiding principles for the ODF implementation in Microsoft Office.

This blog post covers the main presentation from our ODF workshop that took place in Redmond last week: Peter Amstein’s explanation of the guiding principles behind our support of ODF in Office 2007 SP2. I’ve added explanations of some of the details that were covered verbally in the workshop, but if anything’s not clear here, please let me know.

Why ODF 1.1?

We’re implementing ODF 1.1 in our initial release of ODF support. We chose this version because it is the most current approved ODF specification, and because it is the version of ODF that current release versions of most other applications such as OpenOffice also support. We will support ODF in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, using the file extensions .odt, .ods, and .odp. The exact release date for Office 2007 SP2 has not been announced yet, but we expect ODF support to be available sometime in the first half of 2009.

Guiding Principles

As we set out to build in support for ODF, we developed a set of principles to guide our implementation team. Those principles are:

• Adhere to the ODF 1.1 Standard
• Be Predictable
• Preserve User Intent
• Preserve Editability
• Preserve Visual Fidelity

The conversation was a fascinating part of the day where the development leads talked through the complex set of decisions that they have had to make as they build ODF support into the products.

I would encourage anybody interested in this topic to read Doug’s whole post…

From my point of view it was really helpful to hear experts in this field discussion document standards in general along with what it will take for Microsoft to deliver ODF in a way that balances the needs of several different constituents (standards professionals, governments, regulators and users).

I’m sure we’ll see posts with all the details over the next 48 hours as people make their way home, and it is probably best that I let others share their perspective on the conversation rather than me doing it.

For now you’ll find posts from Jesper Lund Stocholm and John Head that get things off to a good start. Also, a couple of Microsoft folks have posts up, Stephen McGibbon and Doug Mahugh.

I’ll add other links here as they appear.

Additions;

Gray Knowlton – Redmond ODF workshop feels pretty good

John D. Head – Thoughts on the Microsoft ODF Workshop

Jesper Lund Stocholm – DII ODF workshop catch-up, round table discussions

Dennis Hamilton – Microsoft ODF Interoperability Workshop

Doug Mahugh – Guiding Principles for Office’s ODF implementation

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…

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.

For most of last week nobody really seemed to care, there were a couple of press stories but nothing like the coverage of his similar test with an IS29500 schema and document produced by Microsoft Office a week earlier.

Then a couple of days ago IBM’s Rob Weir jumped in with an extremely long post that he titled “ODF Validation for Dummies“. I’ll let you read the details for yourself, while I’m interested in the detail I’m more concerned by the tone of the overall post itself – I’ll come to that further down in this text.

For flavour, here is the opening line from Rob’s post;

Alex Brown has a problem. He can’t figure out how to validate ODF documents.

As you might expect, Dr. Brown felt the need to respond to this comment and posted a similarly long post of his own, digging deeper into his objectives, his findings and his intent.

Alex’s post, titled “ODF validation for the cognoscenti” responds to several parts of Rob’s monologue, as I read through it a part headed “Negativity” caught my eye;

Amid the general downer that is Rob’s blog entry, is an assumption that I share such negative thoughts. I find myself described as “someone who would be well served if he could show that all consortia standards are junk, and that only SC34 (and he himself) could make them good”. Hmmmmm – where did that come from?

For the record, I am an enthusiastic supporter of consortia and consortium standards and know from experience that consortia contain great people who are producing some of the best standards work in the planet: XML 1.0, ODF, XSLT, UBL, OOXML (ha!) – the list goes on. Most recently I was very pleased to see a new working draft of the important new W3C XProc specification – something that SC 34 is specifically deferring to rather than attempt something similar itself. I thoroughly disapprove of the kind of oppositional mindset that sees things in a polarised “ISO vs OASIS” or “ISO vs W3C” way. In my view that mode of thinking already did enough damage during the DIS 29500 project.

Rob’s response – a hand crafted piece of XML that will validate as an IS26300 document.

Well, Yahoo! (am I allowed to use that word?)

So here is my concern.

There are literally over a billion users of office suites in the world today. These users are self selecting their favourite office suite, and at the same time choosing whatever document format is right for them.

While the debate around document formats has been an interesting one for those of us embroiled in it we have to remember that these users are the reason why we’re having the conversations, not because we have nothing else to do other than bicker with one another.

It is fascinating to watch the back and forth ping pong on blogs as points are scored, but the mentality of directly attacking an individual with the goal of proving that you’re right (regardless of the facts) really does not help anybody.

At this point it feels like we are still a long way from a scenario where somebody from the OASIS TC might reach out to Alex or another member of JTC1/SC34 to discuss the challenges that arose during Alex’s simple test, instead the goal seems to be to prove something in the blogosphere. (I’m not sure what)

Common goals around interoperability, long term sustainability of documents and simplicity for users are often articulated by all parties – but if we’re going to achieve any of those goals then the blog based fun has to end, and professional dialogue has to begin.