Office Binary File Format Plugfest 2010 Recap

The Office Interoperability team hosted their first Binary File Format Plugfest event last week. The two day event was held at the Platform Adoption Center on the Microsoft Campus, October 19th and 20th. The event consisted of a combination of presentations, 1:1 discussions with the product teams, and file format testing. We covered a lot of ground in two days and had a great time getting to know the folks working with the binary file formats.

We focused the event around the File Format Open Specifications and covered the MS-DOC, MS-XLS, MS-PPT, MS-PST, and MS-OGRAPH formats and tailored the content towards a developer level audience. We also worked on file validation and had a great presentation on the PST SDK. Members from the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook teams made themselves available throughout the event to help answer questions and get to know the attendees. We also had a strong presence from Microsoft support and they were able to help the attendees with issues and assisted the product team with questions. It was an educational experience for us as we grasped a deeper insight to how our customers are leveraging the open specifications.

It was an exciting two days and it was a real pleasure getting to know our specification customers. If you couldn’t make the event, we will be posting videos of the presentations on MSDN Channel 9 in the near future. For those of you who did attend, thank you and we are looking forward to future interactions.

Here are some pictures from the event:

Group Photo	MS-DOC
MS-XLS	MS-PPT
MS-OGRAPH	MS-PST