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OpenXML Community Growing

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Wow, I've been trying to pull together my next "Intro to SpreadsheetML" post for over two weeks now but it's pretty slow going when you only get 10 mins at a time to focus on it. I thought it would have been ready last week but other things kept coming up. This week in particular is super busy, as there are three separate events going on out here at Microsoft that I'm participating in. That combined with the Office 14 planning and specing means I haven't had much time to focus on pulling together my next SpreadsheetML post. Sorry about that folks.

I had a bit of free time this morning before heading into the office, so wanted to take some time to mention that today we're kicking off a new community site to help better organize the large number of people interested in OpenXML. We already have OpenXMLDeveloper.org which is a community of developers programming against OpenXML. The next step is that we're starting a site called openxmlcommunity.org where customers and partners can talk about the formats and share thoughts, ideas. etc.

There are a number of big things we've seen lately which led to the idea of creating a community site. We have over 300 other companies and partners who care deeply about OpenXML and who've already signed up to be part of the community. Go check it out for yourself. There are a ton of quotes up there from various organizations that have been positively impacted by our move to an open standard format for Office documents.

For example, as I've pointed out in earlier posts, the number of people with access to the new formats isn't just limited to Office 2007 customers. Here are the other ways we're seeing people using OpenXML:

Those are a few of the tools I've been keeping track of, but that's just the beginning. Now we have the openxmlcommunity site which will helps other folks building OpenXML tools to share their thoughts and ideas.

Well, that took a bit longer to say than I'd initially planned… now I'm late for work. (BTW, I've set this up to delay post as the openxmlcommunity site isn't supposed to go live until later on this afternoon)

-Brian

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2007
    C'est Brian Jones qui nous l'apprend avec grand plaisir ce matin (du moins de ce côté du globe) dans

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2007
    C'est Brian Jones qui nous l'apprend avec grand plaisir ce matin (du moins de ce côté du globe) dans

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2007
    The Open XML Community site launched yesterday, with an inaugural list of members including over 300

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2007
    The Open XML Community site launched yesterday, with an inaugural list of members including over 300

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2007
    I was having lunch with Jean Paoli today and he told me about this press release that came out this morning

  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2007
    What license terms is the OpenXML Writer published under?  It should be published in the ReadMe, or a License.txt file or some such file, but I can't see it.  (I learnt to check such matters very, very carefully, and it bugs me that I can't find that out from any of the .cs or .xml or .csproj files I've checked.) You see, "Open Source" isn't merely a matter of having the source available; it's also a matter of having the rights and duties of the developers, both original and later,  clearly defined.  The OpenXML Writer source code doesn't itself define those matters at all.  And there is no documentation included with them to define them either.  And that naturally makes me very, very wary.

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    Not sure Wesley. I haven't played around with the writer at all. Someone had pointed it out to me awhile back and I made a note to myself to eventually blog about it. According to their information it's open source, but if you don't think that's accurate you should see if you can get in contact with them directly. Let me know what find out. -Brian

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2007
    Hi, Brian, I got in touch with the OpenXML Writer group and they replied.  It's under the Microsoft Community License, which is good - it's a short and clear license that does fit the Open Source Definition. Now I can be confident that there aren't any gotchas if I read the source and use it appropriately. (The OpenXML Writer source tree does provide a little bit more "documentation" shall we say, about ECMA 376, in actual use.  OpenXML.biz should also provide equivalent utilities and source trees for the other aspects of ECMA 376 (eg, Presentation, Spreadsheeting, etc) if they want it even better understood.  Code is law, to quote Lessing, and Microsoft has been quite remiss in providing enough code for its XML office file format. ;)

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    Thanks for the update Wesley. I hear you on the value of code, and I'll look for ways to make the formats easier to understand and build solutions with. -Brian

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2007
    (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=226) (Palm OS – Documents To Go brings OpenXML support to smartphone and PDA devices powered by the Palm operating system (http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/premium/index.html?redirect=hp_dxtg_palm)

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2007
    (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=226) (Palm OS – Documents To Go brings OpenXML support to smartphone and PDA devices powered by the Palm operating system (http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/premium/index.html?redirect=hp_dxtg_palm)

  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2007
    Voici une liste rapide des outils qui gravitent autour du format de document bureautique Open XML (merci

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2007
    OpenXML Community Growing http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/05...