Standards workshop at Harvard this week

Tomorrow I'm heading out to Massachusetts for what should be a very interesting event at Harvard. The Kennedy school's Leadership for a Networked World is hosting a workshop entitled "Cross-Boundary Governance through Agreements and Standards". Here's a link for more information: https://ksgexecprogram.harvard.edu/program/lnw2/overview.aspx

I'll be out there for the rest of the week, and there should be some great discussions. We're already seeing a lot of examples of government processes benefitting from the OpenXML formats in combination with the custom schema support. Just like what we've already seen with the Florida House of Representatives, there are a huge number of customers that significantly benefit from the document assembly and content re-use solutions that you can now build.

As I've said before, the key thing you want to see is that multiple applications and solutions have the ability to interact with the file format you choose. This allows you to ensure that the information within your files can reach its full potential. It's important that that there is an adequate choice of formats to allow you to best leverage the applications you want to use, as we can't guarantee that one format will work for all scenarios. The translation work underway today is going to help out a lot here, both with existing applications as well as future ones.

Another area that governments in particular are interested in is long term archival, where you can rest easy that regardless of what happens to any particular application, you know that your documents can be accessed in both the near as well as long term future.

I'll let you guys know how the workshops go... there should be some great discussions.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 27, 2007
  Very interesting topic especially for long-term archival purposes which are imposed on heavily regulated industries - do tell how & where the conversations go. Also, can you direct me to a post, url, etc. that may provide insight for a very controlled adoption of the OpenXML format.  We're standardized on a Office 2003 and can use the Compatibility pack, however, we'd like to initially disable the "save as" XML file format to provide the flexibility of reading/editing docs with new format, but only allow saving in legacy format UNTIL we are prepared to adopt the openXML standard (once all questions on long-term usage are answered). No, we don't consider the "viewers" as a longer-term viable option, and upgrading our internal standard version is an expensive proposition with a scope that is quite large.  Yes, we know some formatting will be lost, but our primary objective is to control/minimize the chaos of a new format.  Yes, we expect to receive docs in the new format from business partners, and it's not reasonable to expect to dictate 100% of the time the formats our partners use. It would be a nice option in the compatibility pack to control the use of the new format - thoughts?    

• Anonymous
  March 27, 2007
  DMC, It was a very interesting conference. There were a couple case studies around digital archival, and I'm going to write up a summary in the next couple days. I'm curious to hear a bit more from you though about your concerns with the stability of the file formats. I'm also wondering what you meant about the viewers not being a viable option. What were you thinking they weren't an option for? Does the fact that the formats are fully documented and standardized help out there, or is there more that you're looking for? Thanks! -Brian

• Anonymous
  March 27, 2007
  The comment has been removed