“Directions on Microsoft” Report on Open XML formats

There is a new report out from Directions on Microsoft that discusses the new Open XML formats, and the impact on Office customers. It discusses the benefits that organizations will see from the formats, as well as some deployment recommendations. Here is a link: https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/sample/DOMIS/update/2007/01jan/0107nffio2.htm

I liked Rob's overview of the payoffs for Content Management, Public Sector:

The most important benefit of the new file formats will be for software developers and integrators who use Office as part of a larger solution. Because the Office XML formats are documented and accessible through standard APIs and tools, applications other than Office can do tasks such as generating documents from user input and extracting data from documents for business applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Microsoft itself could eventually benefit: the company's business applications (such as Dynamics CRM) could exploit the formats to extract information from Office documents or annotate them.

It's definitely the case that on top of all the solutions other folks can build, even within Microsoft we'll see other teams building solutions they couldn't have easily done before. The ability to generate or consume a rich Office documents in other applications is a huge shift for the market.

- Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 04, 2007
  Can you respond to this: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-portes.html

• Anonymous
  January 05, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 05, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 05, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 05, 2007
  Interesting comment from Rob Weir's post: "I wouldn't be surprised if those 'too complicated to explain the behavior' tags listed in the article are essentially an enumeration of all of the opaque, undocumented, legacy routines that live on in MS Office." This is what I have suspected all along. I understand why these options are in the standard. Yet including them in the standard means that the legacy code to support them can never be retired. Which means that Word may never get a new engine. Which is sad: in many regards, WPF and IE are now better at text and layout--what should be Word's core competence--than Word itself is!

• Anonymous
  January 05, 2007
  Actually that's not really the case Francis. Any application is free to decide whether or not they want to support that portion of the standard. They would still be fully conformant as long as they don't claim to support those pieces. So if at some point Word decides to no longer support those old layout behaviors, it would just need to say that those portions of the standard are no longer supported by Word. Maybe the Ecma TC would even decide that in a future version of the standard those portions are not longer supported. If people are using them, then they probably wouldn't, but if at some point they are no longer used I can imagine that decision being made. -Brian

• Anonymous
  January 05, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 07, 2007
  As I have tried to comment on Rob wier blog as  well: Both Opendocument as well as Office Open XML are not exact rendering specs. That means documents will never be interpreted exactly the same when just based on the specs in the standard. If you need exact replica's of documents you need a spec like XPS of PDF. This also means that it would be virtually impossible to replicate things like buggy rendering issues from older Office versions. That would require an exact specification which these Office standards are not. To be honest both standards are completly useless for rendering purposes without reference implementation examples. For Office Open XML the biggest advantage is that it has only one main implementation which in itself server as a reference implementation. For OpenDocument OOo does a simular job but with more applications using it that might become a lot more complex as OOo does not have nearly the same userbase as MS Office and for instance google could easily create an application using Opendocument that in a short period creates a bigger userbase and creates more documents.