IBM shows off solutions for OpenXML

Stephen was telling me about this article that IBM had written that demonstrated:

"consuming and repurposing MS Office 2007 documents is easy with IBM DB2 pureXML features. There really is not much code involved which is conducive to great performance."

It sounded pretty cool, as it provided an example .docx file as well as some PHP examples on doing things like repurposing a .docx into a simple HTML paragraph. The article isn't live anymore (looks like it's undergoing some construction), and I think that's because there was some confusion on what is an XPS document and what an OpenXML document is. The original article (google cache here) describes how to parse on OpenXML .docx file, but it refers to it as an XPS document. I think that's why it's no longer live and under construction. Hopefully we'll see it back up there soon!

The article was great in that it hit on some of the other benefits of OpenXML that people haven't been talking about as much. Most folks in the standards discussions are focused on how different Office productivity tools (such as MS Word or OpenOffice) can create and consume the files. The other really valuable piece of an open format though is that you can use these documents in new ways you hadn't thought of before. This article from IBM hits on how you can consume the OpenXML document and store pieces of it in a database. Or you could also go the other way around, which starts to hit on the various document assembly solutions you could build. Very cool stuff.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 12, 2007
  "Hopefully, you've found that consuming and re-purposing MS Office 2007 documents is easy [...]. There really is not much code involved, which is conducive to great performance." If IBM is saying this then it must be true!

• Anonymous
  June 13, 2007
  Is this a case of one division of IBM not knowing/caring about what the other division is doing? I remember when IBM was still shipping OS/2, their PC division pretty much ignored them and shipped PCs with Win3.x, NT, and Win95 (though they also did limited OS/2 shipments I believe).  (The one time where IBM's PC division did listen to the OS/2 division was when the PC division held up shipment of PPC PCs, because the PPC version of OS/2 wasn't ready (and never did become ready).  Those PCs were ready to be shipped with PPC NT, but they held up shipment for the never to be released PPC OS/2, which resulted in PPC only being widely used for Macs.) Anyway, it's interesting that one division of IBM would be publicly trashing and FUD'ing OOXML every chance they get while another is posting articles on how to make use of the benefits of OOXML.

• Anonymous
  June 14, 2007
  Unfortunately, the Google cached version has gone. Not even the text version is there. I think the entire article has been pulled. The IBM URL doesn't exist.

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2007
  Hopefully it will come back soon after they correct the use of the term "XPS". I'm assuming that's why they pulled it down.