DII workshop – Brussels, November 12
The next DII (Document Interoperability Initiative) workshop will take place in Brussels on November 12. As always, the goal of the DII workshops is to share information with the developer community and solicit feedback on how we can work together to improve interoperability.
Much has changed since the last DII workshop in Brussels, when we discussed Office’s future plans for ODF support and the pending rollout of the implementer notes, as well as the need for a validator and document test library to improve ISO/IEC 29500 interoperability. Now there are two versions of Office that offer built-in ODF support (Office 2007 SP2 and the Office 2010 Technical Preview), implementer notes have been published for ODF, ECMA-376, and ISO/IEC 29500, and validator and test-library projects are underway.
This workshop will include presentations on a variety of document interoperability topics. I'll blog the details of the agenda after it's finalized, but I wanted to let everyone know the date so those who are interested can make plans to attend. In the meantime, here are a few of the presentations that are already being planned:
- I'll be covering the Office 2010 extensions (as was covered by the Office program managers in last month's DII workshop in Redmond). I will also present the latest news on how we’re working to improve ODF interoperability between Office and other popular applications, and talk about our plans for the future.
- Alex Brown will be covering present and future plans for the Office-o-tron validator project.
- Klaus-Peter Eckert of Fraunhofer FOKUS will present the latest status of the document test library project and other work Fraunhofer is doing to improve interoperability.
Like all DII workshops, this event is open to anyone and everyone, and there is no cost to attend. If you're interested in attending, let us know by sending an email to diievents@microsoft.com, and we’ll follow up with information about the venue, agenda, and other details.
On a more personal note, I know that many people in the document formats community (myself included) are photo geeks, and cameras may have outnumbered laptops at some of the standards meetings and interop events I’ve attended. I’ve been to Brussels twice before, but never had time to snap more than a few photos on the way between meetings, like the snapshots below. This time, however, I’ll be in Brussels a day early and am planning to get out and take a bunch of pictures on the Armistice Day holiday, November 11. So if you’re coming to the workshop and would like to go on a photo outing the day before, let me know. The more the merrier.
See you in Brussels!