A great thing about Microsoft as an employee is the ability to manage one's own career and to invest in one's own development by seeking new opportunities and experiences. Role changes at Microsoft are common, part of the unique cultural fabric that exists within our company.
Today I find myself in this situation. I have accepted a new role as Group Program Manager in our Customer and Partner Engineering Services team. In layperson's terms this means transitioning to the engineering org out of "marketing," and taking on a new team that manages (among other things) in-market products. I am thrilled to make the move, there are many areas of work on this team for which I have great passion.
In departing the Office Product Management group I leave behind a great team and many outstanding colleagues. I will certainly treasure the experiences I have gained in this organization. I'm not going that far, my new role will still have a strong customer focus, I will still work on Office and MBD products, and I'll still work in the same building.
As I ramp on the new role, I am going to shut down the blog for a while. There are many things to consume to prepare for my new role, so I need to go into a cave for a bit and study up. At some point I plan to return to blogging, but for now, I'm going to be a good student and concentrate on collecting input rather than generating output.
Here's where to go if you want to read blogs similar to mine:
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnrdurant
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones
http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/
Thank you to the readers who have followed my posts and participated in them. I shall return .
On February 21, 2008, I posted on Microsoft Interoperability Principles, which are designed to make our products more open and more available to the broader software community. Since that day, Microsoft has made several strides in this area, too many to recount here and now, but largely explained by the Interoperability@Microsoft team.
Today we are making an important advance in the area of document format interoperability for Office, as part of our ongoing commitment to these interoperability principles.
After four successful Technology Previews, today we are releasing the 2.0 version of the Open XML SDK for Microsoft Office. Among its benefits, this release of the Open XML SDK is a significant step forward because of the amount and quality of functionality it provides to developers seeking to build document processing solutions without the use of Microsoft Office applications.
Today Visual Studio is the primary developer tool for Office 2010, and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is also widely used to extend and automate our Office client software. Traditionally Visual Studio developers build add-ins, integrations with SharePoint and other solutions that exist within Office products. In the past, one of the common developer tasks with Visual Studio and Visual Basic for VBA was processing of Office documents. This was typically accomplished with macros and scripts running inside client applications. This is sub-optimal for many reasons. Client applications are not optimized for large-scale automation, and in-client document processing solutions are error-prone as a result.
Document processing is spreading to mainstream development because of advances in more transparent XML-based formats and the associated tooling to modify documents represented in those formats.
The Open XML SDK improves the ability to process Office documents. Automation operations no longer require a client environment that was never really designed to support bulk processing solutions. With the SDK developers now have direct (element-level) access to a document's content. It is great for enabling solutions to extract, examine or modify a document's contents.
The SDK also improves developer choice and platform-neutral document interoperability. By freeing documents from their dependence on a particular application or platform, government agencies and other entities gain greater access to the information they store in their documents.
Many people will comment on the capabilities of the SDK. If I might recommend some resources to get started, I would point readers to the following posts:
Download the Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft OfficeThis download provides strongly typed part and content classes for use with Office 2007 & Office 2010 Open XML documents. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c6e744e5-36e9-45f5-8d8c-331df206e0d0
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ee441239.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb265236.aspx
http://www.openxmldeveloper.org
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnrdurant/archive/2010/03/15/open-xml-sdk-2-0-for-microsoft-office-is-live.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/erikaehrli/archive/2010/03/15/open-xml-sdk-2-0-rtm-articles-videos-code-snippets-and-resources-on-msdn.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ericwhite/archive/2010/03/15/release-of-the-open-xml-sdk-2-0-for-microsoft-office.aspx
I am very excited for the release of the Open XML SDK, and I hope that the Open XML Development community will be as well.