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...

Doug Mahugh posted today on Interoperability – specifically the difficulty of enabling cross-application exchange of document formats. This represents one (important) aspect of the overall interoperability challenge, but I would like to set some context for this conversation in my blog. There is laser...

You don't have to look hard to see the impact that Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 (aka MOSS) are having. A very real impact that 2007 is having is with Office Business Applications ( http://www.microsoft.com/oba ). With OBA's, customers have the ability to connect Office to Line of Business applications...

Dealing with Product Management for both IT Professionals and Developers for Office requires a lot of brain food. I have to do a lot of reading to keep current on the interop discussion, the state of app virtualization, developer tools, solution profiles, etc. I read a lot of trade press and blogs, mining...

Gartner has published a report about document format standards . They have pointed out a number of key challenges related to document format standards, and illustrate clearly some of the issues that remain from the Open XML and ODF ratification waves. This report offers several interesting conclusions...

Just referring back to our interoperability principles for a moment , and the ongoing commitment to them . EMC Corporation, IBM and Microsoft today announced a jointly developed specification which uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise...

You'll see some blog traffic on this, so I thought I'd throw my own log onto the fire. I attended the ODF workshop yesterday, mainly to sit in the back and watch how things unfolded, but also to learn a little bit myself. I must say that after the conclusion of the event, I was quite happy about how...

As I troll the blogosphere and reporting on Open XML and ODF, I notice a question has surfaced regarding the future of Open XML that is probably worth addressing. Many have asked or speculated that the recent announcement of ODF in Service Pack 2 is an indication that Microsoft is quietly stepping...

Updated. April 28, 2009. Office 2007 SP2 is available for download. For more information: http://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton/archive/2009/04/27/office-2007-service-pack-2-kiosk.aspx For those of you who have been following the file format issue for a while, you'll recognize today's action by Microsoft...

Picking up on the harmonization topic again , it appears that DIN has published an early draft of their report on translation between the two formats. The report outlines some preliminary findings in the feature differences between the format specs, and outlines some principles for what it thinks appropriate...

Yesterday was a big day, filled with lots of goodness on openness and interoperability . Today I thought I'd share some stuff that is a little different than my normal focus, but very interesting nonetheless. I realized last night (thanks to a not-so-gentle reminder from my wife) that I haven't gone...

Today is a very important day in the history of Microsoft; it's a moment with which I am very happy to be associated. If you didn't see the big news , you can read about it here . But if you just want to skip to the "What does this mean for Office and File Formats?" part, read on. To recap what was...

Patrick Durusau, Editor of the ODF specification(s) has offered another post in the vein of "can't we all just get along?" For all the discussion however, these documents from Mr. Durusau indicate a good path forward. This path is similar (the same) as what has been undertaken by DIN a while back. This...

This week Mike Walker announced a new "OBA Component Library " for Financial Services (OBA == Office Business Applications). If you're not familiar with OBAs , they are applications that are designed to help you use Office to get more out of the data center. We see countless situations where our customers...

http://interopvendoralliance.org/labs/ The Interop Vendor Alliance has been testing various scenarios with Open XML interoperability. If you're not familiar with the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA), you can read about their activities here. They've done some interesting work in the area of identity...

Every day I run across a great deal of useful data for Open XML, so I thought I'd share some of that: David Overton recaps the KB articles that describe how to get Open XML documents indexed using various Microsoft server platforms: Jasper Hedegaard Bojsen discusses (refutes) the idea that Open...