Doug Mahugh is carrying an announcement of the next in the series of workshops that we’re running in Redmond to support the Document Interoperability Initiative, this time looking at OpenXML Implementation and Interoperability. The workshop will be held on the Microsoft Redmond Campus on the 24th and 25th October. I managed to attend the ...

My colleague Gray Knowlton has a post up on his blog this morning talking about our unwavering commitment to OpenXML as an essential component  of the Microsoft Office System. Many have asked or speculated that the recent announcement of ODF in Service Pack 2 is an indication that Microsoft is quietly stepping away from Open XML. Some ask… [...]

I see Eric White is carrying details of the release of the OpenXML Powertools on his blog today. If you want to be able to generate OpenXML documents on the server, without an installation of Microsoft Office, then this is the way to do it. You’ll find the details on Eric’s blog by following this link; Processing Open [...]

Back in March of this year, Doug Mahugh talked about the roadmap for the OpenXML SDK, an important set of tools that will allow developers to quickly develop applications that read and right OpenXML (ECMA-376) documents. This first version of the SDK, which is available as of today, includes a set of APIs capable of manipulating [...]

The laziest type of blog post is one that just quotes a bunch of other people and adds little value in its own right, I tend to use this blog as a combination of a place to document some of my own views and a place to store my own notes as various events [...]

It has been a fun week watching the goings on in Geneva, some of the well orchestrated activity outside of the BRM has been fascinating to follow. A little like a high tech episode of The Bold and The Beautiful. Probably by pure coincidence Google’s Open Source Programs Manager, Zaheda Bhorat, added a post to The [...]

A short while ago I mentioned that Microsoft had committed to releasing the file format specifications for the Microsoft Office Binary files under the Open Specification Promise and making them generally available, removing any of the complications that developers previously had to go through to get hold of these documents. So, the only remaining ...

Several of my Microsoft colleagues are blogging this morning about a comment that Brian Jones posted yesterday. Brian announces two things that the company is doing to support developers and organizations that want to understand the relationship between the binary file formats and OpenXML and/or manage conversions between the two. 1. The ...

It has been a busy week on the OpenXML front, I have been travelling for the last few days and have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to catch up on the long list in my inbox. Three of the items stand out; 1. Accessibility. A group of accessibility experts have worked on reviewing Ecma-376 [...]

The compatibility pack comes up in conversation pretty frequently these days, in past years when Microsoft has upgraded to a new file format users of older versions of office products have had to deal with some well document issues when files are sent to them in the newer format. With the advent of Open XML and [...]