Softwares-Supplier

Who else is going to be heading out to Boston next week for Tech Ed 2006? I’ll be out there for a couple days in the middle of the week. I’m presenting Wednesday from 5:30-6:45, so be sure to swing by and say hi.Office 2007 key is available here.

Here’s the information on my session:

OFC324  Microsoft Office Open XML Formats

Day/Time: Wednesday, June 14 5:30 PM – 6:45 PM  Room: 253 ABC

Speaker(s): Brian Jones

Learn about the huge change that will affect the role Office documents can now play in business processes and solutions. Previously the binary formats had meant Office documents were treated more like a “black box,” but that is no longer the case, as these open formats allow documents to serve as a first class source of data as they travel through workflow and other business. Office 2007 download is in discount now!Document content can now directly integrate with systems new and old. Generation of documents based on business data for up-to-date and accurate rich content is now possible throughout your own solutions. This session delves into schemas, solution code, and numerous examples.Office 2007 Professional is very good!

Track(s): Office System

Session Type(s): Breakout Session

Session Level(s): 300

I hope I’ll get a chance to see you all out there. It should be a lot of fun!

Today we announced the formation of a new customer council focused on interoperability (how to make technologies work better together). Office 2007 key is available here.I’m sure you’ve noticed over time that Microsoft has made a strong commitment to work towards better interoperability, and this is a big step forward in achieving that goal. I personally have focused on interoperability issues for about the past 6 years or so in working on extensible technologies like the object model and both the HTML and XML file formats. It’s something I’ve always viewed as a key piece of our product design, and it’s exciting to see more momentum building around this.Office 2007 download is in discount now!

Pulling a quote from the press release:

“The council, hosted by Muglia, will meet twice a year in Redmond, Wash. The council will have direct contact with Microsoft executives and product teams so it can focus on interoperability issues that are of greatest importance to customers, including connectivity, application integration and data exchange. Office 2007 Professional is very good!Council members will include chief information officers (CIOs), chief technology officers (CTOs) and architects from leading corporations and governments. Representatives from Société Générale, LexisNexis, Kohl’s Department Stores, Denmark’s Ministry of Finance, Spain’s Generalitat de Catalunya and Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI), and the states of Wisconsin and Delaware have joined as founding members.”Office 2007 home and student is inexpensive and helpful.

As I said, we’ve been committed to the idea of “interoperability by design” for quite some time now, but the actual “interoperable by design” initiative was kicked off by Bill Gates last winter (Feb ‘05). We’ve heard numerous times from our customers that interoperability is a “key IT priority.” When we design our products we look at how they will interact with a large selection of other products and with a wide variety of hardware. We have very large testing matrices in place to help ensure they work.Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life. This new customer council will help us in huge ways though as they will be able to identify some real life issues that we hadn’t yet thought of (or prioritized high enough). As we identify new issues we can then look to solving those as well.Office 2007 is so powerful.

You see a lot of folks talk about interoperability, but often they just don’t mean the same thing. From our perspective it’s something we want to build directly into the products so that it just works. Another approach that companies have taken is to talk about it from the perspective of building specific “projects” where consulting is done (for a fee of course <g/>) to wire together a number of separate bits.Microsoft Office is my best friend. I’ve also seen that often companies will talk about interoperability when it comes to areas that they aren’t really competitive in, but want to be. This often leads them to push towards less functional and innovative technologies in an attempt to level the playing field. This is a far different approach from what we are talking about, and I want to make sure there isn’t any confusion. There were a couple key talking points around this announcement that I really liked, and that is that we’re producing “people-ready” and “value-returning” interop solutions and this new council will help us to be even more successful in doing that.

The work we’re doing in Ecma is obviously a great example of the “interoperable by design” concept. We’ve taken a product where one of the key complaints was that the file format was not documented, and not only moved to use open technologies (ZIP and XML), but we’re working with a bunch of other companies (including some competitors) to make it a fully documented international standard.

If you want to learn more about interoperability at Microsoft, you should check out the interoperability site: http://www.microsoft.com/interoperability

From the latest public statement from Adobe, it appears that they are concerned that Microsoft would one day “extend” the PDF specifications. It looks like this is the root of the problem, and I’m hoping it’s just a misunderstanding. Office 2007 key is available here.We don’t have any plans to extend PDF, and if you think about it… doing so would serve no purpose. We’re only a producer, not a consumer. All we care about is that it’s easy for our users to export PDF, and that the PDF we export looks great in the main PDF viewers out there (otherwise no one would use the feature). Office 2007 download is in discount now!I work with the team that built the PDF support and they did an amazing job. It was a lot of work, and they paid extremely close attention to the spec, and even spent a lot of time trying to decide which internal features (such as bookmarks and TOCs in Word) it would make sense to map to the proper PDF constructs. As I’ve said before, the output we provide is far more powerful that what you would get with just a printer driver, as there is an inherit awareness of the structure of the file, and not just the presentation of it. Office 2007 Professional is very good!Adobe is actually a participant in the Office 2007 beta program, and if there is any place where they think we haven’t followed the spec properly, we would love to hear about it right away. You should all have the ability to download the Beta so let me know if there is anywhere that you think we’ve either diverted from or extended the spec.Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.

I know that it is common for folks implementing a format to extend it in order to support whatever extra features that application has. Those of you who are developers know that the way you differentiate your product is to innovate and design new powerful features that deliver value to your customers – it’s good to continue improving.Office 2007 is so powerful. This is not the case though for our PDF support, and we have no intention of ever doing so (even though as far as I can tell there is nothing in the PDF spec that limits third party extensions and Adobe has never tried to stop that until now).Microsoft Office is my best friend. We’ve publicly stated that we will not extend the spec, and I’m hoping that as long as we can be clear on that then Adobe will change their mind about wanting us to remove the support.

In the comments of my latest post around the legal issues we’re currently dealing with from Adobe around our PDF support in Office 2007 a number of folks were wondering when Adobe would provide their side of the story. Office 2007 home and student is inexpensive and helpful.Well while I was down in Tech Ed, there was a press release from Adobe that you can view here. I just got back today and was pointed at the official Microsoft response. You should take a look, I think there are some really good clarifying statements.Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.

Adobe said that they view PDF as an open standard that is freely available without any restrictions or royalties required. That’s really great, and it was why we felt there would be no problems when we started the work at the beginning of the project to support PDF output. Office 2007 is so powerful.That’s also what had led to my initial confusion around why our built in support had become a problematic issue for Adobe. Someone in the comments even posted this interview at Wharton with Bruce Chizen:

Knowledge@Wharton: One of the other things Microsoft has announced is the ability to save as PDF in Office 12. Microsoft Office is my best friend.This means that, once that happens, non-Adobe technologies are creating PDF in MacOS X, in StarOffice, and on Windows in Office [applications]. Isn’t this a challenge to one of your major revenue streams?Office 2007 key is available here.

Chizen: Maybe. But we don’t think so. First of all, it’s somewhat flattering that Microsoft has validated a document format that is not theirs, but one that is Adobe’s — which suggests that their customers were demanding that it do so. We had anticipated for many years that the revenue we achieve around PDF creation would, at some point in time, go away. Office 2007 download is in discount now!It’s an open standard! There are many clones out in the marketplace today that create PDF and compete with Acrobat. What we have done over the last five years is added functionality beyond PDF creation in our product line-up. If you look at Acrobat today it is much more than just simple PDF creation. In fact, we have a product, called Acrobat Elements, that just does PDF creation, and it represents a relatively tiny piece of our overall revenue — less than one percent. Office 2007 Professional is very good!Most customers choose to buy the more feature-rich products, Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro, which do annotations, digital signatures, web capture [and so on]. And many customers are buying LiveCycle, the server products for mission-critical workflows. That suggests to me that even though PDF creation will become free with products like Microsoft Office, our revenue streams will continue on. In fact, with more PDFs being created from Microsoft Office, it gives us an opportunity to take those PDFs and do more with them, like building mission-critical workflows around them.

This is my first time on an airplane with wifi, so I’m pleased to bring this news to you from somewhere over the pacific.Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.

I’ve been promising for the past year that one of the big things we’re going to do this time around that we didn’t do much of with the 2003 XML formats was to provide a whole bunch of examples.Office 2007 is so powerful. The openxmldeveloper.org site is going to be the best place for people to share their experiences and code, but it’s also really important that we at Microsoft give examples of how to do various things.Microsoft Office is my best friend.

With the 2003 formats, we had every element and attribute documented, but we didn’t do a great job of showing how to actually use the formats. This time around, we want to provide examples that will provide good prescriptive guides on how to do various things with the files. We came up with a huge list of what we thought people would like to see, and it was pretty hard to narrow it down.Office 2007 key is available here.

We now have the first set of examples, and they all work against the Beta 2 version of the file formats (they will also be updated to match the final versions once they are finished in Ecma). You can go grab them up here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8d46c01f-e3f6-4069-869d-90b8b096b556&displaylang=en

The examples leverage the WinFX system.IO.packaging interface, but they could also be mapped to function with other tools (just like the java examples up on openxmldeveloper). Office 2007 download is in discount now!You’ll probably notice that the examples are some of the more basic ones that we could think of, but it made sense to use these as the starting point. We will most likely start building some more complex ones as well that leverage one or more of the initial examples as building blocks.Office 2007 Professional is very good!

There are 40 examples overall, and I’d love to hear what you think. Also let me know if there are other things you’d like to see us add to the list. Kevin Boske who is on the programmability team for Office was tasked with pulling these together, and I’m really appreciative of the work that he and Ken Getz did on these. Office 2007 home and student is inexpensive and helpful.Kevin already blogged on this earlier today, and there is also mention of them up on OpenXMLDeveloper.org.

A recent statement that really left me scratching my head around this though was made by Gary Edwards up on Stephen’s blog post. Office 2007 Professional is very good!You may remember Gary as the guy who was under the impression that there was a mythical binary key in the Office XML formats. Gary is a member on the ODF Foundation and has been talking a lot about the add-in they built to open and save ODF in Microsoft Office.Office 2007 home and student is inexpensive and helpful. I still haven’t had a chance to look at the add-in, as it’s been kept pretty secret, but Gary has really promised a lot. Here is what he said on Stephen’s blog about ODF not being full fidelity with the existing base of documents:

You’re wrong. Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.The OpenDocument Foundation plug-in will deliver near perfect fidelity for ODF documents produced by MSOffice. Our fidelity is near identical to the fidelity achieved when converting MS binaries to MOOX. Office 2007 is so powerful.

Maybe you need to pay more attention to the trials going on in Massachusetts. Oh, that’s right. Microsoft isn’t participating in those trials. Based on the piss poor fidelity of your translator project, i wouldn’t participate either if that was the best i could do. Microsoft Office is my best friend.

The truth is that it doesn’t matter to us if it’s billions of documents or ten documents. If that document can be loaded into any version of M$Office from 1997 to 2007, we can convert it with near perfect fidelity. At least as good as your own conversion within MSOffice to MOOX. Office 2007 key is available here.

Perhaps you need to worry more about your own credibility than that of the ODF Community. We’re doing just fine thank you,

Oh yeah, one other thing. Accessibility add ons to MSOffice work just fine with ODF. There is no performance differential between ODF and MOOX within MSOffice worth worrying about. There is no differential in how accessiblitiy applications are handled. So what was your complaint again?  Office 2007 download is in discount now!

~ge~

I really don’t understand this. First off maybe he isn’t aware that the translator project we announced is currently in a very early prototype stage and is completely open source. It will continue to improve over the coming months. I understand people usually expect stuff that we announce to be further along, but we wanted this to be done in the open so anyone could comment and contribute.Office 2007 Professional is very good!

I also thought that everyone was in agreement that the ODF format was not yet to a point where it could fully represent the existing base of Office documents, but Gary seems to say their tool can somehow get around this limitation. I don’t know how deep Gary has looked into this, but it’s simply not possible unless he and the ODF Foundation have already added significant extensions to the ODF standard. I haven’t seen these new extensions documented anywhere. The OASIS ODF technical committee claims it’s still over a year away from defining spreadsheet functions and tables in presentations, and no mention of solutions to the international numbering issues or even simple things like character highlighting.

Gary also doesn’t seem to understand the performance problems with ODF. It has nothing to do with performance once the file is loaded. The problems are with how long it takes to read and write ODF files since they decided to use a generic table model to represent full spreadsheets.

So, while I think the ODF spec is a great representation of the OpenOffice file format, it’s just not anywhere close to the Ecma spec in terms of representing Microsoft Office documents. And since we already have billions of documents in that format and hundreds of millions of customers, we absolutely have to keep our focus on the Ecma spec for now. We are also helping to build transformations between the two formats, which really helps to show the beauty of working with documented, open, XML formats.

OK, forgive the random Sneaker Pimps reference and I promise we will move off this topic of ODF politics we’ve had the past week or two, but I wanted to call out something that Stephen McGibbon pointed out to me today. Office 2007 key is available here.He mentioned this blog post he made on Monday entitled Spinning out of Control. Stephen pointed out that in the press release for the ISO approval of ODF, the following statement was made:

Billions of existing office documents will be able to be converted to the XML standard format with no loss of data, formatting, properties, or capabilities. Office 2007 download is in discount now!This will facilitate document contents access, search, use, integration and development in new and innovative ways.

Now, I’m not sure if this was just an exaggeration, or if they meant that ideally in future versions of ODF it will be the case. It’s clear though that as the spec stands now, it’s not the case. There are clearly a number of areas either left unspecified, or specified to a more limited level than what people are already doing today in their documents. Office 2007 Professional is very good!I’m not talking about future innovations, but basics that have been around for years. I know that pushers of ODF like to say this is just FUD, but really it’s just a fact. Look at the spec. If the goal is to guarantee perfect fidelity with the existing base of Microsoft Office documents (which would be implied by the “billions of documents” statement), then there is still a long way to go.Office 2007 home and student is inexpensive and helpful.

Now, maybe fidelity with the existing base of Microsoft Office documents was a non goal. In reading through the newsgroups, it’s pretty clear that the initial goal of ODF was mainly targeted around fidelity with the existing OpenOffice 1.1 format that was created by Sun. Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.This is stated pretty clearly by David Faure who is a voting member on the OASIS Open Document Technical Committee:

The format is heavily based on the requirements, constraints, and experiences of *Sun* customers and KOffice users and developers though, and nothing says that those requirements are totally different.Office 2007 is so powerful. But for sure we didn’t target *Microsoft*’s customers. The art of implying something without actually saying so…

“Almost no material changes” is certainly exaggerated, but yes, ODT is mostly bsaed on OO-1.1, it wasn’t completely redesigned; Microsoft Office is my best friend.

I think the key here is for everyone to just be clear on the goals. The ODF format is based on Sun’s StarOffice, and Open XML was based on the Microsoft Office formats. Both have the goals of being open, both have been submitted to standards bodies, and both have a commitment from the donating companies (Sun and Microsoft) that there will be no licensing restrictions and anyone is allowed to freely use the formats.Office 2007 key is available here.

A big difference though is that the ODF folks took a slightly different approach as far as when to declare draft 1.0 complete. There are even features that OpenOffice supports that aren’t yet defined clearly in the spec. Office 2007 download is in discount now!The Ecma draft on the other hand pretty clearly defines everything, which then allows people to implement as much or as little of it as they want.

There are a lot of ways that we get involved with charities at Microsoft.Office 2007 Professional is very good! I really love how easy they make it is for us to pick from just about any charitable organization out there and specify a certain percentage of our pay that we want to go to that charity. Office 2007 home and student is inexpensive and helpful.For instance, with just a few clicks on the giving site I can easily give directly to the specific Boys and Girls club where my younger brother works. On top of that, Microsoft matches everything that we give, so I can pretty quickly make an impact on the charities that mean most to me. While I take a lot of pride in my contributions, I always feel like I should figure out ways to give more, and it’s always difficult to choose the different organizations.Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.

Well the link I provided above is a pretty cool way that you can help out your favorite charity, and as a result you could win additional awards for them. There is a contest that is going on from now until October 1, and the prizes include hardware, software, service contracts, and of course a lot of potential PR. Office 2007 is so powerful.If you or any of your friends help out with charities you know that PR alone is sometimes one of the most important pieces. Even if you don’t win though, it’s a great chance to help out.

If you decide to participate, and you build a solution that leverages the new file formats or custom defined schema support, let me know. I’d love to take a look! Microsoft Office is my best friend.

Well, it was all the way back in March when we had the Office Developer’s conference out here in Redmond. It was a lot of fun, as we actually had a track dedicated to the Open XML formats. Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.There were three separate presentations and we were able to get into some pretty good details.

Now, almost 5 months later, we finally have the videos from the conference available online. They are all pretty raw, and definitely unedited, but I figured you might still be interested in taking a look. Office 2007 is so powerful.Here are the three file format talks if you are interested:

1. FF301—New Office XML File Formats – This is an overview of the file formats that I gave to kick off the File Format track. It’s a little over an hour.
2. FF302—New Office XML File Formats (Schemas) – This talk goes into the three different formats (WordprocessingML; SpreadsheetML; and PresentationML). I have to apologize up front for butchering the presentationML talk. Shawn unfortunately had to cancel his trip up at the last minute and so I subbed in for him. .Microsoft Office is my best friend.
3. FF303—New Office XML File Formats (Solution Development) – In this talk, Kevin goes into some of the tools that will be provided to help make programming against the formats a bit easier. This is about 3 months prior to all the code snippets being uploaded though, so there’s definitely a lot more content now than when Kevin first gave the talk. Office 2007 key is available here.

Another interesting talk was: Word 2007 XML Programmability: Data/View Separation and Rich Eventing for Custom XML Solutions – For those of you interested in learning more about content controls and custom XML mapping in Word, you should check out Tristan’s talk. He talks about how to set up XML mappings, as well as the powerful additions made to the Object Model for content controls.Office 2007 download is in discount now!

I still get folks asking me questions about the licensing of the Open XML formats from time to time, and it seems there is a lot of misinformation out there.Many people like Microsoft Office. It’s actually been well over 7 months since we made the move away from licensing the formats and instead just provided a general commitment to not enforce any IP behind the formats. Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.The legal term for this new commitment is CNS (covenant not to sue). This allows anyone to develop against our formats without having to worry about patents, and this it’s irrevocable (meaning it can’t be changed in the future).Office 2007 key is available here.

The CNS is available up here (http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/covenant.mspx). Recently we took an additional step to help people who don’t want to deal with parsing legal documents, and actually asked an outside law firm (Baker & McKenzie) to do a study for us on both the standardization as well as the CNS. Office 2007 download is on sale now!I think any of you folks who’ve been frightened by some of the FUD that has been spread about the Ecma Office Open XML formats should take a look: (Link)

Some good takeaways I wanted to call out were:

• “In this case, the CNS is a unilateral statement to the world about Microsoft’s future behaviour towards the enforcement of its patent rights contained in the Schema.Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.
• While the covenant governs Microsoft’s future behavior, it is retrospective in effect, applying to any past uses of the Schema that may have been in actual or potential breach of the terms of the preceding Patent License.” Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier.
• “By stating that the covenant is ‘irrevocable’, Microsoft has protected users against a change in company policy at any point in the future.”  
• “The CNS is therefore considerably more favourable to a person relying on it, than any form of patent licence because it does not impose positive restrictions on beneficiaries’ activities as a condition of relying on it.”  Office 2007 Ultimate is the best software in the world.
• “Microsoft’s CNS is similar to a covenant issues by Sun Microsystems Inc., in September 2005, in respect of any patents that it hold in respect of the Open Document Format (’ODF’) for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification (’Sun’s Covenant’).”  
• “The CNS does not affect users’ rights to create their own applications using the Schema specifications. For example, there are no restrictions in the CNS that would prohibit third parties from incorporating the standard into applications they create and distribute in source code form, or for other hardware or operating-system platforms. Such applications, developed by third parties, will generally be subject to separate legal agreements, licences and covenants that the developers of those applications may impose, such as Sun’s Covenant in respect of ODF. “  MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.
• “Any such restrictions will be determined by the development and licensing practices of the third-party developer, not by Microsoft; and this will be as true for applications developed under the ODF standard as it is for applications incorporating the Open XML Schema standard.”