FW: Article on Proposal for Massachusetts to move to OpenDocument

FYI.

 

Brian is the program manager for XML in office. He's 
been blogging about the upcoming Office 12. I'm a bit surprised about his 
dismissing remarks; clearly he wasn't briefed about the meeting and the fact 
that Microsoft was, in fact, in attendance.Of course it's all marketing-related. 

 

Regards,

 

Mary

From: BrianJones 
Posted At: 
Wednesday, August 31, 2005 7:42 PM
Posted To: Brian Jones: Office XML 
Formats
Conversation: Article on Proposal for Massachusetts to move to 
OpenDocument
Subject: Article on Proposal for Massachusetts to move to 
OpenDocument

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/08/31/458879.aspx  
|  Comments

I just read this 
article today about Massachusetts wanting to move away from closed formats 
and standardize on open formats (OpenOffice's XML and PDF). While it's not 
mentioned in the article, from what I've been told there is not yet a decision 
made, rather a proposal brought forward and is under consideration.

I think that a number of the points raised in the article are really great. 
Moving to document formats that are open, documented, and royalty-free is 
actually really valuable. I've been talking for awhile now about the benefits 
people will get now that we are moving to open XML formats in the next version 
of Office. This is really a big deal. The default format for Word, Excel, and 
PowerPoint in Office 12 will be completely open, meaning you aren't tied into 
Microsoft software to access your files. They will now totally belong to you and 
you have control over them. I'm extremely excited about the opportunity this 
gives to people to build solutions that operate on Office documents and it's 
royalty-free (no cost).  

I'm a bit stunned by the overall proposal that was brought forward to the 
State though as it seems to be a bit short sighted and unnecessarily exclusive. 
I question why the proposal has this exclusivity given the fact that there has 
been no thorough research into the open XML formats for Office 12. The reason I 
say that there hasn't been thorough research is that we won't have our first 
Beta for another couple months, so I doubt they could have looked into it much. 
If they had, I can't imagine that they would have made this decision as it 
actually provides the easiest path of moving from proprietary binary formats 
into open XML formats. 

The Microsoft Office Open XML Formats will work for all those billions of 
Office documents that already exist today. We are going to provide bulk upgrade 
converters that allow you to easily convert from the binary formats into the XML 
formats. Everything that you could represent in the existing binary formats you 
will be able to represent in XML. This means all features and functionality that 
people have come to expect from their office products will be stored in XML. 
This was actually a huge undertaking. The Office applications are very large, 
and while most people only certain features, each person uses a different set, 
and in the end all features are used. Trying to lock out those documents and 
forcing people to lose data and functionality is not really a great idea.

-Brian
 

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