Web Services and the Microsoft Office Open XML Format
November 30, 2005 Yesterday, Microsoft said it would take steps to offer its Office 2003 file-format technology to some of its customers and the industry as an international standard. Its proposed standard (Microsoft Office Open XML, Extensible Markup Language) has been submitted to Ecma International, the standards organization for document management. Microsoft also announced it will make available tools to enable old documents to capitalize on the open standard format. Opening Office document formats, the vendor said, will alleviate questions around customers' abilities to store and manage data for the long term, with many more vendors and tools from which they can choose. The move will enable software and services vendors to more easily build solutions that interoperate across a broad spectrum of technologies, Microsoft said. Co-sponsors of the Ecma submission along with Microsoft include Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba. These global industry leaders have agreed to work together as part of an open technical committee that Ecma members can join to standardize and document the Open XML formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the next generation of Office technologies, code-named Office "12," as an Ecma standard, and to help maintain the evolution of the formats. The group will ask Ecma to submit the results of their collaboration to the International Organization for Standardization for approval. "Standardizing the Office Open XML file formats would be one more in a series of milestones Microsoft has attained in realizing its overall vision of making it easy to create, access and share data between different systems on the network," said Jean Paoli, Microsoft's senior director of XML architecture and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). "This vision was developed in response to the fact that companies are often forced to adopt inefficient and duplicative business processes because business-critical information frequently ends up locked inside data storage systems, such as a database that employees don't know how to access, or business-productivity documents, such as a long-forgotten spreadsheet stored on an employee's PC. We want documents to be represented using a standardized, stable and open format so that the owners of the content can use and repurpose it in whatever way they want, independent of the software they used to create it."  "Microsoft estimates that more than 300,000 developers have utilized the XML file formats in Office 2003 editions alone. Those documents will be able to take advantage of the benefits of the new open standard, enabling document contents to be accessed, searched, used, integrated and developed. Customers, technology providers and developers around the globe will be able to work with the Open XML file formats without barriers, creating a broad ecosystem of products, applications and services that can work with the formats, with or without Microsoft software. As a result, documents and public records can be archived, maintained and maintained in perpetuity with long-term, widespread industry support. To clear out any legal concerns around existing Office 2003 patents, Microsoft also issued a statement that it would forego patent rights to technologies related to Office XML. In a posted statement, Microsoft said that it "will not seek to enforce any of its patent claims necessary to conform to the technical specifications for the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas. (The schemas are posted at http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/xmloffice/default.aspx .) "(Brian Jones, Microsoft program manager for office, explains patent and licensing details in non-legalese terms here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/11/22/495876.aspx ).  "Turning over Office Open XML to Ecma and its members will ensure its continuity and development as an open standard, Paoli explained. “The license for Office Open XML is open to anyone. We are expanding the language of the current royalty-free license to specifically enable developers who work only with open source licensing to also be able to work with Office Open XML. This will enable any customer or technology provider to use the file formats in its own systems without financial consideration to Microsoft.” "Another reason Office Open XML is an open format “is because XML itself is an inherently interoperable text-based standard that has been defined by the W3C,” Paoli added. “We have used this standard as the foundation for the Office Open XML file formats, and we have worked very hard to ensure that the work we have accomplished using XML is open, too.” "The full text of this announcement is available at www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-21EcmaPR.mspx . Source: Web Services.org USA & Canada, call toll free today at 1-800-547-4149 or just send us an email for additional information on any Web Services offered on this website.  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