Microsoft Cracks Open the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Formats in XML
Brian Jones: Office XML Formats : New default XML formats in the next version of Office. Earlier today, it seemed like Robert Scoble could barely contain himself about a June 2 announcement from the Microsoft Office team. I couldn’t imagine what it could be — maybe another wedging of Exchange or Sharepoint inter-operation. I was blown away to visit the Channel 9 interview shortly after 9pm (pdt) and see the tomorrow-dated video with Brian Jones.
Brian has given a great summary and some further links of the new capabilities. I was so enthralled, I started blogging in the comment over there. I have a page of notes, but here’s what struck me so much that I had to comment at once:
- As a document system and interoperability guy, I must admit this is very exciting. I am particularly taken with the lessons learned from the last format change (to docfiles in Word 97) and the careful use of Zip as a packaging technology for hierarchical inclusion of content, components, and anything else you want to carry around (including the old format in the test version that Brian demonstrated). [dh:2005-06-02T19:07Z this also means that a form for linking and cross-referencing within such packages has been worked out, and I want to know about that (while praying that it is not part of the patented technology under limited license).]
- The retrofit of the new format all the way back to Offices 2000, XP, and 2003 is also heart-warming as a powerful move to sustain interoperable reach across generations of the application.
- The document-management, content-management folk are not going to miss the value of this, and the comment about Sharepoint appeal is going to catch a lot of attention from those with ideas about other interoperable applications of distributed documents. [dh:2005-06-02T19:12Z The interaction with search and indexing technology will also be interesting, especially since desktop search capabilities like MSN Search already recognize Zip packages as containers and index and locate material within those archives.]
- When I started my comment on the great Channel 9 video, there weren’t any other comments yet. By the time I posted, my comment was the sixth in line and Scoble was attentively posting responses to questions
(such as the location of his blog). [As I touch up this note, Brian’s blog has a growing list of comments and I suspect he’s been slash-dotted by now. [dh:2005-06-02T19:17 That hadn't happened yet, but maybe by now.]]
While I have been digging around for other material and links, there are more thoughts:
- I have been resisting the smart-client vortex because I didn’t want to spend time going in a direction where users didn’t own their own documents and had to count on perpetuation of proprietary intermediaries (including Visual Basic for Applications) to use their own material. I must confess this development removes that barrier for me. It puts the ownership of the content in the right place.
- I think it is pretty forward thinking to trust that the value of the Microsoft Office System is in the applications, and not the format, while offering a streamlined super-kit for the document. This message is reinforced in the PressPass Information Kit that is done as an interview with Microsoft Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky (who also did a great Q&A with Bill Gates at the Interoperability announcement). Although we don’t get to dive into technical details, the Sinofsky overview provides a great complement to the Brian Jones blog and Channel 9 interview. There are also some key statements about licensing [all emphasis is mine – dh:]:
PressPass: How are you enabling the interoperability you described earlier?
Sinofsky : XML is inherently interoperable because it is a text-based standard that has been defined by the W3C. It can be consumed and created by a wide variety of tools already on the market today. We have used this standard as the foundation for the new Office XML Open Format, which is an open, published document format. In addition, we are publishing with it a royalty-free license, so any customer or technology provider can use the file format in its own systems without financial consideration to Microsoft. This will ensure that the new file format can be used by everyone to create, access, and modify documents in this format.
PressPass: Won't this make it easier for your competitors to copy Microsoft Office?
Sinofsky : Certainly this will make it easier for other developers to use our formats to build solutions that don't require Office. However, the ability of other technology providers to use the new file format to integrate their solutions with the Microsoft Office System is an important and frequently requested capability by the industry. We feel it's to everyone's advantage to respond. Customers also know that the true value of a desktop application is not the format in which data is stored but the full breadth of capabilities offered by that application, along with the quality and security of the user experience that it provides.
- I expect this effort to attract a lot of attention. The early (pre-beta1) visibility is going to provide an outstanding opportunity for people to experiment with novel applications and extensions to the regime.
- Since some will say this is a reaction to the open format work that has been rallied for in Europe and at OASIS, I may as well respond to that now with my two-cents worth: So what? Whatever the previous difficulties of negotiation around open formats for government use, Microsoft has found a way to do its thing while also empowering its customers and developers.
And perhaps the greatest news of all: The new format is more compact than the current binary format for Word, XML, and PowerPoint documents.
Brian Jones’s Blog and the PressPass Q&A both provide links to the first-available white papers on the file format and developer information.
Uh, about those licenses. The license model that applies here is that used for the MS Office 2003 XML Schema Reference. This is tough sledding, involving the Office 2003 XML Reference Schema Patent License with its difficult language around "Necessary Claims." It is possible to break this down to understand it (and compare this with the kinds of automatic licenses about necessary claims that apply in adopting W3C specifications). Doing a threat-model approach raises some problems about having to know what patent might be necessarily infringed to determine whether infringement is truly unavoidable or not. Because if infringement is avoidable, you’re not entitled to an automatic, royalty-free license as far as I can tell. I am sure the Free Software Foundation will be explaining all of this to us in the coming days.
Update 2005-06-02T19:18Z I just had to do some tweaking of some oddities, and that gave me an opportunity to expand on some other things [;<).
posted by orcmid
at 6/02/2005 12:00:35 AM,
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