Ecma embraces MS Office OpenXML standard
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Along with 6,000 pages of notes International tech standards body Ecma has approved the Office Open XML document format.â¦
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Microsoft is calling IBM out over its opposition to Office Open XML, saying it is attempting to create a movement to prevent ISO standardization of the format. In an open letter posted to its Web site, Microsoft claims IBM is trying to limit choice by pushing the OpenDocument Format.
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The executive board of the INCITS standards body voted yesterday to approve the recommendation of Microsoft's Office Open XML standard to the International Standards Organization as Draft International Standard 29500, once concerns voiced by some of its members have been attached and adequately addressed by Microsoft. The vote was 12 yea, 3 nay, and one abstention - again by the IEEE.
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The Open Document Format saw a marked uptick in use last year across the globe, according to the ODF Alliance&#39;s 2007 report.Twelve countries and six regional governments have adopted &quot;pro-ODF policies,&quot; according to the group, composed of companies and organizations that advocate for the format. The latest countries are the Netherlands and South Africa, which require government agencies to use the format. Also, more than 40 applications now support ODF, and the Alliance&#39;s membership ranks are set to rise above 500, according to the report.&quot;Considering where we started when we launched the alliance back in 2006, the developments in 2007 are amazing in terms of the progress that has been made,&quot; said Marino Marcich, managing director of the group.&quot;It&#39;s one thing to recognize ODF as a matter of policy in an enterprise architecture framework and another to mandate its use,&quot; he added. &quot;Proprietary formats in the public sphere are going out of style and becoming unacceptable globally.&quot;The ODF Alliance&#39;s report marks another chapter in the long-brewing debate over Microsoft&#39;s Office Open XML document format and ODF, which is supported by the likes of Sun Microsystems&#39; StarOffice application suite and Google&#39;s hosted productivity software.OOXML is the native file format in Microsoft Office 2007, and&#160;Microsoft is attempting to get it recognized as a standard. ODF advocates have lambasted OOXML, calling it far too proprietary to warrant such a stamp of approval.Marcich echoed that charge. &quot;Microsoft certainly has the right to advance its proprietary format,&quot; he said. &quot;What it doesn&#39;t have the right to do is call OOXML open and interoperable. ... We&#39;d love it if Microsoft supported ODF in its products natively.&quot;Despite the prevalence of Office software, ODF nonetheless has a chance to thrive, Marcich argued.Today, he noted, Microsoft&#39;s&#160;DOC format, not OOXML, is still dominant. &quot;If the question is &#39;what is the future,&#39; clearly ODF has the lead right now,&quot; he said.OOXML cannot supplant&#160;DOC until the majority of organizations and users upgrade to Office 2007, he noted, a process that will not occur imminently.&quot;We have a window here where governments have time to make a decision as to upgrading,&quot; he said. &quot;I think 2008 will be a critical year as to which format will emerge as the format of the future.&quot;Another ODF advocate, Andy Updegrove, also expressed pleasure over ODF&#39;s adoption to date and optimism about its future. &quot;The tipping point has been passed. I don&#39;t think it will lead to a deluge, but progress will continue,&quot; said Updegrove, an attorney with Gesmer Updegrove in Boston. Updegrove serves as legal counsel to technology companies as well as standards bodies, including OASIS, and closely tracks the ODF-OOXML saga on his blog.Updegrove predicted that 2008 will be &quot;a tough year for Office,&quot; pointing beyond ODF and OOXML to broader trends in computer usage. &quot;The monolithic idea of an office suite is really eroding, and the younger you are, the more meaningless it becomes,&quot; he said.Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment Friday.Another win for ODF in the United States could come soon. New York officials are expected to decide which format the state will use in its systems. The public comment period for the matter had originally been scheduled to end on Dec. 28, but an updated document on the state&#39;s Web site indicates that the period has been extended to Jan. 18.
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(InfoWorld) - EMC and Microsoft are substantially stepping up their existing enterprise content management (ECM) relationship to provide tighter integration between EMC's Documentum ECM software and Microsoft's Office, Outlook, and SharePoint products. As part of the expanded relationship announced Tuesday, EMC's Documentum will support Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 database later this quarter, according to John McCormick, vice president of product management, content management software at EMC EMC also plans to bring out two services designed to link Documentum and Microsoft software content and archiving, he said. The two services are set to debut early in the first quarter of 2007 as Microsoft releases SharePoint Server 2007. EMC expects to release pricing for the two services -- EMC Documentum Content Services for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and EMC Documentum Archive Services for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 later this year. The idea is to have Microsoft software as the front-end for Documentum software as a way to increase the number of users of EMC's products and give more Microsoft customers easier access to complex ECM functionality. It's the same strategy Microsoft is adopting with a number of applications partners, notably with SAP around the Duet product, said Rob Bernard, general manager of Microsoft's global independent software vendor team.Â Formerly known as Project Mendocino, Duet was jointly developed by Microsoft and SAP to let users access data and processes from SAP's back-end business applications via Microsoft's front-end desktop Office software suite. "This is the culmination of a vision we've been working on for a number of years," Bernard said. "It's about unifying the front end with the back end that the casual user needs to interact with in ECM, ERP, and CRM." Using the upcoming Documentum archive services, users can manually or automatically flow content from SharePoint repositories to a Documentum repository while enabling users to access and search the content from the SharePoint Server 2007 software. Archiving SharePoint content in Documentum should help companies in meeting compliance regulations, McCormick said. Unlike Duet, the services are only being offered by EMC. The previous ECM relationship between EMC and Microsoft was more reactive than proactive, Bernard said. McCormick agreed. "Before we worked on [Documentum] integration with Office and Outlook 2003," he said. "Microsoft supplied the tools, EMC or our partners built out the solution. This is different. EMC and Microsoft are together." As yet, the two companies aren't working together on Web content management, but that could be a logical next step to further expand their relationship, the executives noted.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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IBM has taken the lead in lobbying against the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML format. But it does support the format in a few products -- a fact that some Microsoft bloggers were happy to point out.
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PC Magazine - A Microsoft official says IBM was the only company that voted against approving its OpenXML specification as a standard.
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Microsoft's version of XML is now drawing support from the U.S. representative to the ISO standards body.
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The defeat of Microsoft&#39;s Open XML proposal before the International Standards Organization is more than a small hiccup in the software giant&#39;s plans to make its document file format a global standard, some analysts now say.
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(InfoWorld) - The Swedish Standards Institute has declared its recent vote in favor of Microsoft's Office Open XML format invalid. It means that Sweden will probably abstain from an important upcoming international vote on whether to make the format a standard. The reason given by SIS was not the controversial circumstances surrounding the vote, in which Microsoft was found to have offered companies "incentives" if they voted in favor of OOXML. Instead, SIS cited a technicality, saying proper procedures had not been followed. "It appears that one of the organizations that took part had two votes. Since the rules weren't followed, the decision made earlier is void," SIS president Lars Flink told IDG's Computer Sweden. A new vote will now be held. It probably won't be possible to arrange it by Sunday, however, the deadline for countries to submit their votes on whether to standardize the format to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The ISO will then tally the results and publish the result early next week, possibly by Monday. "The board of SIS knows that there is not much time, which means that Sweden won't take part [in the ISO vote], although we won't know for certain until Sunday," Flink said. He denied that the storm of criticism directed at the vote was behind SIS's decision to declare its vote invalid. "The vote has been criticized, but that is not the reason for our decision," he said. "The sole reason is that one of the companies that voted cast more than one vote. No member company has more than one vote." The original decision to accept OOXML as an ISO standard was taken by the Swedish working group on Monday. Microsoft Sweden was later found to have offered extra "marketing contributions" to its business partners to encourage them to vote for OOXML, according to e-mails seen by Computer Sweden. A Microsoft manager said this week that the e-mail "should never have been sent." SIS said it is now "practically and formally impossible for the Swedish working group to arrange a new vote before September, 2, 2007, when the global vote is closed. If a new Swedish vote cannot be arranged, Sweden will abstain from voting." About 100 countries will take part in the vote. OOXML is Microsoft's rival to the Open Document Format (ODF), which is used by applications including OpenOffice.org and Star Office. ODF has already been adopted by the ISO as an international standard, but Microsoft is pushing ISO to have OOXML adopted as well.
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Office as a Window EMC is cosying up to Microsoft - or is it the other way around? The pair have ensured that as yet unlaunched Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 can natively access EMC's Documentum ECM software.â¦
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Microsoft's Open XML format has won ECMA approval as a standard, giving Redmond, so often the opponent of open-source software, a better footing to compete with OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument Format (ODF).
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Responding to requests, Microsoft will sponsor open-source project to build translators between older office formats and Open XML.
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Maarten Balliauw points out a new blog post he's made today showing how to take the methods described in this article on the MSDN and convert it to a more PHP way of thinking, parsing the OpenXML info of the patients.    The scenario for the article is quite simple: Contoso provides a central medical records database. Whenever a physician has to register a new patient, he downloads a Word 2007 document from the Contoso server, fills it out, and uploads it back. Contoso then strips out the necessary data and saves it back in their systems.   This Word 2007 document is crafted around embedded custom XML data, which is displayed and edited using Word 2007. In short: to do the above exercise, you just need to strip out the custom XML and you're done.    Don't worry, Maarten includes his code and a demo to show the functionality in action. Check out the original article for more information as well.
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openCRX is a professional CRM solution (customer relationship management) deployable to all major platforms. openCRX is multi-entity enabled, scalable, a real enterprise-class CRM-solution - new: Activity Management, Bug Tracking - try our Demo Server   openCRX - Limitless Relationship Management     openCRX version 1.11.0 is available from:   http://www.opencrx.org/     The release notes are available at:  http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=535085&group_id=95219    If you have openCRX v1.10.0 installed, you can upgrade to openCRX v1.11.0 by following instructions available at:  http://www.opencrx.org/faq.htm#110to111   Highlights:   * support for JDK 1.5 * JDO/JPOX compatible DB schemas * GUI: multi-level grid drill down * DataBindings * enhanced facility management with inventory items * new locales: es_CO and ja_JP   see http://www.opencrx.org/opencrx/1.11/new.htm for details     We also published new/updated guides at:  http://www.opencrx.org/documents.htm       Your openCRX Team
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BOSTON -- A data format used in Microsoft Corp.'s prevalent Office software line has been approved as an international standard _ a move aimed at preserving access to documents created with the package for years to come.
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InfoWorld - Companies have completed the first phase of a Microsoft-sponsored project to create software that can convert Microsoft Word documents between Open XML and Open Document Format for Office Applications file formats.