Microsoft Office Open XML Formats
It looks like another group is planning on taking advantage of the Open XML formats that are coming in Office '12'. Corel has stated that they will support the new XML formats in Wordperfect once we release Office '12'. Office 2010 is powerful!We've already seen other applications like OpenOffice and Apple's TextEdit support the XML formats that we built in Office 2003. Now as we start providing the documentation around the new formats and move through Ecma we'll see more and more people come on board and support these new formats. Here is a quote from Jason Larock of Corel talking about the formats they are looking to support in coming versions (http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2006/01/new_wordperfect_1.html):
Microsoft Office 2010 is the best software in the world.Larock said no product could match Wordperfect's support for a wide variety of formats and Corel would include OpenXML when Office 12 is released. "We work with Microsoft now and we will continue to work with Microsoft, which owns 90 percent of the market. We would basically cut ouirselves off if you didn't support the format." Microsoft word is so great!
But he admitted that X3 does not support the Open Document Format (ODF), which is being proposed as a rival standard, "because no customer that we are currently dealing with as asked us to do so." Office 2007 makes life great!
X3 does however allow the import and export of portable document format (pdf) files, something Microsoft has promised for Office 12.
I mention this article because I wanted to again stress that even our competitors will now have clear documentation that allows them to read and write our formats. That isn't really as big of a deal though as the fact that any solution provider can do this.Many people like Microsoft Office.
It means that the documents can now be easily accessed 100 years from now, and start to play a more meaningful role in business processes.
Back in the summer I wrote a bit about why we've made this move to open formats, I think it's worthwhile repeating some of that:
Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world. In Office 2003, we really started to gain a lot of momentum around XML. We had heard from a number of big customers that they needed XML support for their Word documents. People were trying all kinds of hacks on top of the Object Models to produce XML that they could work with. We had Wall Street firms with the need to integrate with XML more dramatically than we had imagined, so that they could do structured authoring with repurposable data. Office 2007 key is available here.We had law firms that were trying to build solutions that could automatically generate legal documents based on data about who was involved in the case, as well as business logic around what pieces of content were required for that case. We also were getting a lot of demand for supporting other people's existing internal schemas. Not only did people want the Word document itself represented in XML, they also wanted to add their own XML markup to the files. Let's take a government office as an example here.Office 2007 download is on sale now! Imagine they have a template that folks can use to submit to receive a permit. While it's nice that the formatting information can be represented in XML, they don't care as much about what's bold, numbered, or any other kind of random formatting. What they do care about is the name of the person that submitted the permit; what their address is; and what type of work they are seeking a permit for. Those things can all be labeled using custom XML support.Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.