Real World Computing
Looking to the future
Office Business Platform For a long time, Office has provided the basis for many corporate information management solutions, from simple sets of macros to automate routine tasks, through to complex systems that integrate corporate data into documents and route them around the enterprise using sophisticated workflow rules. Microsoft says it will expand on these capabilities, improving the SharePoint Business Data Catalogue (BDC) integration and introducing what its calls a "Declarative Programming" approach for building workflows.
Manageability and Security Office 2007 brought much needed simplicity to corporate deployment scenarios. Office 14 deployments are set to be even easier still, with federated, offline and virtualised models. The experience of using SharePoint offline is also set to improve.
All these plans are, of course, subject to change, and some of the enhancements may not happen this time around, having been pushed out by more pressing concerns as the development progresses. But Microsoft is planning to spend nearly $1 billion per year on Office, so we should definitely see some benefit when Office 14 is released next year. Does most of this benefit appear to be biased towards business customers? Yes it does, but then that's the area where Microsoft makes the most money and where it can most effectively distinguish its offering from those of its competitors.
OOXML inches towards standard
At the end of February, the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) took place in Geneva, with 120 delegates from 32 national standards bodies attending to discuss and vote on the proposals from Ecma International and Microsoft on what to do with the 1,100 unique comments they'd received about OOXML, the new file format used by Office 2007 for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Even given a whole week of meetings, there inevitably wasn't enough time to discuss every comment and every proposed change in detail, and while many people seemed to go away happy with the work that did get done, others have since complained about "abuse of process" or attempts to steamroller the standard through.
There were votes at these meetings, but they were about the proposed changes to the specification, not about the specification itself. Many countries decided to abstain on individual votes, if for instance the vote was about a change not related to one of their own comments. Some anti-OOXML voices have tried to lump all the abstentions in with the "No" votes, so bolstering their case, but if these national standards bodies had wanted to vote "No" to any amendment then they were free to do just that, rather than abstain. An abstention should only be interpreted as "No opinion".
By most accounts, 98% of the proposed changes were accepted, but often after long discussion. All the accepted amendments will now be put into the final draft standard and the national standards bodies have 30 days in which to consider their position and vote to accept or reject it. Several issues that weren't resolved at the BRM meeting will be deferred to the "maintenance phase", which, if the standard is approved, will be managed by the ISO/IEC joint technical committee with Ecma International.
On a related note, Microsoft has decided the specifications for the older, binary file formats for Office will now be made available to everyone without them having to ask, which is what you had to do up until now. The binary file formats have been given to the British Library to host (www.bl.uk/dp/formats), which ensures they'll remain available to whoever wants them, whenever they want them. The OOXML formats are hosted by Ecma International, which now controls them (at www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/ecma-376.htm), and anyone can use either the Office Binary or OOXML file formats in any of their applications, even applications that compete with Microsoft Office. The Office Binary and OOXML formats are both covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, which asserts that Microsoft won't sue you for using its formats, provided you don't try to sue the company to claim any of the technology as your own.
