First new principles, now an interoperability initiative for OOXML

Microsoft wants to show that it's working really, really hard on adopting the principle of interoperability in its key software. To keep the rhythm flowing in its direction, it's building new alliances with software vendors.

A few days after the scheduled Ballot Resolution Meeting of ISO Standards Committee 34 has come to a close, Microsoft wants to leave a positive picture in the minds of members still considering their Office Open XML votes. That picture, it hopes, shows a company that is practically flogging itself over the interoperability issue.

In a further move to that end today, the company launched a new interoperability laboratory, in partnership with five other independent software vendors including Novell.

The lab, to be headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., will be tasked with ensuring the interoperability of the OOXML format with Open Document Format, already an international standard, and the format used by OpenOffice software distributed by Novell, among others.

The other four companies in the partnership are:

• DataViz Inc., which produces a mobile office suite called Documents to Go, supporting OOXML files, for Symbian S80 and UIQ, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and soon RIM BlackBerry devices, among other products;
• Mark Logic Corp., the producer of an XML database called Mark Logic Server that supports the XQuery standard, whose customers today are primarily in the public sector, and whose aim is to expand, as it tests an XML-based indexing application for e-mail;
• Nuance Communications, the maker of Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software, and which also just two days ago announced its latest revision to its PDF Converter software; and,
• Quickoffice Inc., the producer of another mobile suite of office applications that support the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint categories of the OOXML format, for Symbian S60 and Palm OS devices;

Arguably, all four of these companies already have a stake in ensuring that the OOXML format works in the way they expect it to, and that no changes Microsoft -- or anyone else -- may choose to make to it in the future has a detrimental effect on their product lines.

This latest move by Microsoft comes just a few weeks after the company unveiled its unilaterally adopted set of Interoperability Principles. Among those -- in fact, first and foremost -- is the following: "Microsoft commits that all the protocols in its high-volume products that are used by any other Microsoft product will be made openly available to the developer community in a non-discriminatory fashion. These Open Protocols may include protocols that implement industry standards."

Reports that purport to be from the site of the ISO's BRM vary wildly. Some saying the members were locked in deep contemplation, others say they couldn't quite agree on so much as the working agenda for each day, and others talk about protests and walkouts -- and none of them, at least thus far, have been capable of being independently and reliably verified.

The propensity of the reports apparently provoked Patrick Durusau, one of the founders of the ODF standard and a driving force behind its standardization, to issue an open letter yesterday (PDF available here) in outright support of the adoption of OOXML as international standard DIS 29500.

"Reject DIS 29500? The cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table where the next version of the Office standard is being written," wrote Durusau yesterday. "Approve an admittedly rough DIS 29500? That gives all of us a seat at the table for the next Office standard. Granting that I wince at parts of DIS 29500, it is hard for me to argue with that rationale."

Microsoft also announced this afternoon the release of the first 1.1 edition of a stand-alone translator between ODF and OOXML documents. This project is currently being hosted on SourceForge. BetaNews located the project, and noted that only the command-line version of the translator has thus far been upgraded to version 1.1.

A check of the release notes show that many formatting features between Word 2007 and ODF documents are lost in the translation, even for the 1.1 version. Page background colors, background images for tables, variable font weight, blinking text (a holdover from the MS-DOS era), text rotation, capitalized or lower-case text as an applied format, embedded objects, and hidden sections are among the 41 known formatting elements that the newest build of the translator does not currently support.