Why document standards matter
10 March, 2008
By John Weigelt
When it comes to their list of IT concerns, businesses tend
to rank interoperability near the top. The reason for this
is simple they want to make full use of their existing
software investments, minimize the potential for user disruption,
and ensure their IT department doesn't have to spend precious
time knitting systems together.
Interoperability is not a new concept at Microsoft. Our
vision has always been to ensure that information can flow
as efficiently as possible between people and systems. And
that's one reason why we and a number of other software
developers and businesses (including Apple, Novell and the
United States Library of Congress amongst others) - led
by ECMA, an international standards body based in Geneva
- have been actively engaged in the development of Office
Open XML, an open standard for word-processing documents,
presentations and spreadsheets that's designed to make document
sharing a seamless experience for users. The standard can
be freely implemented by multiple applications on multiple
platforms.
Standards development tends to happen behind the scenes,
and many businesses don't give standards much thought. But
a conversation about document standards is worth having
with your customers for two reasons.
One, Open XML addresses concerns about interoperability.
It's designed to ensure that information can flow freely
within a company and among trading partners regardless of
the systems from which it originates. This has positive
business implications. Two, open standards provide technology
partners with tools to help their customers extend and customize
their business software, which helps them drive the most
value from their investment.
A short history
Over the past 10 years electronic storage has come to surpass
paper-based documentation. Nearly 93 per cent of all documents
are now sent or stored digitally in the form of email or
text messages (and the numerous documents attached to them).
Of those, only one-third ever see a printer.
This should come as no surprise -- electronic documents
are easy to edit, can be sent at the click of a mouse and
help ensure that productive work can occur almost anywhere
you have a computing device.
The challenge, however, is that every company has its own
data needs - too many for any single electronic document
approach to fit them all. As well, for many years software
vendors have asked customers to store documents in a way
that was most advantageous to the vendor's developers. Each
vendor had their own method, and this often made sharing
documents between different software suites difficult, if
not impossible.
The importance of open standards
Without open descriptions of how each software vendor encoded
their documents, businesses risked making stored data inaccessible.
For businesses the stakes are high; information is the lifeblood
of today's organizations, and a great deal of that knowledge
is locked up in their electronic documents. That's why companies
are looking to technology providers to help them unlock
this value, and why open document standards like Open XML
have a big part to play in this process.
True, Open XML is not alone -- the current ISO/ISEC standards
include the OpenDocument format (ODF), and Portable Document
Format (Archival) (PDF(A)). So why develop a new standard
when others already exist? Standards have a direct impact
on how people store, send and access information, and we
firmly believe it's better to have the options and choice
available from multiple standards. This is a growing consensus
recently even the editor of ODF, Patrick Durusau, publicly
endorsed the ISO standardization of Open XML, changing his
previous position on the subject.
As well, it's important to note that Open XML is an open
standard - it has been developed and reviewed by a diverse
community in ECMA and is now undergoing ISO ratification
at the request of customers and governments. It was also
designed to work seamlessly with existing document file
formats to ensure that customers can continue to derive
the value that they have stored in their existing documents,
spreadsheets and presentations.
For this reason, Open XML can help users realize full value
from their desktop software. With it, they need not worry
that an embedded table will be seen as gibberish by the
person they're sending it to. They also don't have to worry
about saving a file in a particular format to ensure that
all possible recipients of the document can access it. Much
like Web browsers enable users to view a wide variety of
images (.JPEG, .TIFF, and .GIF) without asking users to
make any extra effort, so too will Open XML ensure that
information regardless of where it's from. It will, be made
viewable in a wide variety of applications and in a way
that's completely transparent to users.
Also, consider that workers may need access to information
that's months or even years old. It's vital that documents,
regardless of when they were first created, can be opened
fully intact and even further edited. This is especially
important in light of regulations related to security, privacy
and accounting that govern how companies must manage and
store documents. Open XML can help ensure that companies
meet these requirements by breaking down barriers that restrict
the movement of documents and providing the capability to
pass along the labeling and handling of instructions necessary
to guide recipients. We believe that the entire industry
has a responsibility to come together to address the interests
of users in interoperability and effective data exchange
between widely deployed document format implementations.
To help support this, Microsoft just launched its Document
Interoperability Initiativeaimed at promoting user choice
among document formats and expanded opportunity for developers,
partners, and competitors.
The software industry has come a long way since the days
of closed, proprietary systems. If nothing else, the evolution
of standards like Open XML is a clear indicator that those
days are now well behind us. This is something that resellers
and other service providers should weave into any discussion
about interoperability.
John Weigelt is national technology officer at Microsoft
Canada
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