Microsoft's OOXML: The Yes Vote

Legacy and future interoperability

At the OOXML symposium the National Archives of Australia's (NAA) concerns over the standardisation of Open XML centred around the long term sustainability of the format.

Technical manager for digital preservation at the NAA, Michael Carden, said the bar had been set too high for organisations such as the NAA to implement, encode and render a new format such as Open XML in addition to ODF.

Microsoft supports the right of the NAA to determine the preservation format its uses, but suggests that benefits associated with the widespread use of the Open XML specification should not be ignored in determining its passage through the ISO process.

"Organisations charged with the stewardship of national records around the world are dealing with the complexities of preserving as near full fidelity of the original document as possible in their preservation efforts - for both the existing corpus of Microsoft-based documents and the growing volume of Open XML-based artifacts as the community adopts the new format. And so Open XML represents a vital tool in meeting these challenges," Bond said.

The British Library, for example, has successfully implemented Open XML alongside its own document archiving strategy, stating that the format plays a key role in preserving billions of legacy office documents.

"Microsoft - and the many others who see merit in Open XML - supports the continued development of ODF and a variety of other formats, as they know that when choices are offered to customers, competition follows and that produces even further innovation," Bond concluded.

Microsoft business partners - Unique World

Anthony Woodward, head of innovation at Unique World, a business solutions company and Microsoft Gold Partner, believes that standardising OOXML will provide a set way to interchange information and help to solve the problem of translating multiple document formats and versions.

"What standardising OOXML will give you is a standard commercial way for people to interchange information in a way that means the content has been separated from form. And more importantly, from what I have seen of the world, in a way that everybody has on their desktop in a commercial context."

Woodward believes that ODF is not an adopted or de facto standard in the commercial world in the way Microsoft tools are.

"One of the arguments is that ODF exists today so why have another standard? The reason you have another standard is that in the real world people haven't adopted that standard, so you need a standard that people are going to adopt and use and can actually be implemented," he said.

"My role before I was at Unique World was to do a lot of work around content authoring, I worked for the Supreme Court and other places looking at electronic lodgement and other bits and pieces, and ODF - even though the standard was there - wasn't rich enough for those environments. Because of that it was disregarded."

While Woodward believes it won't be hugely detrimental to his business practices should OOXML not become an official standard, it will mean that business processes will continue in an inefficient manner.

"When there is a transaction, lets look at BHP's bid for Rio Tinto as an example, because of that there are thirty or forty lawyers, a bunch of merchant bankers and a whole bunch of other people involved in that transaction, and there is a lot of commercial overhead around the technology to cater for not having a standard file format. As silly as that sounds the reality of it is true; there are all sorts of people retyping documents and trying to get around the technology, and that will continue," Woodward said.

He believes OOXML will eliminate these unnecessary overheads, adding more value to business transactions by reducing costs associated with translating multiple file formats.

In response to the National Archives of Australia's current preference towards ODF, Woodward states that Unique World has been building a record managements system for government and corporate entities, and has been in discussions with the NAA over its use of ODF.

"The key issue was that they had already started with ODF...The only thing I would say and have debated with those guys is, if everyone is talking OOXML does that mean the National Archives wont take commercial documents because that is the language business is talking? The reality is they will have to. In fact, commercially if there are more implementations of OOXML there is probably going to be more longevity of that format versus ODF," he said.

Microsoft business partners - CargoWise

Richard White, CEO and founder of Cargowise, a provider of enterprise integrated logistics software solutions, and a Microsoft Gold Partner, agrees with Unique World Woodward's assertion that OOXML is already the de facto standard within enterprise.

"When I look at our customer base, I look at the desktop platforms and 98 per cent of those platforms are Windows. In terms of the server back ends, I would say that all of our customers have Windows platforms, some of those, maybe 25 per cent have other machinery apart from Windows machinery," he said.

In response to critic's claims that the standard is overburdened by complexities, White agrees that the OOXML proposal is a large and complex document, but says this is because it has to be.

"If you look at ODF, it misses some of the capabilities we need to be able to do some of the work we need. There are things that OOXML does that ODF doesn't do. I think ODF is a wonderful thing and I'm not criticising ODF - it's just different," he said.

"[The OOXML proposal] is complex, but no more complex than the problem it is trying to solve; it has to be because the applications are very detailed and have a lot of complexities in them.

"Ultimately it makes the development cost of our applications lower, it makes the utility of our applications much higher, and it gives our customers richer features that they couldn't get before simply because we couldn't afford the substantial cost and complexity of reverse engineering the binary formats," he said.

White pointed to the myriad of standards in the world of computing: drive standards, memory standards, CPU standards, and believes it is the interaction and friction between multiple standards that makes for competitive advantage.

"I have quite a lot of respect for the players that are critical of Microsoft on this, as individuals and as companies they are good people. But on this particular matter I think their opinions are slanted towards either a dogmatic or commercial imperative. In particular people like Google and IBM clearly don't want this standard to get up because of commercial reasons," he said.

"The open source community has a very strong bias in terms of how they view these technologies and that openness often colours their behaviour, particularly when the word 'Microsoft' appears in a sentence alongside anything. Certainly the people generally are very smart and I wouldn't want to be critical of them or the companies, but I do criticise their critique of this issue because I think it's very commercially biased or dogmatic in an open source sort of way."

White said that Microsoft has been criticised for many years for not having an openly specified standard for it's set of office applications, and is surprised to see them attracting criticism for publicising what he believes is a very powerful standard.

"It's a damned if they do, damned if they don't problem. They've done what they were asked to do and created a standard so that developers, other companies and even their competitors can now address interoperability much more effectively because of this document," he said.

"Now the argument is they shouldn't be allowed to have a standard even though they have created that standard and they have made it open. That's quite a dichotomy in terms of the process."