Microsoft Office Binary Formats
It’s been just over a month now that the technical documentation for the Office binary formats has been available via download. What does this mean for developers and customers of third-party Office solutions?
Well, for one, it means that there is now universally public access to those specifications in electronic form. Previously, there was some documentation available in paper form, but trying to work collaboratively was no easy task. Those who did have access couldn’t easily share the documents internally, and they were covered by a confidentiality agreement and were not allowed to be freely distributed to just anyone.
Second, the available documentation wasn’t really well laid out, and read more like a complicated technical dictionary rather than an organized specification. The new documentation is a good step forward in making a complicated format a bit more clear. Navigation through the document becomes easier with links, and the general structure and flow is improved, including a specific section on where each Office version behaves differently with regards to the specification, which of course has been a big complaint with the Office Open XML specification.
Third, with an official 1.0 release, we can hope that the documentation will be improved in the future, incorporating feedback from those who are using it, fleshing out confusing or lesser documented areas, etc.
Last, the fact that this documentation is now public means that more people may begin to work with Office formats. Those with current solutions will be able to more easily improve them, and it may encourage new solutions to be created, as rather than guess at how to implement the formats, something tangible exists to assist the effort.
The bottom line is that only good can come of these formats becoming more accessible and understandable, and I hope Microsoft (and others) continue to open up previously proprietary technology.
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October 16, 2008 at 7:21 am | Doug
<a href=”http://www.revolution-os.com/”
Is a good starting point for anyone interested in the open source debate or MS Office’s release of source code but to answer the question of “What does the release of the MS office binary mean for developers, customers, and third-party office solutions,” I think we could look at the history of the proprietary debate and maybe understand why Microsoft released the code in the first place.
Because for me, personally, the release falls into the “too little, too late” category. By now, many open source developers are ‘married’ to the Linux OS and GNU standards which have been supporting their efforts for more than a decade and in my opinion these developers are unlikely to change gears and abandon the application developers who have been creating programs aimed at competing with or even replacing MS Office.
Not to mention so many open source programs are already available. We can look at one of the most successful operators (Google) and their office tools, Google Docs, which have been successful because they work, but they also create a mobile desktop environment. This may be one direction developers go with the MS Office binary (mobile computing).
But with so many open source tools and companies already operating successfully, I think it will be Google’s business model that we tend to emulate and that the release of the MS office binary is just a blip on the radar albeit a meaningful one.
Then again, this is just my opinion.
November 6, 2008 at 1:07 pm | Chris
Doug,
While your point is valid, our goal is to be able to work with the Office documents already out there and not to create an alternative product. That is a debate in itself, one that will go on for a long time I’ll wager.
For those companies trying to provide tools for the customers out there that use these documents, the only “too late” is “never”. These customers may take forever to move away from Microsoft, if they ever do, for many reasons.
Perhaps MS is realizing the more tools out there that work with their formats, the better they can stem the tide of open source and alternative solutions. That and the specific criticism of OOXML spec and its lack of definition of the older formats’ way of doing things.