This week I participated in some very interesting discussions during the Document Interoperability Initiative event held in London. One of these discussions was related to conformance testing. Obviously, the world of documents is moving forward and one of the important processes going on is the continuous improvement of standards. But standards by themselves are not enough.

It turns out that when one talks about conformance testing in the world of documents there are at least two issues to talk about. The first one is document conformance testing and it’s the easier one (nota bene, I’m saying easier not easy). It is all about the conformance of a particular document to a published standard. When it comes to OOXML, the standard is ISO/IEC 29500 with its four parts:

• ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008 – Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference
• ISO/IEC 29500-2:2008 – Open Packaging Conventions
• ISO/IEC 29500-3:2008 – Markup Compatibility and Extensibility
• ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008 – Transitional Migration Features

Who’s in charge of the standard? Well… that’s a more complicated question. The International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are running a collaborative effort named Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) whose members are National Bodies (42 participating members and 44 observers). All in all, there are about 2100 technical experts from around the world that work with JTC1. Among the subcommittees of JTC1, there is one named SC34 – Document Description and Processing Languages which is in charge, among many other things with the ISO/IEC 29500 standard. SC34 has 5 Working Groups:

• WG1 – Information description
• WG2 – Information presentation
• WG3 – Information association
• WG4 – Office Open XML
• WG5 – Document interoperability

As you might notice, despite the fact that the documents and the bodies governing them are quite complex (remember, it’s the easier side of conformance, not the easy one :) ), testing document conformance is pretty much an exact science.

The second aspect of conformance testing, is unfortunately a bit more fuzzy. I’m talking here about application conformance testing. This one is supposed to test whether an application that works with certain types of documents does what it is supposed to do. Because we’re talking here mainly about user interaction, testing for conformance is much more complicated. Think about the simplest example possible: is the application displaying italic fonts in all places where the underlying document states so? Well … seems to be quite a difficult test to be implemented in an automated way, right? That’s why, unfortunately, much of today’s application conformance testing is still performed manually.

Ok, you might ask, what’s all the talk about OOXML and conformance testing anyway? Well, some of it has to do with JTC1/SC34/WG5, or in plain English, with document interoperability. Now that Office 2007 SP2 supports ODF 1.1, all of the sudden the issue of document interoperability got much hotter. And obviously, conformance testing is going to play a major role in this area for years to come.

I am attending today a DII workshop in London which gives me a good opportunity to talk about what I perceive to be a new face for Microsoft. For those of you who are not familiar with the term DII, I’ll start by saying that it stands for Document Interoperability Initiative. DII workshops are currently organized all over the world, and the main goal of such workshops is to talk about the most pressing issues faced today in document interoperability, from two major points of view, business and standardization.

As a consultant I encountered (and actually worked in) a lot of projects dealing with documents on the server side of the the world. Traditionally this has not been an easy ride. Not even a medium one :D I can’t help remembering the days of proprietary and binary Office document formats when you needed high class wizardry to make winword.exe or excel.exe work within a Windows service on the server side. For many many years Microsoft has been struggling with its inability to get passed the “we’re the only ones making the right stuff” mindset spiced with the “you’re not entitled to understand what’s happening behind the curtain” approach.

I was looking today at the agenda of the workshop and I couldn’t help thinking about the fundamental changes going on with Microsoft for the past 10 years. Today we’re talking about stuff like standards-based validation of documents, PowerPoint presentations generated from PHP, converting to and from ODF, and so on. All of this in a context where Office Open XML is an ISO standard. This is a move from Microsoft towards openness and interoperability that even its toughest critics cannot ignore.

If you want to find out more about what Microsoft is currently doing in the area of interoperability you can start by reading their Interoperability Principles.

Here’s a teaser video on YouTube about Microsoft’s Web Platform. As you’ll see, the main stars are ScottGu and Soma :D It looks this one is just the first from a bunch of episodes to come, so stay tuned…

Today I just had one of my best experiences so far as an operating system user. I’m talking about in-place upgrade to Windows 7 Release Candidate (build 7100). Being very enthusiastic about the sheer performance and slickness of the new Windows 7, I started to use it for quite some time by installing one of the early builds (6800 and something).

Although I am known as one of the Romanian public speakers who does enjoy the occasional ‘head shot’ (can’t help it, I’m still an UT player :D) to MSFT (of course only when they really deserve it), I have to admit, it is the very first time when I am genuinely impressed by an OS produced by the Redmond giant.

So far, I never had the guts to use for more than 6 months, on my primary machine, a Windows version that was not even a Release Candidate. This time, I did it, and it turned out to be a good decision. On top of that, having a spare moment today, I decided to upgrade my shack to the RC version. Guess what, it went on perfectly, without a glitch and all my stuff is working like a charm (and believe me, I have lots of stuff on my machine).

All I can say is that Win7 RC really rocks! Can’t wait to get the final bits…