The new face of Microsoft

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.