| Open XML Value Proposition
Open XML is a platform independent international open standard. It coexists with other document file formats, including Open Document Format (ODF) and supports long-term document retention, preservation, and accessibility.
What is Open XML?
Ecma Office Open XML ("Open XML") is an international, open standard for word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that can be freely implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. Open XML was approved as an open standard by Ecma International, a Geneva-based standards organization. It obtained ratification as a global standard with the ISO (International Standards Organization) in March 2008.
While Microsoft initially developed the early predecessor to Open XML, Ecma participants that included Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the U.S. Library of Congress, helped ensure that the final standard was fully open and vendor neutral. Its maintenance is expected to be performed by Ecma in collaboration with ISO/IEC JTC1.
Benefits of Open XML
- Integration with Business Data: Due to its use of XML, Open XML enables organizations to share and exchange information between Office documents and any other software application or business system. In addition, Office documents can consume information from other business applications. Web services that expose data in enterprise information systems can create, populate, and update Office documents automatically; and developers can create interfaces that allow users to view and retrieve data from line-of-business applications and operational data sources from within the Office environment.
- Support for Customer-Defined Schemas: Open XML allows Office documents to easily fit into business solutions and business data to easily fit into the files. By including support for mapping customer-defined schemas into the content of Word and Excel files, it ensures that organizations can leverage common vocabularies—within documents and spreadsheets, as well as other business systems, thus integrating critical business data into the document authoring environment.
- Improved Automation and Programmability: The Open XML formats provide significantly enhanced opportunities for automation of Office documents and document-based processes. As documents stored in the Open XML formats are machine-readable and editable by any text editor or XML processor, solutions need not use Microsoft Office programs to view or edit content within the documents.
- Openness and Transparency: Open XML specifications for the individual parts that make up a file are fully documented and publicly available. In addition, ZIP technology is used as the wrapper for the files thus enabling existing tools to easily open the files and access its components. This openness allows the development of third-party or custom tools that read and write the new Office file types or view and operate on the component parts of Microsoft Office documents without actually opening the documents. The Open XML formats enable users and applications to see and identify various parts of a file and to choose whether to load specific components. In particular, the ability to identify and handle embedded code supports compliance management and helps reduce security concerns around malicious document code. Also, personally identifiable or business-sensitive information can be clearly identified and separated from the document data. As a result, organizations can more effectively enforce policies or best practices related to security, privacy, and document management. And, by reducing dependency on the Office programs themselves, the Open XML formats enable the archival strategies mandated by increasingly strict regulatory and compliance guidelines.
- Robustness: Because the Open XML formats segment, store, and compress file components separately, they reduce the risk of corruption and improve the chances of recovering data from within damaged files. The file compression engine algorithm performs cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error detection on each part to help ensure the part has not been corrupted. If one part has been corrupted, the remaining parts can still be used to open the rest of the file. In addition, because the file formats are open and well documented, anyone can create tools for recovering parts that have been created improperly, for correcting XML parts that are not well formed, or for compensating when required elements are missing.
Open XML is also designed to be backward compatible with the content and functionality in billions of existing documents. This enhances archiving capabilities, which is one of the key reasons the U.S. Library of Congress and The British Library participated in the creation of the OpenXML standard. As a truly international standard, Open XML supports multiple languages and scripts. Open XML also includes robust support for assistive technologies utilized by those with disabilities.
Today, the Microsoft funded open source Translator is available at no cost; it enables interoperability between the Open XML and ODF. Novell has released a document format translator for OpenOffice and is working with Microsoft on similar translators for presentation and spreadsheet formats. Microsoft Office (2007, 2003, XP, 2000), OpenOffice Novell Edition, open-source project Gnumeric, Neo-Office 2.1, and PalmOS (Dataviz) already support Open XML. Corel has announced Open XML support for WordPerfect 2007 and developers worldwide are building solutions using Open XML. |
