February is a busy month.

It's only been a few days and February is really grinding me down. The upcoming Chinese New Year holidays isn't going to help, now there are less days in the month.

We just had a fruitful Technical Committee meeting at SIRIM yesterday. It's great that there are no vendors influencing the members. I can't believe it has been over a year since our last meeting!

Now not only are the guys at TC4 fully appreciative of our work, but the Department of Standards has finally understood what OOXML really is about. After being publicly accused of 'dragging their feet', I don't think it was that hard to convince them anyway.

So much has happened in between, and I still am in awe of what one company can do to disrupt so many of our lives. Oh, when will this ever end?

I just hope that come March we don't have to endure another 5 months for a 2nd Draft. (That's yet another year gone). If they just listened to us last year and submitted it the normal way, they wouldn't have wasted this past year.

The folk at SIRIM really had enough of this. They can't understand why this monster DIS is being fast tracked. They have never come across a situation where the proposer proceeded with the 5 month ballot despite so many concerns raised against it during the contradiction period. "Normally they give up at that stage" was the remark by a standards expert.

When asked what happens next after the BRM, the response was "This is unprecedented." We are not sure whether we will get a draft document to review before the final vote, and if so would it be reasonable to have less than a month to review 6000 pages of changes? With wholesale movements of sections ripped out and placed in Annexes? Deprecated yet normative annexed items?

This goes right in the face of the standards process.

Another funny thing happened. Someone at the meeting had a copy of yesterday's Tech&U which had a feature article by one of the journalists who got a free ticket to Washington. The article is currently online here "Charting path of OpenXML." We all had a chuckle because we all saw right through it and one of the attendees said "This isn't an article, its a press release from a vendor!"

So although the flight tickets to Redmond got quite a few inches of press  over the past few weeks, unfortunately when articles are written without any substance, people just don't buy it.  Nice try.

Now to dig up my winter wear...

yk.

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[yoonkit]

Charting path of Open XML
by: Izwan Ismail

MALAYSIA and other governments around the world will be able to have a say in the development and ongoing evolution of an advanced XML-based document standard if Open XML is accepted as an ISO standard.

The balloting process by the ISO is expected to begin end of this month in Geneva, Switzerland.

Microsoft Malaysia’s national technology officer Dr Dzaharudin
Mansor pointed out that the ability to have a say in the development of OXML is important because the advanced XML-based document standard is said to be compatible with millions of documents that governments currently have, ensure support business line of business applications relevant to e-government, potentially have a large user base in the real world, and is already implemented by many companies, including IBM.

“Open XML allows the Malaysian Government to migrate the millions of documents presently stored in a proprietary binary format, to one which is XML-based with minimal loss of document fidelity.”

Dzaharudin said the popularity of XML today gives the Malaysian Government a wide array of tools and applications to render and/or process documents.
“Given that ECMA Open XML is already a free and open standard,
the Malaysian Government no longer has to worry about dependency on any one particular vendor or product to unlock the national assets that document contains. It is also about protecting the country’s sovereignty,” he added.

Commenting on how Microsoft Malaysia plans to promote the use of Open XML in the Government sector, Dzaharudin said the company would like to be able to demonstrate the relevance and advantages of Open XML not only in rendering millions of legacy documents, but also as a free and open standard that can help advance e-government applications in the country.

He also said Open XML will be able to address real-world needs and that the IT industry has more to benefit from adopting Open XML than Microsoft.
“It is our opinion that open and free competition will boost the business for us as well as that of our competitors as we do business in a growing market segment.”