Sunday, June 05, 2005

Microsoft Opens Next-Gen Office File Format

Microsoft is introducing the new formats as part of Office 12, officials said, and will share more details about them at next week's Tech Ed 2005 conference in Orlando, Fla.

On Thursday the company will announce that it plans to make XML-based file formats the default in the version of Office due to ship in the latter half of 2006.

This is very big news. With a free license, third parties will be able to get the metadata for the Office file formats. As XML files, many programs will be able to easily assimilate Office documents and their content. EMC's Documentum will be licking its chops.

The downside is that machines will be able to more easily modify documents, bypassing the annotation and change management features -- and controls - in today's Office products. That's somewhat scary.

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are moderated.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.