Brian Jones - New Office file formats announced | TheChannel9Team

Zeo
Channel 9 :)

SWEET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

'nuff said

mbazzoni

Really Cool! I just got home and it was right when this got posted. I can't wait to see the Reference Schemas. You said it would be on the Microsoft XML page...when will it be up? Can you post a link to Brian's blog so we can all subscribe?

The Channel 9 Team
5 guys from Redmond

I just posted a link to Brian's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/default.aspx

The other pages will be up soon.

harumscarum
out of memory

Haven't watched the video yet but the first thing I thought of when I read this post was backwards compatibility, I visited the blog and:

Backward compatible: There will be updates to Office 2000, XP, and 2003 that will allow those versions to read and write this new format. You don’t have to use the new version of Office to take advantage of these formats. (I think this is really cool. I was a big proponent of doing this work)

nice Smiley

Steve411

XML!XML!XML!XML!XML!XML!XML!XML! < -- Steve Ballmer

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

I hope this will allow replacement the current Office suite & I'll tell you why I hope so later. But here's my hope.

1) There's simpler file formats.
2) Even though the current suite can write the new file formats, the suite is still buggy & has high maitenance cost.
3) Some maverick within MS proposes writing a new Office suite to deal directly w/ the simpler file formats
4) The newly proposed Office suite is inherently simpler & therefore, more robust and has lower cost, the maverick says.
5) The maverick got the OK -- as long as he writes the new Office suite in .NET -- lower dev cost & all.
6) Right around Longhorn release, the maverick finishes Office.net and there is finally a reason to upgrade to Longhorn.

OK, here's why I want a new Office. When I open Word, there are 1,000 UI elements staring me in the face when all I want to do was to type a note. Since Longhorn is all about visualization, how about some adaptive UI for the new Office? I'll thank you personally.

orcmid
Orcmid as Apparition

Scoble was very excited about the excitement around this announcement, and now I can see why.

As a document system and interoperability guy, I must admit this is very exciting. I am particularly taken with the lessons learned from the last format change (to docfiles in Word 97) and the careful use of Zip as a packaging technology for hierarchical inclusion of content, components, and anything else you want to carry around (including the old format in the test version that Brian demonstrated).

The retrofit of the new format all the way back to Offices 2000, XP, and 2003 is also heartwarming as a powerful move to sustain interoperable reach across generations of the application.

The document-management, content-management folk are not going to miss the value of this, and the comment about Sharepoint appeal is going to catch a lot of attention from those with ideas about other interoperable applications of distributed documents.

This is goodness guys.

(I notice I comment like I am blogging, so now I'll go do that too.)

Hip, hip, hooray!