peterdehaas.net

"You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf"– Jon Kabat-Zinn

  • Home
  • About Peter
  • Presentations & Publications
  • Home
  • About Peter
  • Presentations & Publications

Tag: Open Standards

Open XML Overwhelmingly Approved as an ISO / IEC standard (IS 29500): the end of the file formats war

1 april 2008

You’ve most likely seen a lot of speculations on the ISO vote for Open XML. Brian Jones, part of the Office Productteam and heavily involved in Open XML officially confirms the vote :

APPROVED

(This is no April Foolsday joke ;-))

… I’m sure many folks have seen the news by now that Open XML has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard (IS 29500). Based on the numbers I’ve seen, looking at the P member countries there are now 24 who vote "yes", and only 8 vote "no". This puts the P member approval at 75% easily passing the 2/3 majority needed. Of the overall votes (both O and P members combined) 61 countries votes "yes" and only 10 voted "no" which puts the overall approval at 86% (so only 14% no). This puts us well below the minimum bar of no more than 25% voting "no". So on both criteria, Open XML now easily passes, which is a great indication of the general positive feelings amongst the national bodies of the progress made over the past 6 months.

Now that the voting over, it’s time to move forward and start to work together in the ongoing development of these document format standards. There has been a lot of energy focused on the review period over the past year or two, and we need to use that same energy to move us forward. There is still a lot of work to do in order to make it even easier for developers to build solutions using these standardized technologies (new tools; test suites; labs; etc.). We also need to continue looking beyond traditional documents and identify the important innovations that will be necessary for the documents of the future. I may have been a bit premature last year when I declared the file format wars over. It was a couple days after we saw that Open Office was going to have Open XML support, and I thought at that point folks would start to move on to the more collaborative and mutually beneficial investments. Well, I was a bit premature I think, but now a year removed from my initial statements, I think we’ve reached the milestone that really will help put a lot of the tension to rest. Open XML has been approved as an ISO standard, and we can now switch our energy back to the technical work that will continue to drive things forward. As we move into the next stages I’m excited to see the energy and knowledge that will be brought to the table as we begin to innovate and move both Open XML and ODF forward as important internationally standardized file formats. …

Continue at Source : Brian Jones : Open XML Formats

Peter de Haas Microsoft, Open Standards

ISO to announce Microsoft Open XML result Wednesday

31 maart 2008

I’m closely monitoring the news .. Peter O’Kelly quoted Reuters who aparently quotes the ISO comittee … fingers crossed …

The saga continues… at least until Wednesday

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) said it would reveal on Wednesday whether Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) had won the support needed to have its document format made into a global industry standard.

“Because ISO needs first to inform its worldwide membership of national standards bodies of these results, a press release on this subject will be issued on Wednesday, 2 April, 2008,” ISO spokesman Roger Frost said in an e-mail message.

ISO to announce Microsoft Open XML result Wednesday | Industries | Technology, Media & Telecommunications | Reuters

Source: ISO to announce Microsoft Open XML result Wednesday | Industries | Technology, Media & Telecommunications | Reuters

Peter de Haas Microsoft, Open Standards

Microsoft Partners with Top Social Networks to Put Users at the Center of their Data

25 maart 2008

Another big step in interoperability between social networking platform and Microsoft’s Live platform. This new way of interop is much safer for end-users and its easier to invite your friends from other networks …

… Today Microsoft is announcing some significant developments to the Windows Live platform that demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to data portability and giving users a choice of how to use and control their information. …

… Strong Partners

The collaborations with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged will make it easier, safer, and more secure for people to have access to their contacts and relationships from more places on the web. These networks will be adopting the Windows Live Contacts API instead of “screen-scraping.”  Starting today, you can visit www.facebook.com and www.bebo.com to find your friends using the Windows Live Contacts API.  Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn will be live in the coming months. …

… We encourage you to visit www.invite2messenger.net to see these ideas in action, and to invite your Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged friends to join you on the world’s largest instant messaging network, Windows Live Messenger. …

Source : dev.live.com

Peter de Haas Microsoft, Open Standards

Smart Move: OpenOffice.org 3.0 to Support Read/Write of OOXML

23 maart 2008

Guy Creese posted about an interesting move by OpenOffice.org; the support of OOXML …

…

According to a post at OpenOffice.org Ninja, OpenOffice.org 3.0 is planning to support the reading and writing of OOXML documents. This will not occur in the immediate future: OpenOffice.org 3.0 is about six months away (with OpenOffice.org 2.4 shipping in the meantime) and the screenshot included in the post shows a lot of work still needs to be done. However, this means that sometime in 2008 OpenOffice.org users will be able to easily share documents with workers or partners who are using the Microsoft Office 2007 default file formats. …

Source: Pattern Finder – Smart Move: OpenOffice.org 3.0 to Support Read/Write of OOXML

Peter de Haas Office, Open Standards

Bouw platform Rijk naar Sogeti

7 maart 2008

Mooi en veel besproken project. Het is aan Sogeti gegund en de oplossing is gebaseerd op het Microsoft platform …

… Sogeti Nederland gaat, met HP als onderaannemer, voor de rijksoverheid een nieuwe digitale samenwerkingsomgeving inrichten en beheren. Dat is de uitkomst van een door de ICTU/Rijksweb uitgeschreven Europese aanbesteding.  …

… De nieuwe oplossing zal daar in eerste instantie instant messaging, een Rijks-adresgids (waar alle rijksmedewerkers in staan), een virtuele samenwerkruimte en aanwezigheidsignalering aan toevoegen. In een later stadium zullen videoconferencing, voice over IP, blogs en wiki’s worden toegevoegd. Verder is het de bedoeling dat ook het aantal gebruikers sterk toeneemt. Potentieel gaat het om ongeveer 120.000 werkplekken bij departementen en Hoge Colleges van Staat. 

In eerste instantie zal een en ander worden gerealiseerd op basis van Microsoft-oplossingen zoals Sharepoint en OCS. Maar Sogeti heeft ICTU/Rijksweb wel toegezegd de mogelijkheid open te houden van een componentgewijze overstap naar andere oplossingen, waarschijnlijk op basis van opensource. Voorlopig is ICTU echter tevreden met open standaarden, zoals ook Microsoft die belooft te gaan bieden. ….

Source: Automatisering Gids – Bouw platform Rijk naar Sogeti

Peter de Haas Collaboration, Microsoft, Open Standards

Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability

21 februari 2008

Microsoft today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice.

Brad Smith, Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie

Audio Recording & Transcript: Conference Call with Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia and Brad Smith

Video Highlights from the Press Conference (1 min 50 sec)

 

…Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.

Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

“These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies,” said Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer. “For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but today’s announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency. Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies.”

According to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, the company’s announcement reflects the significance that individuals and businesses place upon the ease of information-sharing. As heterogeneity is the norm within enterprise architectures, interoperability across applications and services has become a key requirement.

“Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions,” said Ozzie. “By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.”

“The principles and actions announced today by Microsoft are a very significant expansion of its efforts to promote interoperability,” said Manfred Wangler, vice president, Corporate Research and Technology, Software and Engineering, Siemens. “While Microsoft has made considerable progress on interoperability over the past several years, including working with us on the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, today’s news take Microsoft’s interoperability commitment to a whole new level.”

“The interoperability principles and actions announced today by Microsoft will benefit the broader IT community,” said Thomas Vogel, head, Information Management, Novartis Pharma. “Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products presents significant opportunities for the vast majority of software developers, which will help foster greater interoperability, opportunity and choice in the marketplace. We look forward to a constructive, structured, and multilateral dialogue to ensure stakeholder-driven evolution of these principles and actions.” …

Read the press release

Peter de Haas Microsoft, Open Source, Open Standards

Microsoft Open Source Project To Enable OOXML Conversion

19 februari 2008

New developements around OOXML …

… Microsoft today launched an open source software project on the SourceForge site, aimed at developing conversion tools that will translate Microsoft Office binary files to Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats. According to Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect in the Interoperability & Platform Strategy group at Microsoft, initial work will focus on a Word conversion solution, with Excel and PowerPoint file formats to be addressed starting in the spring.

“We are hoping that our first beta version of this is going to come out around June 30th. That will give us a good benchmark of what are the capabilities of the Word translator,” Rajagopalan said. “Around April we are hoping to publicly make our first technology preview.” …

Source: Microsoft Open Source Project To Enable OOXML Conversion
Date Published: Fri, 15 Feb 2008

Peter de Haas Microsoft, Office, Open Source, Open Standards

Theo blogt: Verwarring rond ‘Goud’

12 februari 2008

Theo blogde gisteren over de verwarring rond ‘Goud’ de werkplek aanbesteding van de overheid, welke op dit moment in de aandacht staat in verband met het recente debat dat hierover is gevoerd.

 

… Na een periode van rust in de afgelopen weken, althans rust qua het schrijven van blogs, was er deze week voldoende aanleiding om weer eens een blog te schrijven.

In december werd het actieplan ‘Nederland open in verbinding’ door de Tweede Kamer aangenomen. We hebben daar als Microsoft over aangegeven dat we de doelstellingen en ambities rond interoperabiliteit en open standaarden volledig steunen. En dat we wel een aantal kritische kanttekeningen hebben op het actieplan, zoals:

– Onnodige positieve discriminatie van één bedrijfsmodel in een dynamische industrie met meerdere bedrijfsmodellen, die steeds meer door elkaar gebruikt worden (hoezo open versus gesloten?)

– Onnodig beperkende definitie voor ‘open standaarden’

– Onrealistische invoeringstermijn van 1 april voor ODF ondersteuning, naast reeds gebruikte formaten DOC en PDF

We gaven daarbij aan dat het actieplan op een aantal punten tot praktische problemen kon leiden, met name daar waar het onduidelijk was en zeer waarschijnlijk in de praktijk tot onbedoelde uitleg en implicaties zou leiden.

Zo’n situatie doet zich nu in de praktijk voor. Het zal begrijpelijk zijn dat ik het debat rond de werkplek aanbesteding ‘GOUD’ met belangstelling volg. Zoals ik overigens ieder debat rond ICT in de politiek probeer te volgen.

Ook in dit debat van vorige week bleek duidelijk dat Kamerleden en politici worstelen met de complexiteit van ICT. Dat kunnen we als industrie voor een deel onszelf aanrekenen, we informeren niet iedereen altijd even goed over actuele ontwikkelingen, successen en mogelijkheden. Het meest in het oog springend was voor mij de eerlijke uitspraak van Wouter Bos in relatie tot de ICT technische elementen in de aanbesteding: “…ook ik snap er geen hout van”.

Ik zal geen reactie geven op de project inhoudelijke zaken, zoals de “big bang” of “back office” discussie. Dat zijn projectmatige keuzes aan de kant van de aanbestedende partij. Wel viel me een aantal zaken op in de discussie die correctie behoeven: …

Lees verder : Theo blogt

En verwarrend dat is het zeker. Zoals Theo in zijn blog aangeeft zijn er 11 producten die in de aanbesteding als “kritiek” worden geclassificeerd. Slechts 4 ervan zijn Microsoft gerelateerd.  Je vraagt je dan ook af wat het onderliggende doel is …

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.”

Robert Heinlein (1907 – 1988)

 

Tijdens de kamerdiscussie kwam ook naar voren dat Active Directory min of meer een “lock in” is naar Microsoft Windows. Het is waar dat Microsoft produkten AD vereisen voor authenticatie. Het is echter ook waar dat interoperabiliteit van deze omgeving met ondermeer andere platformen en directorysystemen essentieel is:

“The Active Directory is an implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) version 3 standard as specified in RFC-2251. LDAP version 3 supports authenticated connections using simple authentication through NTLM, SSL, and SASL/GSSAPI (RFC-2222) mechanisms. The Kerberos authentication service is an implementation of the Kerberos version 5 as specified in RFC-1510. The authentication service implements the Key Distribution Center (KDC) service and forms the core security mechanism for Windows 2000.”

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms808911.aspx

en dat Active Directory al veel (open) standaarden ondersteunt:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms808927.aspx

Because the Active Directory is built from the ground up using Internet-standard technologies, customers get the best of proven technologies such as DNS, TCP/IP, LDAP, X.509 and Kerberos that have already been implemented worldwide within organizations and on the Internet. By supporting these industry-standard directory service protocols and interfaces, Microsoft enables user benefits, such as single sign-on, centralized management, and network interoperability.

Enkele artikelen over AD en interoperabiliteit

  • http://www.linux.com/articles/40983 
  • http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Likewise-Extends-Active-Directory-Embrace-to-Mac-and-Linux/ 
  • Een video uit 2005 over Unix/Linux authenticatie met Active Directory: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/sessionh.aspx?videoid=103
  • Active Directory ondersteuning voor kerberos: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms808911.aspx

Persoonlijk vind ik de koppeling tussen Active Directory en het open source produkt A-Select van SURFnet een heel goed voorbeeld van interopability op basis van open standaarden. A-Select wordt door een groot gedeelte van de hoger onderwijs instellingen en universiteiten gebruikt. Deze zelfde organisaties maken ook zeer veel gebruik van Microsoft produkten en Active Directory:

A-Select (middleware voor authenticatie)

De afgelopen jaren hebben SURFnet en Alfa & Ariss in nauwe samenwerking A-Select ontwikkeld. A-Select is middleware voor authenticatie. Het koppelt uiteenlopende applicaties met een scala aan authenticatiemogelijkheden. A-Select is de technologie onder de motorkap van de nationale authenticatievoorziening DigiD. Het hoger onderwijs gebruikt A-Select inmiddels volop. SURFnet en Kennisnet werken aan de uitrol van authenticatiedienst in het gehele onderwijs.

SURFfoundation participeert in de raad van advies van A-Select en in het Nationaal Authenticatie Platform van ECP.NL.
Tevens is SURFfoundation actief betrokken bij relevante ontwikkelingen op het gebied van authenticatie.

Belangrijke functies en voordelen van A-select:

  • Beschikbaarheid als open-sourcesoftware
  • Flexibele toepassing van diverse authenticatietechnieken (instelbaar per gebruiker en per toepassing) voor het inloggen van webtoepassingen, waaronder diverse wachtwoordsystemen (RADIUS, LDAP, Active Directory), IP-adres en bancaire authenticatie, passwords verzonden via SMS-berichten, PKI-certificaten
  • Single sign-on
  • Eenvoudige samenvoeging van toepassingen op bestaande webservers
  • Ondersteuning van zowel lokale als instellingsoverstijgende toepassingen
  • Breed draagvlak binnen onderwijs, overheid en daarbuiten.
  • Bron: http://www.surffoundation.nl/a-select 

Peter de Haas Microsoft, Open Source, Open Standards

Gray Knowlton: On “motivation” and commitment to open file formats

8 februari 2008
 

There’s al lot of talk about OpenXML and PDF. Microsoft colleague Gray Knowlton has created an excellent blogpost about OpenXML. Gray is a Group Product Manager for the Microsoft Office system, so he’s close to the fire as we say.

He is highlighting the work, the solutions and most of all the progress that has been made in this field.

… Microsoft has been and continues to be fully committed to opening its document formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Interoperability is not new to Office, and Open XML is part of a much broader strategy around interoperability for Office. When we look at the past three years of document format related investments, you’ll see this shining through; we’ve done quite a lot. Different circumstances led to each of these activities, but as a collection of work, the intent is unmistakable, and despite claims to the contrary, we’re highly motivated to ensure that we can participate in an open environment. These are all steps toward openness, which is good for us, good for our customers and good for the industry.

Brian Jones has covered the history of the formats and XML support for Office in a prior post, there is a significant amount of ground covered in his post. 

Let’s take a look at what has happened: …

Read on at source : Gray Knowlton’s blog : Gray Matter

Peter de Haas Microsoft, Open Standards

OpenID board members

8 februari 2008

This is an impressive (and challenging ?) group to start of your iniative that’s for sure :

The OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft Corp., Verisign, and Yahoo! have joined as its first corporate board members. With these companies’ deep expertise in Internet and security technology, the OpenID Foundation strengthens the industrywide effort to empower users with portable Web identities, or OpenIDs. This effort helps ensure the evolution of an open and interoperable Internet that helps people take control of how their personal information is used online and helps online businesses attract and retain more users by simplifying and securing the management of digital identities. www.ibm.com / www.microsoft.com / www.google.com / www.verisign.com / www.yahoo.com

Source Radicati News By Mail

Peter de Haas Google, IBM, Microsoft, Open Standards

Berichtnavigatie

1 2 3 4

Zoeken