Microsoft Innovation Center Report 2008-2009 vol.4
Office Open XML Formats Interoperability Proven by Collaborative Experiment with wipse
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July 30, 2008, Microsoft Chofu Technology Center
On July 25th, 28th and 29th, Windows + Services Consortium (wipse
) and Microsoft Co. Ltd. Japan conducted a collaborative experimental project to verify the interoperability of Office Open XML Formats. wipse and Microsoft announced to the press that their project proved Office Open XML Formats help facilitate data exchange between various systems.
The experimental project at Microsoft Innovation Center employed a scenario based on the business activity of a vending machine salesperson.
Four companies from wipse Open XML working group built a valid system usable in the real world, and it was demonstrated that the development processes could be reduced by 60% as a result of using Office Open XML Formats.
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In Order to Realize Interoperability Principles
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In order to promote innovation and to contribute to the IT industry in Japan, Microsoft Innovation Center is conducting various activities including providing various programs and offering their facilities. Microsoft Innovation Center has also been addressing the theme of interoperability, providing interoperability programs and free seminars to support partners who develop business solutions to enable data interoperability utilizing Microsoft technologies.
“As Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corporation, announced on the Interoperability Principles on February 21st, 2008,” said Shunichi Kajisa (CTO, Microsoft Co. Ltd, Japan), “interoperability is an important theme Microsoft has long been pursuing. We will continue our efforts for Open Connections, Support for Key Standards, Data Portability, and Open Engagement.”
Microsoft discloses information in order to achieve Open Connections. It plans to publish an English document of over 50,000 pages for the general public. As part of Support for Key Standards, Microsoft promotes the implementation of standards to its products. The 2007 Office system employs Office Open XML Formats, an international standard format certified by Ecma (European Computer Manufacturer Association) and ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission). In addition, Data Portability is also achieved by providing an environment in which various plugins can be added to the documents created with the 2007 Office system applications.
CTO Kajisa promised Microsoft will actively continue its collaborative business with its partners and developers and provide support for them. As part of its efforts, Kajisa introduced the collaborative experiment conducted with wipse for verifying Office Open XML Formats interoperability.
Proven Realization of Development Environment without Limitations in Geographical Location or to the Scale of the Business
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As wipse Chairman Akira Matsukura (President, Tosho Computer Systems Co., Ltd.) recalled, he was not sure if the test would be successful, since the experimental project was conducted after a short preparation period. The project was successful, however, verifying that Office Open XML Formats is a data format with high interoperability.
wipse is a community intended to promote and enlighten the new generation of user experience where the Windows platform and services integrate. Four member companies from wipse Open XML working group were involved in this project. Three out of these four companies are located in regional cities in Japan.
“wipse now has 80 member companies,” said Chairman Matsukura, “ many of which are small- and mid-sized companies. It was proven that, by using a standardized technology, these companies with their own technologies can work together to build a system that meets the real-world business scenario in a short period of time without limitations in geographical location or to the scale of the business.
wipse will share the result of this experimental project among its member companies, promoting Office Open XML Formats as well as contributing to the creation of new business opportunities by developing various solution developments.
Ideal Data Format That Allows Focus on Improving Functionalities of In-House Solutions
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The interoperability of Office Open XML Formats has been verified at the converter level. The collaborative experiment with wipse was, however, the first verification project in the world based on business scenario.
In the experimental project, a system was built based on the business activities of a vending machine sales person. As soon as the information of candidate locations for new vending machine installations is entered into a form created with Office Excel 2007 and sent to an in-house system, the system returns an auto-generated proposal including the sales forecast information and the recommended vending machine types. When the proposal document is received in Outlook, the texts in the proposal will be read out with an automated voice using text-to-speech functionality.
In addition to Microsoft server products and LOB systems, systems from wipse Open XML working group member companies were used for file format conversion, data extraction and file generation processes. Under such a heterogeneous environment where data is exchanged between different systems and solutions, a list of agreements, including which data format is to be used, should be prepared in advance. Additional components are often required as well.
“One of the remarkable features of our experimental project was,” commented Hiroshi Ota (wipse Open XML working group Lead, Embedded Evangelist, Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Co. Ltd, Japan), “they used the products available in the market without any modification to build the system. It proved that, with Office Open XML Formats as a common data format, the developers can focus on the agreement between systems and functional advancement of their solutions.”
Solution to Connect Different Systems Developed in a Remarkably Short Period of Time
The wipse Open XML committee member companies had only a day or two to prepare for this project. After three days of implementation and verification, they completed the coordination between their systems in just three hours. Most of their efforts were put into the environment creation and the file generation process.
The experimental project was successful and a system based on the business scenario, in which different in-house systems were connected by each member company's solution, was built in a remarkably short period of time. The project demonstrated that using Office Open XML Formats as a standard data format can reduce the number of processes and the development codes by an average of 60%.
Comments from the wipse Open XML Working Group Members in This Experimental Project
| • | “We were responsible for data insertion into the Office Excel 2007 proposal template. Although the specification changed to use Web services for data insertion at the initial meeting, it only took us half a day to a day to port the programs. After joining this collaborative project with other companies, we recognized Office Open XML Format can serve as a collaborative solution on a large scale, rather than only a tool to embed into a program. I believe this result will be a great asset for our company.” - Kazuhiro Yamamoto, President, Advance Software Corp. & Mitsutaka Uomi, Director, Advance Software Co.,Ltd. |
| • | “In addition to the fact that the functionality to generate an XML file from an Excel spreadsheet is supported in a binary format, the current release supports Office Open XML Formats, so no special development was required to complete the implementation and it was conducted without any major problems. In this project, we just used a part of our product. We would very much like to join another project like this with other scenarios.” - Yoshiya Okuda, Team Leader, Power Tools Products Division, GrapeCity inc. |
| • | “One of the great benefits of Office Open XML Formats is that it can be opened to verify the sources, including XML data in a direct manner. As a number of different products were connected, there were some minor issues, but we could quickly isolate the issues by verifying the source. Because we are offering products to connect different systems and coordinate data, this is our expertise field, and we would like to join this sort of project as much as possible when we have an opportunity.” - Kazutoshi Ono, CTO, APPRESSO K.K. |
| • | “Our part in this experimental project was to handle the text-to-speech functionality. It was a coordination of Open XML data so that we used our existing product as it was, and we could concentrate on which part of the data was to be read out with an automated voice. It is now proven that we could build a development environment using Microsoft technologies, regardless of the size or the location of organizations, I would like to see it in a world-wide project.” – Masanaga Otsuka, CEO, Skyfish Inc. |
| Experimental Project Summary | ||||||||||||||||||||
Scenario The project was based on a scenario in which a vending machine sales person obtains the proposal documents based on new candidate locations for vending machine installations and has a meeting with the landowner.
The system based on the scenario above was built using existing solutions from the wipse Open XML working group member companies. System Components
Participant Companies and Products Used (In Alphabetical Order)
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