An open letter from Senior Director and XML Architect Jean Paoli¹
The European Union's Telematics Between Administrations Committee (TAC) Recommends Its Governments Use Open Document Formats Such as Those in the Microsoft Office System

As co-creator of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML 1.0 standard and as a longtime evangelist and ambassador of XML, I am tremendously pleased by the recent Valoris report issued by the European Union's (EU) Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) Commission. The report recommends the uptake of open document formats based on XML, encourages the use of standards and of custom-defined schemas, and identifies Microsoft WordML (the schema for Microsoft Office Word 2003) as an open document format that greatly improves the potential for interoperability of document processing.

We at Microsoft and in the XML community believe that XML-based technologies will enable new and exciting e-Government solutions, so it is gratifying to see a validation of this vision at the highest levels of government. With this report, there can no longer be any question that XML enhances data interoperability across heterogeneous systems and allows documents to be archived, restructured, aggregated, and re-used in new and dynamic ways. The steps taken by the EU to analyze the current status of document formats in the industry and to endorse the vision for XML will have tremendous importance in helping make that vision a reality in the years ahead.

I am extremely satisfied by the support the IDA Commission's report offers our efforts to empower customers with the benefits of XML on the desktop. The report specifically cites the steps Microsoft has taken with the WordML format as greatly improving the potential for interoperability of document processing around the world and calls out Microsoft support for custom-defined schemas as a key benefit for customers.

Although our work will certainly continue, we view the EU report as a validation of our investment in XML and our open, royalty-free approach. Microsoft announced the availability of the WordprocessingML format (also known as WordML) through a royalty-free licensing program shortly after the launch of the Microsoft Office System last October. Since that time, we have seen a tremendous response to this announcement from governments and from a broad set of customers that have accelerated plans for deployment of XML-based solutions based on the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions. We were honored and pleased to be invited by the EU to a meeting of the IDA earlier this year to discuss our work and the steps we have taken to develop an open document format.

I appreciate the Commission's drive to encourage the industry to provide filters that allow documents based on the WordML specifications to be read and written to other applications while maintaining a maximum degree of accuracy in content, structure, and presentation. At Microsoft, we fully believe in the benefits of this, as demonstrated by our licensing program for the open and royalty-free Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas. This program specifically enables the developer community to build such filters to enable better interoperability across document formats. If it is not too bold, I would actually like to expand this call to action. We should not be limiting our thinking to word processing capabilities; I would like to see this concept extended to many more productivity-based scenarios that will bring data interoperability efficiencies to customers worldwide. This is the core foundation of the release of SpreadsheetML (for Microsoft Office Excel 2003), DataDiagramingML (for Microsoft Office Visio 2003), WordprocessingML (for Word 2003) and FormTemplate Schemas (for Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003).

I also want to underline the EU's notation about the deep support of Microsoft for custom-defined schemas as a key benefit for customers because it is a central part of our overall strategy. At Microsoft, we do not believe in a "one-size-fits-all" approach. Instead, as we have evolved Microsoft Office over many years, we have added support for more and more file formats to meet the growing needs of our customers. The support we have built into the Office 2003 Professional Editions for custom-defined schemas takes this concept to a new level. For the first time, Microsoft is able to offer customers a built-in infrastructure to support their own XML document schemas, allowing customers to combine the power of Microsoft Office 2003 with the infinite flexibility of custom-defined XML document support.

Behind this approach is a vision that many of us have shared—that if we could separate the content, or meaning, of a document from the presentation layer of that document, then users would be able to 'tag' and precisely identify parts of their document with labels that could have commonality of meaning that would allow use and reuse. In a government form, for instance, a creator could tag the name, address, sex, age, and other fields to allow the capture of information in a richer, more semantic and structured way. By making it possible for governments and businesses to capture that information, we're enabling the world to work with the data that is most relevant to the needed situation. This is the promise delivered by the support for custom-defined schema. We believe that the next few years will see an explosion of new solutions in which, for example, pharmacies, clinics, health organizations, and other medical organizations will be able to fully leverage the open standard HL7 XML data structure to define the industry requirements. The Microsoft Office System provides a rich authoring, editing, and workflow environment for this schema.

At Microsoft, we recognize that, in addition to in many ways validating our approach, the EU report also challenges us and others in the industry to think about how we can further clarify our position and think long term about our commitments to data interchange. We accept this challenge and look forward to working with the EU, representatives of its member states, other government policy-makers, and the industry as a whole in the months and years ahead. Personally, I am truly delighted that the vision for XML on the desktop is becoming a reality for the benefit for all.

C'est magnifique.

Sincerely,

Jean Paoli
Senior Director, XML Architecture
Microsoft Corporation

¹ Jean Paoli, Senior Director of XML Architecture at Microsoft, is one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and has been a significant player in the worldwide XML community since 1985, when the technology was still known as SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). He helped start the XML activity at Microsoft by creating and managing the team that delivered the software that XML-enabled both Internet Explorer and Windows and was instrumental in creating the new Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 program.