MS Office's New XML

Microsoft has released some info on the new XML file formats they are planning for the next Office (to be shipped around Longhorn time, and still called Office 12 internally). These are the same formats that raised concern, and got them okayed, by the government of Massachusetts. The very same XML formats that they claim will be open for all to see and use and develop, but are strangely covered by patents that MS doesn't want to clarify on. Scoble was as giddy as a school boy on prom night all day, as he waited for the 21:30 time that he was allowed to post about it (when his NDA expired). Without further ado, an interview, with Brian Jones, one of the Office XML developers. These new XML formats will be available in the next Office, as well as through patches for Office 2000/XP/2003.

They are touting it as a great thing, something that will revolutionize the way we handle our document formats. We can have proxies automatically strip out macros, to prevent viruses from travelling. We can have search programs search through documents in many smart ways (search for author, search for creation date, search for the word "antitrust"). Anything you can imagine doing with an open document that has been marked up in XML is now do-able. (I'm thinking about the creation of a .docx -> .odt converter). For those who don't know, OpenOffice.org, Abiword, and just about every other major open source office suite has been using XML in zips for years now. As for the searching within our files, don't forget about Beagle, which is a very young project, and is still in development. Beagle is to Linux what Google Desktop Search and the Microsoft Desktop Search (unreleased, and not the official name) are to Windows. I imagine that Microsoft will get many APIs out and many of their own plugins out for IIS and Exchange server, so that many cool things can be done with the new formats. Can open source stay one step ahead?