Microsoft’s new way of delivering word files

Over the past year Microsoft Sri Lanka (Pvt) Ltd, has stepped up efforts to identify and meet the needs of its customers by sponsoring a new type of standard for document based information.

Founder and General Manager, Allette Systems in Australia and Director of the Lending Industry XML Initiative (LIXI), Nick Carr, told The Sunday Times FT in an interview last week that Microsoft had now created a new way of delivering word files where in the past, documents were created in a format which was difficult for people to extract value from.

Document formats play an important role in helping computer users share information and when shared amongst many applications and platforms, people have an improved ability to communicate with others.

New file formats such as Open XML and Open Document Format (ODF) is meant to serve a variety of customer needs and is already being implemented. Microsoft was able to take the experience that Carr had in the use of open standards to organize a forum to introduce the new standards to the industry.

"It's hard to move information between systems at the moment because there is no common standard because there's no one way of delivery," he said. "Standards are free and open to everyone and we think these standards are good for us and for our customers to adopt. There is a collective benefit for people to use the Microsoft standard." Carr explained that using the standards is a way to eliminate non-productive costs. He added that Microsoft does not have a history of openly supporting open standards so what they are doing now is a valuable contribution to the community in educating people.

Carr gave the explanation of music notation to explain what people could expect from the new standards. Music notation has been around for hundreds of years, he said. It allows information that was created hundreds of years ago to be played on a hand phone today. It’s portable into the future and across all types of devices such as pianos, guitars and even mobile phones. Document information may be very valuable and costly to create so the objective is to make that data usable in the future instead of re-engineering it. "The solution that we are involved in is to make it available so that it can be reused without being re-engineered," said Carr. (NG)