OpenXML Community Growing

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Wow, I've been trying to pull together my next "Intro to SpreadsheetML" post for over two weeks now but it's pretty slow going when you only get 10 mins at a time to focus on it. I thought it would have been ready last week but other things kept coming up. This week in particular is super busy, as there are three separate events going on out here at Microsoft that I'm participating in. That combined with the Office 14 planning and specing means I haven't had much time to focus on pulling together my next SpreadsheetML post. Sorry about that folks.

I had a bit of free time this morning before heading into the office, so wanted to take some time to mention that today we're kicking off a new community site to help better organize the large number of people interested in OpenXML. We already have OpenXMLDeveloper.org which is a community of developers programming against OpenXML. The next step is that we're starting a site called openxmlcommunity.org where customers and partners can talk about the formats and share thoughts, ideas. etc.

There are a number of big things we've seen lately which led to the idea of creating a community site. We have over 300 other companies and partners who care deeply about OpenXML and who've already signed up to be part of the community. Go check it out for yourself. There are a ton of quotes up there from various organizations that have been positively impacted by our move to an open standard format for Office documents.

For example, as I've pointed out in earlier posts, the number of people with access to the new formats isn't just limited to Office 2007 customers. Here are the other ways we're seeing people using OpenXML:

Those are a few of the tools I've been keeping track of, but that's just the beginning. Now we have the openxmlcommunity site which will helps other folks building OpenXML tools to share their thoughts and ideas.

Well, that took a bit longer to say than I'd initially planned… now I'm late for work. (BTW, I've set this up to delay post as the openxmlcommunity site isn't supposed to go live until later on this afternoon)

-Brian