TechReady3 and Open XML

This week we're having a huge conference at the convention center in Seattle for Microsoft employees. It's called TechReady, and it's an opportunity for salespersons, consultants, evangelists, and others from around the world to travel to the Redmond area and here all about current and soon-to-be-released technologies directly from the product groups themselves. It's also an opportunity for those of us at the home office to bone up on what's going on, so I'm attending as many sessions as I can fit in this week.

Yesterday I attended Brian Jones's session on Open XML. He covered the basics of Open XML, its key benefits to users and developers, and some of the key differences between Open XML and ODF. Those differences are starting to get a lot of attention now that Open XML is becoming better-documented through the Ecma standardization process and people can really dig into the details, as you can see on Brian's blog.

Brian also showed a brief preview of a demo we're working on for demonstrating how Open XML documents can be generated from non-Microsoft platforms. What interesting times we live in, when a bunch of Microsoft people fly to an internal event near Redmond, where they watch a fellow Microsoft employee show off some Java code running on a Linux server in India.