- Get a grip or you don't get the job
- Desktops of the future here today
- Researcher hides IE attack on Web
- Cisco third quarter 2008 channel stuffing
- Sci-Fi's goofiest gadgets and technology
Don't get 'Green Scammed'. Listen now!
Cisco opens ISR routers to developers; SaaS providers cut costs with open source. Listen now!
Windows Server 2008 is not intended to be a "one size fits all" solution and Microsoft relies on third-party solutions to enhance and extend Windows Server 2008 to accommodate functions like auditing, backup and recovery. Here, we look specifically at audit and recovery capabilities for Active Directory and learn where Windows Server 2008 toolset leaves off, and where the right third-party solution can provide broader coverage and enhanced management capabilities.
Get the latest on storage technologies that allow IT professionals to better cope with new IT demands. Learn how storage technologies can help you successfully tackle e-Discover, regulatory compliance, green data center initiatives and the data explosion. Get all the details now.
Find out how you can consolidate Windows workloads and create a more efficient virtualized data center in this informative webcast, "Reduce Complexity and Cost - Windows Server Consolidation with Virtualization." Six concise webcast modules are available for your viewing. Watch them all consecutively or only the topics that interest you. The modules cover performance, user case studies, enterprise-level support, managing windows workloads, setup and configuration and the future of virtualization. Learn more today. Register below to learn more and be entered to win an Archos 605 Portable Media Player.
If you aren't just being a fanboi on this one, go to ROUGHLYDRAFTED.COM and read much more detail about...- Anonymous
The powerful tape technology can address data security with tape encryption as well as long term data protection.
Discover what disk and tape really cost -- and which solution provides lower total cost of ownership and optimizes energy use for your organization
The Clipper Group explores the truth behind the myths of tape, digging into the misconceptions in the disk vs. tape debate.
Over two thirds of disk-only users look to add tape back into storage infrastructure according to recent survey.
Next month, national standards bodies will vote for the second time on whether to adopt the Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an international standard.
Whether the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) should adopt OOXML is a question that has fuelled a blog battle between supporters and opponents, ahead of this week's meeting in Geneva to finalize the text that will be put to the vote.
But will the final decision even matter?
Definitely not, according to Andy Updegrove, a Boston lawyer who works with industry standards bodies. "It really doesn't matter which way the vote goes," he said at the Standards and the Future of the Internet conference in Geneva on Wednesday.
The event, organized by OpenForum Europe, took place in Geneva's International Conference Center -- just a few floors down from the room where Joint Technical Committee 1 was holding its Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) to debate OOXML's future as a standard.
How OOXML came to be there provides some of the explanation for Updegrove's answer.
Microsoft offered the specification for OOXML, based on Microsoft Office 2007's .docx default file format, to ECMA International, an industry consortium which also hosts the standards for the C# programming language and for ECMAScript, the "standard" version of JavaScript.
ECMA duly adopted OOXML in December 2006 as Standard ECMA-376 and submitted it to the ISO for fast-track approval as an international standard for office document formats.
An initial ISO vote rejected OOXML, with national standards bodies making 3,500 comments on areas needing further work. This week's meeting is attempting to resolve those comments to produce a new draft, which ISO members will vote whether to adopt next month.
However, the ISO already has a standard for office documents: Open Document Format for Office Applications, or ODF, submitted by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards and adopted as ISO/IEC 26300 in November 2006.
Whichever way the OOXML vote goes next month, some European governments are likely to specify ODF for their office and archival systems, according to Updegrove.
That, he thinks, will ultimately lead to the merging of OOXML with ODF through "soft persuasion: a small percentage of the government market saying, 'This is something we think you should do. We aren't going to make you do it, but if you don't we're going to take our business elsewhere.'"
If OOXML is not adopted, it will simply ratchet the pressure to merge up a little as a few more governments specify ODF.
One who thinks the vote does matter is Vint Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP technology that underpin the Internet, and now chief Internet evangelist at Google.
"If OOXML is adopted, it leads to a problem of duplicate formats for document exchange," Cerf said. That duplication is bad for interoperability: In the Internet world, standards makers work hard on agreeing "one way to do things, and then evolving it," he said. "We don't reinvent the wheel."
IBM Vice President of Standards and Open Source Bob Sutor has an interest in the outcome of the vote, but there is one thing the BRM has already changed, he said: "OOXML has caused a crisis in the standards system." Although "this is a BRM unlike any other," he said, there is one way in which it is just like all the others: It is held behind closed doors.
Whatever the outcome of the vote, that secrecy is one of the things that should change in the way IT standards are developed, Sutor said.
"Minutes should be published. This secrecy . . . has to end," he said.
Cooperation is needed, no matter the OOXML vote outcomeBy Microsoft Subnet on February 28, 2008, 7:11 pmWe've hit a second time a major player in the standards world has said the path ahead for OOXML (and ODF) is cooperation, perhaps an eventual merging of the...
Reply | Read entire comment
View all comments