Microsoft release a new version of the Office XML standard today:

• Microsoft Makes XML the File Format for the Next Version of Microsoft Office (press release)
• New default XML formats in the next version of Office (Brian Jones, Word program manager blog post)
• Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas(Microsoft’s Office XML webpage)
• Brian Jones - New Office file formats announced (Channel9 video with Brian Jones)
• Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger (Scoble’s post)

My initial thoughts? Can’t tell yet. Until we see an actual working copy of at least the document formats it’ll be hard to tell whether it’s really interoperable and open (if anyone knows where we can get one, let me know; I was unable to find one). The fact that Brian’s blogging is cool, and they’re saying all the right things, both in the video and in the press release. I also really like the notion of compartmentalizing the doc format so that individual portions can be modified by external apps or services - it opens the way to 3^rd party web-services that can hook into Sharepoint and InfoPath and actually change the contents of documents. If they follow through on the promise of this I think it’ll be killer.

I’m also curious to see what extra hooks (if any) they’re going to build to make Visual Studio Tools for Office leverage this new format. And it’s tremendously interesting that they’re going to change the default file format - that in itself says a lot about their confidence in this move.

My only strong reservation is regarding the licensing. They seem to be using the Office 2003 license, which is more open than pretty much anything else that Microsoft uses. However it’s still not that open. From the license:

Microsoft hereby grants you a royalty-free license under Microsoft’s Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise distribute Licensed Implementations solely for the purpose of reading and writing files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas. A “Licensed Implementation” means only those specific portions of a software product that read and write files that are fully compliant with the specifications for the Office Schemas.

What about for other purposes (like data analysis or ? or printing the document from a 3rd party app for that matter? or automatically rendering to pdf?) What if I want to extend the format? Perhaps I’m being paranoid, and I think that Microsoft is making a genuine effort here, but I think they could be more clear, or use a different license altogether.