Microsoft releases free Office-ODF interoperability guides

Five years ago, releasing such information seen as giving away 'competitive advantage,' says Microsoft product manager
By Eric Lai
December 16, 2008 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp will publish technical documents on Tuesday describing how it built support for the rival Open Document Format (ODF) within Office 2007.
In addition, Microsoft will also give away notes on how it supported its own format, Office Open XML (OOXML).
This information could be helpful for third-party software firms trying to build applications that work with Office 2007 and its documents.
Doug Mahugh, Microsoft's senior product manager for Office interoperability, said the information was valuable enough that it would have been viewed five years ago as giving up "competitive advantage" and thus would not have been released publicly.
Despite Microsoft's long-standing argument that customers benefit from the tight integration between Office 2007, SharePoint and other Microsoft Aplications , Mahugh said the company was sincere about promoting interoperability with other formats and applications, and encouraged other software vendors to be equally "transparent."
OOXML was first ratified by standards body ISO as an open standard in September 2007, but appeals against it were not finally defeated until August .
During that time, Microsoft has taken more steps to appease those who claim it is not being fully open and interoperable.
In May, Microsoft said it would support both ODF and Adobe's PDFs in Office
Microsoft posted its set of interoperability guides in June .
Mahugh said some applications were starting to emerge as a result. For instance, there is an application that allows non-Microsoft Web browsers such as Firefox to view Word 2007's .docx files, Mahugh said.
He said Novell Inc's version of the OpenOffice.org suite supports OOXML well. Apple Inc.'s Mac OSX and iPhone also had "really pretty good" support for OOXML documents.
To further help developers, Microsoft will support the creation of an open-source project to create software that tests that OOXML documents execute properly, Mahugh said.
source : www.computerworld.com

Microsoft preps emergency IE patch for Wednesday release

Second out-of-cycle update in the last two months is imminent
By Gregg Keizer
December 16, 2008 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp announced today that it will issue an emergency patch tomorrow to quash a critical Internet Explorer bug that attackers have been exploiting for more than a week.
The advance warning came less than a week after Microsoft acknowledged that exploit code had gone public and was being used by hackers to hijack Windows PCs running IE.
Microsoft will deliver the out-of-cycle patch Wednesday at 1 p.m. Eastern time via its normal update mechanisms, including Windows Update, Microsoft Update and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).
The update will be pegged "critical," the most serious ranking in Microsoft's four-step scoring system.
Even as it declared that it would release an emergency fix, Microsoft continued to downplay the threat. "At this time, we are aware only of attacks that attempt to use this vulnerability against Windows Internet Explorer 7," said company spokesman Christopher Budd in an e-mail today.


Initially, Microsoft and other security companies believed that only IE7 was vulnerable to attack, but on review, the company confirmed that all versions of its browser, including IE5.01, IE6 and IE8 Beta 2, contain the bug.
Last weekend, Microsoft researchers said that they had seen a “huge increase” in attacks, and that some were originating from legitimate Web sites. Another researcher added that about 6,000 infected sites were serving up exploits that target the IE vulnerability.
Also today, Microsoft confirmed that attacks could be launched through Outlook Express, a free e-mail client bundled with Windows XP. Because Outlook Express renders HTML-based messages using IE's engine, attackers could exploit the bug by getting users to open or view malicious messages.
This will be the second out-of-cycle patch from Microsoft in the last two months. In late October, it issued an emergency fix for a critical vulnerability in the Windows Server service; like IE's bug, that one had been actively exploited before Microsoft was able to come up with a patch.
According to today's advance notification , Microsoft will provide patches to users of Windows 2000 , XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008 for IE5.01, IE6 and IE7. A separate patch will apparently be issued tomorrow for IE8 Beta 2, a preview version of Microsoft's next browser that is not officially on the support list.
source : www.computerworld.com