Brian Jones talks in his latest posting about his trip to Brussels (hope you enjoyed the city) and the meeting with the ECMA committee. As you probably already know, most of the Office '12' client products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) will have a new file format. This file format is actually a combination of XML and ZIP technologies. The last weeks, I have done a lot of work with these formats working out demos and now starting with the creation of labs for the participants of the Ascend training. It is amazing how flexible and powerful this new approach is. We foresee endless opportunities for developers integrating with or building solutions that are based on the new file formats, ranging from server-side document generation (much more options here than with Office 2003), parsing, repurposing of documents and if you combine it with the XML data store you have very nice scenarios to embed data dynamically on the server in your Office documents.
Submitting the format as a standard to ECMA is a major step forward for Microsoft in the move to the utilization of more open and standard technologies in their products. If you are interested in the draft, download it here.