Open XML is at the same time virtually invisible to business users yet possibly the most important new piece of technology for the future of document intensive organizations such as insurance companies and professional services firms. Here is a quick primer on what it is and what it means for business.
Open XML (aka Office Open XML or OOXML) is the file format introduced by the Microsoft Office 2007 suite. For most users, its only visible manifestation is that file extensions now have an additional “x” at the end (“docx” for Word documents, “xlsx” for Excel spreadsheets, etc.).
Under the hood, an Open XML document really is a zip archive containing files (mostly XML data but also images and other inclusions) organize in a folder structure. Those who used to break open AM radios to peek inside and see “how it works” can actually do the same with these documents. Just take any “.docx” file, change the extension to “.zip” and open it via your favorite archive manager (Windows Explorer, WinRar, etc.). You’ll get something that looks like this:
The fact that this file format is compressed is already good news for network administrators and email systems for it makes these documents much smaller. The fact that its content is XML-structured data is even more important thanks to the rich document life-cycle scenarios that it supports. Open XML documents can be created, converted, signed electronically, indexed, searched, categorized and audited in a much more efficient and reliable way than what was possible with earlier formats. Over time, these capabilities will have increasingly important significance for document-centric and heavily regulated industries such as insurance and financial services.
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