Does Aspose have any plans or timeline of supporting Office 2007 documents? Speciffically Powerpoint?
I know that Microsoft just entered beta for this product and my company is scrambling a little bit to determine our own roadmap for supporting the new version.
Microsoft appears to be heading towards a slightly more open standard with xml as the default format for documents created in the next version of office. .doc, .ppt files etc would then simply be zip archives containing the xml file for the document and any resource files associated with the document (images, data etc.) Italics below are mine.
The Microsoft Office XML Open Formats introduce significantly enhanced XML formats for Microsoft Word and Excel, and the first XML format for Microsoft PowerPoint. The formats use consistent, application-specific XML markup and are completely based on XML and use industry-standard ZIP-compression technology.
PressPass: Why is Microsoft doing this?
Sinofsky: The short answer is because these capabilities – improved file and data management, improved interoperability, and a published file-format specification – are exactly what customers have asked us for.
we are publishing with it a royalty-free license, so any customer or technology provider can use the file formats in its own systems without financial consideration to Microsoft. This will ensure that the new file formats can be used by everyone to create, access, and modify documents in these formats.
So my question specifically is, does Aspose have a plan for the situation where one of our customers gives us a ppt files saved in the “new” xml format that is the default in Office 12? To extend upon that, does the “open” standard for the XML format help enable increased Aspose functionality for ppts in the newer format?