IT-Experts from German federal authorities such as the ministry of justice, Bundestag and Bundesrat as well as other public administrations met in Berlin at the Fraunhofer Fokus on 30 June for another DII event (Document Interoperability Initiative). These events have been set up by Microsoft to discuss -- user, vendor and service providers -- issues but also solutions in the domain of document exchange. More information on previous DII events can be found here http://www.documentinteropinitiative.org/default.aspx

Wolfgang Keber from DIaLOGIKa was invited to this event due to his rich and profound expertise in the domain of document creation (example eNorm) and document translation (example OpenXML/ODF Translator).

Quite a number of highly interesting topics were discussed during this event (and even afterwards during the delicious lunch):

• Status of the ODF and OpenXML standardisation


• Evolution of the standards


• Interoperability questions


• between the standards


• between different versions of a standard


• between applications differently implementing a standard


• Validation of documents


• Incompatibilities between the standards, e.g. unsupported numbering schemes in one of the formats, which are albeit required via the „Handbuch der Rechtsförmlichkeit“ (and which are properly implemented in eNorm)

The participants welcomed Microsoft´s initiative, which opens a direct channel to the vendor, but also to IT service providers such as DIaLOGIKa. In general, they gave a positive feedback about this event in Berlin – in particular also about the perfect organisation by Microsoft and the Fraunhofer Fokus which hosted the event and which was represented by Mr. Gerd Schürmann and Dr. Klaus-Peter Eckert.