The seventh Document Interoperability Initiative event took place on December 2, 2008, at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center for European Innovation, Brussels, Belgium.

This follows events around the world in Cambridge, Seoul, Beijing, Munich, Tokyo and Redmond over the last several months, with more planned for the following months. Consistent with the overall goals of the DII to enable document format interoperability, the event brought together vendors and experts on document formats interested in driving interoperability between implementations of different formats and discussions about how the community can best work together to drive increased interoperability in the marketplace.

Some of the organizations that participated in this event include Fraunhofer, Dialogika, SourceSense, Wgywam, RealDolmen, Fedict, IRIS, Getronics, Ovum and Microsoft

In addition to the many compelling subjects, there were several presentations of particular interest. Dialogika discussed some of the collaborative work on the ODF/OXML/Legacy translators and the work at the PLANETS Consortium, while Paolo Mottadelli from Sourcesense shared the work being done at Apache.org. Maarten Balliauw from RealDolmen and Julien Chable from Wygwam collaborated to show how two open source projects, PHPExcel and OpenXML4J, were using OOXML to store and transfer data between two applications built using them.

Additionally, Microsoft discussed making information available to developers about its implementation of Open XML/ODF to increase transparency and facilitate interoperability. Another topic was on document format test libraries and the development of validation tools for implementers to ensure that they are all able to test against the same documents.

The roundtables that took place were especially interesting as topics that have been on the minds of attendees were brought forward. With ideas validated, suggestions taken and new paths forged for where we should go next. Two of the topics discussed were the certification and legality of translated documents. The customers and vendors who participated in this event stated that they would like to continue to have more discussions around document interoperability and see more showcases of projects that have come out of this effort. The presentations are available here.