garyedwards's Discussions

Lebech said Denmark considers OOXML an open standard, regardless whether it is approved by the ISO. "It would be impossible
for us to use only ISO standards if we want to fulfill the goal of creating interoperability in the government sector," he
said.

The Danish Parliament also mandated that public agencies consider the cost of using open formats. One of the main reasons
OOXML was included is because Denmark is heavily dependent on document management systems that are integrated with Microsoft's
Office products, Lebech said.

Denmark also found that requiring agencies to only use ODF would have been too expensive, mostly because of the cost of converting
documents into ODF, Lebech said.

"We wouldn't have been able to only support ODF," Lebech said. "It wouldn't have been cost neutral."

3.2.2.2. A pox on both your houses!

Hi Robert,

What you've posted are examples of MSOffice ”compatibility settings” used to establish backwards compatibility with older documents, and, for the conversion of alien file formats (such as various versions of WordPerfect .wpd). These compatibility settings are unspecified in that we know the syntax but have no idea of the semantics. And without the semantic description there is no way other developers can understand implementation. This of course guarantees an unacceptable breakdown of interoperability.

But i would be hesitant to make my stand of rejecting OOXML based on this issue. It turns out that there are upwards of 150 unspecified compatibility settings used by OpenOffice/StarOffice. These settings are not specified in ODF, but will nevertheless show up in OpenOffice ODF documents – similarly defying interoperability efforts!

Since the compatibility settings are not specified or even mentioned in the ODF 1.0 – ISO 26300 specification, we have to go to the OOo source code to discover where this stuff comes from. Check out lines 169-211. Here you will find interesting settings such as, “UseFormerLineSpacing, UseFormerObjectPositioning, and UseFormerTextWrapping”.

So what's going on here?

Crawford said a corporate desktop needs to be focused on the business user, compliant with company standards, interoperable, secure, and able to be shipped with an enterprise kernel and managed remotely, and to have standard applications installed.

"The Linux desktop can do all of that. It can be interoperable with earlier versions of the operating system, is generally interoperable with Windows, can ship with an enterprise kernel and can be remotely managed by existing management solutions," he said.

How should an IT team start thinking about an Enterprise 2.0 strategy? One way is to carve it into two main areas. The first is Web-based information sharing--think business versions of Wikipedia, MySpace, and Flickr. A sizable minority of companies are finding effective business uses for blogs, wikis, syndicated feeds, pervasive search, social networking, collaborative content portals like SharePoint, and mashups that use easier-to-integrate APIs and fast-response development techniques such as Ajax. One example: Wikis, which let multiple people access and edit a document online, are widely used at 6% of companies in our survey and used effectively by a few employees at 25% of companies.

The second area is voice and messaging, where voice over IP, instant messaging, presence, videoconferencing, and unified communications can make it possible to connect people in more relevant ways. Unified communications entails the blending of voice calls, video, and messages, coupled with functionality like embedded click-to-call links in documents and contact lists and the ability to see if colleagues and partners are available to chat. It's widely used at 13% of companies surveyed and effectively by a few at 24%.

Opponents to OOXML, which include IBM (Quote<!--, <A HREF="http://www.internetnews.com/stocks/quotes/chart.php/IBM/chart">Chart</A>-->) and the Open
Document Foundation, have argued that Microsoft's specifications are
unwieldy and that the standard application is redundant with the Open Document Format (ODF), which already exists.

Microsoft has countered that the OOXML format is valuable because it is
closer to Office 2007 and is backwards-compatible with older versions of
Office. "Although both ODF and Open XML are document formats, they are
designed to address different needs in the marketplace," the company wrote
in an open letter published earlier this month.