There was a certain inevitability that Microsoft would be forced to bow to market pressures and announce its acceptance of ODF. However, Microsoft’s traditional approach to standards has been characterised as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - i.e. attempt to claim ownership and take control of a standard through abuse of its near monopoly position.

Proponents of ODF need to defend against this by setting up independent testing for software conformance with the standard. The testing needs to be accessible not just to the Suns and IBMs of this world - but also the KOffices.

While proponents of ODF are celebrating that a victory has been won, it is more likely that the real battle is only just beginning.

What is to be done?

ISO has in a sense put itself in an awkward position here by
already approving the rival OpenDocument
format as an ISO standard. This makes it harder to reject OOXML, and
at the same time makes it difficult to approve OOXML, since it
competes with an existing ISO standard. Generally, I'm unhappy with
how closely these two standards are tied to existing software. What I
would really have liked to see was for OpenDocument and OOXML both to
be dropped, and the two communities to sit down and work out a common
agreed format that is not tied to any existing software. The Chinese
UOF
format, for example, might have served as the starting point for
this. ODA has
also been suggested. Unfortunately, this requires a political will
that does not seem to be present, and so this seems unlikely for now.

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."

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.