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Open Document Format The panel discussion will focus on a single question: what should the user community do, what actions should they take in light of competing Open Document Formats? Each of our industry experts will be asked to present their practical response.

There’s some weight to that accusation when you consider how the applications behind each format operate. For instance, Microsoft Office more or less sucks at handling ODF documents and OpenOffice sucks at opening OOXML files — but why? OpenOffice has largely refused to implement any of the proprietary elements of Microsoft’s Office and Microsoft has made only a passing effort at supporting ODF. The two sides may argue about which is the better file format, but in reality what they’re saying is “our software works better than yours.” From an end user point of view software remains the critical issue — far moreso than the document format itself. But the OpenDocument Foundation would like that to change, they believe that interoperability is the whole point of having a universal format.

But it is nice to see that at least some part of office document debate is actually on the real-world user’s side. After all, most of us really don’t care what format our documents are in as long as all our applications can open them. And right now that sort of cross-application compatibility is little more than a pipe dream.

A presentation made two weeks ago by two members of OASIS' OpenDocument technical committee, and founding members of the OpenDocument Foundation, made it clear that the foundation would be turning its attention away from developing the ODF format and translators for it. Instead, in a course change instigated as far back as last May, the Foundation is steering back toward a project launched in 1995 by the World Wide Web Consortium, in hopes of recapturing the momentum toward document interoperability for all existing word processor users.

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) remains "more of an anti-Microsoft political statement than an objective technology selection" by users, according to a report released Monday by analysts at Burton Group, who recommend that companies adopt Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML document format whether or not it is approved as an ISO standard next month.

Nobody has invested more to defeat Microsoft Corp.'s Open XML document format than IBM Corp. So why is IBM supporting Open XML in a handful of its products? According to technical documentation on IBM's own Web sites, Big Blue already supports Open XML, the native file format of Microsoft Office 2007, in at least four of its software. However, Microsoft Office users interested in testing or switching to Lotus Symphony, IBM's upcoming challenger to Office, may be disheartened by signs that IBM won't budge from its stance that it will only support documents created in Office 2003 and prior versions.

This document defines a generic language-independent processing model for combining arbitrary document formats. The Compound Document Framework is language-independent. While it is clearly meant to serve as the basis for integrating W3C's family of XML formats within its Interaction Domain (e.g., MathML, SMIL, SVG, VoiceXML, XForms, XHTML, XSL) with each other, together with CSS and the DOM; it can also be used to integrate non-W3C formats with W3C formats or integrate non-W3C formats with other non-W3C formats. 1.1. Conformance Everying in this specification is normative except for diagrams, examples, notes and sections marked non-normative. The key words must, must not, required, shall, shall not, should, should not, recommended, may and optional in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119]. This specification defines the following classes of products: conforming implementation A user agent that implements all interfaces described in this specification and follows all must-, required- and shall-level of critera in this specification. conforming document A document that follows all must-, required- and shall-level of critera in this specification that apply to document authors. conforming authoring tool One that produces conforming documents.

this TC does not have the final word on what goes into the ODF 1.2 spec. There is still the OASIS vote, the JTC-1 vote, and the ISO final ballot, with a few other stops along the way. There is also the market's response to what this TC does. Given that no one on this TC has objected to my considerable efforts to raise public concerns with Microsoft's ISO submission and some on this TC have lambasted Microsoft for creating interoperability barriers, why should this TC's members consider themselves exempt from warnings that they have just fallen into precisely the kind of behavior we routinely criticize when it's Microsoft that creates the interoperability barriers. Especially when it's the end users who will pay the price of the non-interoperability?

Firstly it is a back end to what most people would traditionally think of as "Microsoft Office", i.e. the suite of desktop tools (Word, PowerPoint, Excel and so on). In this respect, it acts as a hub for collaboration, document storage/sharing, search and a range of other functions. However, SharePoint can also be used independently of the Office desktop components as a very respectable and capable portal environment for serving up either native .Net or composite applications to users through a browser.

reflects the functionality in those products.

It is important to recognize that ODF and Open XML were created with very different design goals and that they are only two of many document format standards in use today, each of which has characteristics that are attractive to different users in different scenarios

In a proposal submitted to the European Commission two weeks ago, Microsoft spelled out a range of promises related to Office, its desktop and server software, and other products to address antitrust concerns first expressed by officials in January 2008.

Beginning with the release of Office [2010], end users that purchase Microsoft's Primary PC Productivity Applications in the EEA [European Economic Area] in both the OEM and retail channel will be prompted in an unbiased way to select default file format (from options that include ODF) for those applications upon the first boot of any one of them," Microsoft said in its proposal [download Word document]

a calm look at some of the issues

Microsoft’s implementation decision

an implementation of ODF which does not interoperate with other available implementations

Symphony 1.3, released last week, now enables imports of documents using Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format. However, the free-of-charge office suite does not yet let users save documents in OOXML.