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First, let me say that I am a CIO in a small (20 employees but growing fast) financial services company. I am well aware of how locked-in I am getting with our MS-only shop. I am trying to see my way out of it, but this "ODF vs ODFF" is leaving me very confused and no one is working to clear the fog. I beg for all parties to really work towards some sort of defined understanding. I don't need cooperation. But, what I don't have is well-defined positions from all parties. As it is, I feel safer staying the course with MS right now, honestly. It's what I know vs the mystery of this "open cloud" and all the bellicose infighting. How's that for "in the trenches" data? I posted a comment on Andy's blog, and I will post the same comment here for your group (minor edits): I will admit to being very, very confused by all of this ODF vs ODFF posturing. I will try to put my current thoughts in short form, but it will be a muddled mess. I warned you! From what I gather, the OpenDocument Foundation (ODFF) is attempting to create more of an interop format for working against a background MS server stack (Exchange/Sharepoint). You worry that MS is further cementing their business lock-in by moving more and more companies into dependency on not only the client-side software but also the MS business stack that has finally evolved into a serious competitive set. At that level, and in your view, the "atomic unit" is the whole document. The encoded content is not of immediate concern. ODF is concerned with the actual document content, which ODFF is prepared to ignore. The "atomic unit" is the bits and parts in the document. They want to break the proprietary encodings that MS has that lock people into MSOffice. The stack is not of any immediate concern. So, unless I misunderstand either camp, ODF is first attacking the client end of the stack, and ODFF is attacking the backbone server end of the stack. The former wants to break the MSOffice monopoly by allowing people to escape those proprietary encodings, and the latter wants to prevent the dependency on server software like Exchange and Sharepoint by allowing MS documents to travel to other destinations than MS "server" products. Is this correct? I have yet to see anyone summarize the differences in any non-partisan way, so I am at a loss and not enough information is forthcoming for me to see what's what. The usual diatribe by people closer to the action is to go into the history of ODF or ODFF, talk about old slights and lost fights, and somehow try to pull at emotional heartstrings so as to gain mindshare. Gary's set of comments on this blog have that flavor. This is childish on both sides. Furthermore, the word "orthogonal" comes to mind. I often see people too busy arguing their POV, and not listening to others, when there is no real argument to keep making. It's apple-and-oranges. ODF vs ODFF seems like they are caught in this trap. Everyone wants to win an argument that has no possible win because the participants are not arguing about the same thing. Tell me: Why can't the two parties get along? I can see a "cooperative" that attacks the entire stack. Am I the only one seeing this? Am I wrong? If yes, what's the fundamental difference that prevents cooperation?

To be fair, Microsoft seeks to solve real world problems with respect to helping customers glean more value from their information. But the approach depends on enterprises adopting an end-to-end Microsoft stack—vertically from desktop to server and horizontally across desktop and server products. The development glue is .NET Framework, while the informational glue is OOXML.

Microsoft seeks to create sales pull along the vertical stack between the desktop and server.

Microsoft's major XML-based format development priority was backward compatibility with its proprietary Office binary file formats.

We’re trying to view it as a straight business decision. What are the costs associated with one approach over another? Does it serve all of our business needs? If it doesn’t serve a business need, how do we satisfy that business need? We’re trying to view this just as a plain-vanilla, nonpartisan, nonideological issue.

Opponents to OOXML, which include IBM (Quote) 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.

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.

Bowen's compatibility concerns, combined with the potential cost of upgrading the FAA's 45,000 workers to Microsoft's next-generation desktop environment, could make the moratorium permanent. "We're considering the cost to deploy [Windows Vista] in our organization. But when you consider the incompatibilities, and the fact that we haven't seen much in the way of documented business value, we felt that we needed to do a lot more study," said Bowen. Because of Google Apps' sudden entry into the desktop productivity market

Microsoft significantly increases cross-integration of features with the company's other software. Microsoft acquired most of the products making up its Dynamics product line, and what a motley crew. New products and versions bring the Dynamics line more into the Microsoft family, in part by convergence—or increased integration with the company's other software.

In a new setback to Microsoft's public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker's Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.

In this exclusive interview with APC, Mundie says the notion of all software delivered entirely through the web browser is now widely recognised as being 'popular mythology'. He also stakes the claim that Google's existence and success was contingent on Microsoft creating Windows. He talks about what's coming down the pipeline for future versions of Windows, and his belief that Windows can get still more market share than it has today. He also discusses the issues around the recent controversy over the Office Open XML file format.

So Vista is in its diffusion cycle and until there is enough of it out there, you won't really see the developer community come across.

So far, we have delivered about 60 million copies. That would represent about six per cent of the global Windows install base. So it has probably got to get up another few percentage points before you will start to see a big migration of the developer community.

The key is to extend both functionality and interoperability without taking away any of the capabilities that users currently rely on or expect. Reducing interoperability or functionality is a non-starter, for the end user as well as the IT departments that want to avoid annoying the end user. You screw with PowerPoint at your own risk.

Microsoft sees this coming, and one of its biggest challenges in the years ahead will be figuring out how to replace the revenues and profits that get sucked out of the Office market.

The real problem that I see is the reduced functionality and integration. I don’t think there can be a Revolution until someone builds an entire suite of Revolutionary office products on the web. Office has had almost (or more than, don't quote me) 15 years of experience to build a tight cohesive relationship between it's products.

In a highly informative post to his Open Stack blog Wednesday, Edwards explains how three key features are necessary for organizations to convert to open formats. These are: Conversion Fidelity - the billions of binaries problem Round Trip Fidelity - the MSOffice bound business processes, line of business integrated apps, and assistive technology type add-ons Application Interop - the cross platform, inter application, cross information domain problem

The marketing folks in IBM's Lotus division are starting to sound like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who insists he's winning a fight even as he loses both arms and legs: "'Tis but a scratch," the Black Knight declares after one arm is lopped off. "Just a flesh wound," he says after losing the other. "I'm invincible!" The same goes for IBM's (nyse: IBM - news - people ) Lotus, which keeps declaring victory even as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) carves it up.

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%.

Unless we add conformance requirements for the preservation of metadata and processing instructions, the less featureful apps will never  be able to round-trip documents with the more featureful apps. Our language should require that. Personally, I believe that the software-as-an-end-point client-side office suites are dinosaurs at the end of their era. They are being finished off by a thousand cuts as users spend less and less time using them and more and more time using other apps, such as web apps. ODF either develops methods for interoperability among all apps or it will die along with the office suites. E.g., Microsoft knows this and is busily migrating its Office development budget across the Sharepoint/Exchange server hubs to the network. Meanwhile, this TC fiddles with preserving the 1995 software-as-an-endpoint vision.

That said, it goes on to acknowledge that “there are standards which we are obliged to adopt for pragmatic reasons which do not necessarily fully conform to being open in all respects.

»  E-Mail »  Print »  Discuss »  Write To Editor late last year -- can be resolved. "We have more confidence in Microsoft than we would have 10 years ago," says Schmidt. "But it always makes sense to look at the security implications, the value back to the customer, and those kind of issues." The DOT's ban on Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and Office 2007 applies to 15,000 computer users at DOT proper who are currently running the Windows XP Professional operating system. The memo indicates that a similar ban is in effect at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has 45,000 desktop users. Compatibility with existing applications appears to be the Transportation Department's major concern. According to a separate memo, a number of key software applications and utilities in use in various branches of the department aren't Vista compatible. Among them are Aspen 2.8.1, ISS 2.11, ProVu 3.1.1, and Capri 6.5, according to a memo issued by staffers at the DOT's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Any prolonged ban on new Microsoft technologies by the federal government could have a significant impact on the software maker's bottom line, as Microsoft sells millions of dollars in software to the feds annually. http://as.cmpnet.com/event.ng/Type=count&ClientType=2&AdID=125682&FlightID=75634&TargetID=2625&SiteID=222&AffiliateID=283&EntityDefResetFlag=0&Segments=1411,3108,3448,11291,12119&Targets=2625,2878,7904,8579&Values=34,46,51,63,77,87,91,102,140,222,227,283,442,646,656,1184,1255,1311,1405,1431,1716,1767,1785,1798,1925,1945,1970,2217,2299,2310,2326,2352,2678,2727,2767,2862,2942,3140,3347,3632,3636,3638,3890,3904,4080,448