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Gary Edwards

Open XML trumps ODF in document format fight, consulting firm says - 0 views

  • 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.
Gary Edwards

CIO Wakeup Call: Burton Group ODF/OOXML report | The CIO Weblog - 0 views

  • Although most of the ruckus over the paper has focused on the prediction that OOXML will beat out ODF, the more intriguing and meaningful conclusion is in fact that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) model, built on open and broadly accepted web standards already in broad use, will in fact "...be more influential and pervasive than ODF and OOXML." This implicit acknowledgment that the SaaS delivery model will dominate productivity and document storage applications is less supportive of Microsoft's approaches than many of the documents detractors care to acknowledge and suggests the entire debate is essentially a sideshow.
  • CIOs who are truly concerned with data preservation and open standards need to take a hard look at Microsoft's historical business practices and the remaining questions hanging over OOXML and ask themselves if it's worth making such a major transition to a format that is fraught with the same potential for vendor (rather than consumer) control in the future. SaaS options, it's worth noting, hardly escape this issue, so regardless of the very real potential that SaaS will eclipse any of the stand-alone office applications that are currently involved in this debate, it's still going to be necessary to pick a format for long-term, corporate control of vital data and documents.
Gary Edwards

Independent study advises IT planners to go OOXML | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com - 0 views

  • “ODF represents laudable design and standards work. It’s a clean and useful design, but it’s appropriate mostly for relatively unusual scenarios in which full Microsoft Office file format fidelity isn’t a requirement. Overall, ODF addresses only a subset of what most organizations do with productivity applications today.” The report continues: “ODF is insufficient for complex real-world enterprise requirements, and it is indirectly controlled by Sun Microsystems, despite also being an ISO standard. It’s possible that IBM, Novell, and other vendors may be able to put ODF on a more customer-oriented trajectory in the future and more completely integrate it with the W3C content model, but for now ODF should be seen as more of an anti-Microsoft political statement than an objective technology selection.”
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Mary Jo takes on the recently released Burton Group Report comparing OOXML and ODF. Peter O'Kelly, one of the Burton Group authors, once famously said, "ODF is a great format if you live in an alternative universe where MSOffice doesn't exist!" This observation speaks to the core problem facing ODF and those who seek to implement the ODF standard: ODF was not designed for the conversion of MSOffice documents. Nor was ODF designed to work with MSOffice applications. Another way of saying this is to state that ODF was not designed to be interoperable with MSOffice documents, applications and bound processes. The truth is that ODF was designed for OpenOffice/StarOffice. It is an application specific format. Both OOXML and ODF do a good job of separating content from presentation (style). The problem is that the presentation - layout layers of both ODF and OOXML remains bound to specific applications producing it. While the content layers are entirely portable and can be exchanged without information loss, the presentation layers can not. Microsoft makes no bones about the application specific design and purpose of OOXML. It's stated right in the Ecma 376 charter that OOXML was designed to be compatible with MSOffice and the billions of binary documents in MSOffice specific binary formats. The situation however is much more confusing with ODF. ODF is often promoted as being application, platform and vendor independent. After five years of development though, the OASIS ODF TC has been unable to strip ODF of it's OpenOffice/StarOffice specific aspects. ODF 1.0 - ISO 26300 had three areas that were under specified; meaning these areas were described in syntax only, and lacked the full semantics demanded by interoperable implementations. Only OpenOffice and StarOffice code base applications are able to exchange documents with an acceptable fidelity. The three under specified areas of ODF are: Lists (numbered), F
Gary Edwards

Open XML trumps ODF in document format fight, consulting firm says - 0 views

  • Marino Marcich, executive director of the OpenDocument Format Alliance, retorted via e-mail that many users are taking "a buyer-beware attitude" toward Open XML because that format "is not interoperable and will tie them to the upgrade path of a single vendor." For example, he noted that Becta, the U.K. government's educational technology agency, last week released a report of its own advising, among other things, that to ensure the widest compatibility of files between different applications, Office 2007 users shouldn't save documents in Open XML. Instead, Becta recommended the continued use of Microsoft's older and proprietary .doc, .xls and .ppt formats.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      It's true, OOXML is not interoperable. It was designed for MSOffice and MSOffice only. The problem is that there is no interoperable" alternative to OOXML!!!! ODF itself has serious interoperability problems fully demonstrated at the October 2007 ODF Interoeprability Workshop held in Barcelona Spain. If users want interoperbility with ODF, they must settle on a single ODF vendor. So how is that different from the interop problems imposed by OOXML?
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