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Paul Merrell

BetaNews | Microsoft's Matusow and Mahugh on Office's move to open format support - 0 views

www.betanews.com/...2

compatibility mode mahugh matusow microsoft native file support apis odf

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 May 08 - Cached
  • DOUG MAHUGH, program manager for ISO 29500-based products, Microsoft: One thing to be very clear about here is this: When we say, "support for ODF in [Office] SP2," we intend to write very compliant ODF documents when you save a document. However, it's not a given that everything you can do in the Office UI is savable under ODF. As you're alluding to, there are things -- SmartArt, conditional formatting, things like that -- that we have in Office and that are popular features, where there is no way to save those in ODF, currently.The way we're approaching that, I can share a little bit with you: We're not throttling the UI, as you describe, where certain things are disabled. Rather, at the time you save, we're telling you, "Hey, you're saving in this other format; some information in this document may be lost." That sort of thing. And let me tell you why we made the decision to do it in that particular way: There are situations where some of that functionality may be very useful to the user, even though it can't be serialized out to the format that they're saving in.
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 27 May 08
       
      One might suppose that the new API discussed on the following page will similarly not allow developers to set a compatability mode in Office apps. Note that the existing APIs do allow that, so one might suspect that disabling the ability to set a compatibility mode is one of the reasons for the new API.
  • The engineering decisions that were made in the original creation of ODF represent the engineering pathway and the innovations that were happening in the OpenOffice space. The engineering decisions and development pathway for Open XML represents that which was happening in [Microsoft] Office, and the feature sets are not in parity. In fact, there's a superset of features within the Microsoft Office set, but there are certainly features that are exclusive to OpenOffice that do not get covered in Microsoft Office.
  • We really hope to see ODF move to JTC 1 / SC 34 maintenance
Paul Merrell

Where is there an end of it? | Real Conformance for ODF? - 0 views

www.adjb.net/...Real-Conformance-for-ODF.aspx

ODF conformance foreign elements ODF TC ODF politics

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Feb 09 - Cached
  • There has been quite a lot of hubbub recently about ODF conformance, in particular about how conformance to the forthcoming ODF 1.2 specification should be defined.
  • The proposal caused much debate. In support of the new conformance clause, IBM's Rob Weir described foreign elements (formerly so welcome in ODF) as proprietary extensions that are “evil” and as a “nuclear death ray gun”. Questioning the proposal, KOffice's Thomas Zander wrote that he was “worried that we are trying to remove a core feature that I depend on in both KOffice and Qt”. Meanwhile Microsoft's Doug Mahugh made a counter-proposal suggesting that ODF might adopt the Markup Compatibility and Extensibility mechanisms from ISO/IEC 29500 (OOXML). Things came to a head in a 9-2-2 split vote last week which saw the new conformance text adopted in the new ODF committee specification by will of the majority. Following this there was some traffic in the blogosphere with IBM's Rob Weir commenting and Microsoft's Doug Mahugh counter-commenting on the vote and the circumstances surrounding it.
Gary Edwards

Office 2007 won't support ISO's OOXML - SD Times On The Web - 0 views

www.sdtimes.com/...article.aspx

iso oasis odf ooxml pdf

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 May 08 - Cached
  • In a surprise move, the company also announced that it intends to participate in the OASIS ODF working group and the corresponding ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 34 working groups for ODF, as well as the ISO Technical Committee 171 working group for PDF, said Doug Mahugh, senior product manager for Microsoft Office.He added that Microsoft would also introduce an API to allow developers to plug their own converters for formats, such as ODF, into Office to make it the default conversion path. ODF 1.1 was chosen over the ISO-standard ODF 1.0 as a practical decision based upon interoperability with existing implementations, Mahugh explained.
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 22 May 08
       
      The announcement of the new API for others to use for plug-ins is not new news. It was originally made when Microsoft claimed to have gotten religion on interoperability a few months ago. The wookie is that the only conceivable reason for a new API for use by others is that Microsoft does not want to disclose the specs for its existing API. That in turn suggests that the API for use by others will have functionality different from the API used by Microsoft itself, almost certainly far less.
  • “Customers that are expecting true document fidelity from XML-based, ISO-standard document formats will continue to be disappointed,” said Michael Silver, a Gartner Research vice president. Silver observed that the most compatible formats to use today are Microsoft’s legacy binaries, and he believes that Microsoft will be unlikely to convince customers to move to OOXML in the foreseeable future.
  • Gary Edwards on 21 May 08
     
    Microsoft to support PDF, ODF 1.1 and ISO OOXML in MSOffice 14. The company will also join the OASIS ODF TC and working group for ISO PDF.
Paul Merrell

BetaNews | Microsoft's Matusow and Mahugh on Office's move to open format support - 0 views

www.betanews.com/...3

compatibility mode mahugh microsoft native file support apis

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 May 08 - Cached
  • One of the most intriguing parts of today's development, especially for open source developers and ODF proponents, concerns Microsoft's upcoming release of its API's for document format plug-ins for the forthcoming "Office 14:"
  • A second scenario is, perhaps there's a format that we have not implemented or supported in Office, but for whatever reason, a particular organization wants to support that format. They can write their own support and integrate it into Office, so that it's very seamless; and from the user experience point of view, it just looks like yet another format Office supports.
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 27 May 08
       
      But will developers be able to set compatibility modes so that functionality in MS Office that can not be saved to another document format is not available? If not, there can be no ireliable nterchange of documents between different IT systems without loss of fidelity.
  • The APIs, BetaNews learned, will be released under the auspices of the interoperability initiatives the company launched in February. Those apply to documentation and information (note, not programs) that Microsoft says it will freely release to developers without them having to obtain a license; and those initiatives apply to Microsoft's "high-volume software" -- and certainly Office qualifies as that. A careful read of these initiatives' wording would indicate that Microsoft leaves itself no option for using intellectual property leverage against anyone who should make a format plug-in for Office 14 -- even a "better Open XML than Open XML," since that's no longer Microsoft's property either.
Paul Merrell

Doug Mahugh : ODF Implementation Notes for Office 2007 SP2 - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...notes-for-office-2007-sp2.aspx

ODF Microsoft office 2007 interop

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Microsoft has today published our first set of document-format implementation notes, for the ODF implementation in Office 2007 SP2. These notes, which are available on the DII web site, provide detailed information about the design decisions that went into our implementation of ODF 1.1.
  • Doug, The list of elements and attributes "not supported in core Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007" is quite long. Can you tell us what will happen, when Office 2007 encouters an unsupported element. Will it simply be ignored? When roundtripping - will it be deleted or preserved?
  • Doug, The list of elements and attributes "not supported in core Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007" is quite long. Can you tell us what will happen, when Office 2007 encouters an unsupported element. Will it simply be ignored? When roundtripping - will it be deleted or preserved?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Jesper, On load, Office 2007 SP2 will simply ignore the unsupported elements and attributes in ODF files.  We do not attempt to round trip unsupported elements and attributes, they will be removed from the ODF file if you resave it using Office 2007 SP2.  This is consistent with our implementation principles and our desire to provide predictable behavior.   We considered trying to roundtrip elements and attributes that we do not understand or support, but we found if we did this that we could not be sure the resulting files were internally consistent and conformant ODF files.   As an aside, there are some cases where we write elements or attributes on save that we do not support on load, for the sake of better interoperability with other applications that use ODF.   Those cases are described in the implementer notes as well.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 09
     
    Jesper Lund Stocholm asks a right-on-the-mark question. Peter Amstein answers for Microsoft. What do you expect when a specification ends its conformance section with the statement, "There are no rules regarding the elements and attributes that actually have to be supported by conforming applications, except that applications should not use foreign elements and attributes for features defined in the OpenDocument schema?"
Paul Merrell

Doug Mahugh : Office support for document format standards - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...document-format-standards.aspx

interop microsoft odf strategy

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 May 08 - Cached
  • Third-party translators. We anticipate that some developers may want to take over the default ODF load and save paths, so that they can plug in their own translators for ODF, and we'll be providing an API in SP2 that enables this scenario. This means that if a developer disagrees with the details of our approach and would like to implement ODF for Office in a different way, they're free to do so and can set it up such that when a user opens an ODT attached to an email or from their desktop, it will be loaded through their ODF code path.
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 22 May 08
       
      The Third-party translators discussion of the forthcoming new API suggests that it is for ODF only, and thereby implicitly that it will not be a tool for accessing the full functionaolity of MS Word, i.e., that only the functionality specified in ODF 1.1 will be available. E.g., no control of Sharepoint functionality or manipulation of the Microsoft cloud through the API from OpenOffice.org via ODF. .
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 23 May 08
       
      The Microsoft cloud depends heavily on OOXML, and that is likely not going to change. Are you saying that you'd prefer a plug-in mechanism in SharePoint as well? I believe the protocols used by SharePoint are included in the specs now provided. Won't that do (apart from the non-commercial usage of the specs)
  • If you're an Office 2007 user, the image above probably looks pretty familiar. But look close, and you'll see some Save-As options you've not seen before here: OpenDocument, and (unless you have the existing add-in) PDF & XPS.
  • There is new information today about the planned release of v2.0 of the ODF translator on the ODF translator team blog. The SourceForge translator projects will continue to move forward, and Microsoft will continue to be an active participant in these projects.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This is a screen shot of a pre-release copy of SP2 (Service Pack 2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, showing the new document format standards that we'll be supporting starting with SP2.
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 23 May 08
       
      Hi, Jesper. according to another article I found later, the new APIs (I assume it should be plural rather than singlular) will allow addition of formats other than ODF, so I apparently got that part wrong. On the Sharepoint example, I wasn't sufficiently clear and apologize. Assume you create a document in MS Office that invokes Sharepoint functionality, then you save it as ODF and ship it off to a co-worker using OOo. The OOo user wants to send it back to you for further processing. But if saving to ODF in Office wipes the Sharepoint metadata, you've got data loss on the outbound trip. The path you suggest would work at least in theory (I haven't heard any reports yet of the documentation on the Sharepoint APIs) if Sharepoint were used as an intermediary hub. But the Sharepoiint document may not be accessible to the co-worker, e.g., because of page security settings. I anticipate that there would be many cases where only one end of the trip has access to the hub, so there's a need to keep the path open that bypasses the hub and for it to be non-lossy. There is an article on BetaNews by Scott Fulton that interviews a couple of the Softies. They said that there will be lots of Office functionality that won't be able to be saved in ODF, that they're not planning a compatability mode that would block use of features that can't be saved to ODF, and that they're not planning to go beyond the features specified in ODF 1.1. So if they carry through on what they said, the outbound trip to ODF implementations will be lossy. I think the real problem with the Sharepoint specs and other documentation Microsoft is releasing is that it isn't in a standard where a technical committee could say yea or nay on whether it is suffiiciently specific and where the specs can be made vendor-neutral. In other words, that Micrsooft is in control of the specifiation rather than a standards body. Microsoft got away so far with creating a de facto standard for the line of business functional
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 23 May 08
       
      Hi, Jesper. according to another article I found later, the new APIs (I assume it should be plural rather than singlular) will allow addition of formats other than ODF, so I apparently got that part wrong. On the Sharepoint example, I wasn't sufficiently clear and apologize. Assume you create a document in MS Office that invokes Sharepoint functionality, then you save it as ODF and ship it off to a co-worker using OOo. The OOo user wants to send it back to you for further processing. But if saving to ODF in Office wipes the Sharepoint metadata, you've got data loss on the outbound trip. The path you suggest would work at least in theory (I haven't heard any reports yet of the documentation on the Sharepoint APIs) if Sharepoint were used as an intermediary hub. But the Sharepoiint document may not be accessible to the co-worker, e.g., because of page security settings. I anticipate that there would be many cases where only one end of the trip has access to the hub, so there's a need to keep the path open that bypasses the hub and for it to be non-lossy. There is an article on BetaNews by Scott Fulton that interviews a couple of the Softies. They said that there will be lots of Office functionality that won't be able to be saved in ODF, that they're not planning a compatability mode that would block use of features that can't be saved to ODF, and that they're not planning to go beyond the features specified in ODF 1.1. So if they carry through on what they said, the outbound trip to ODF implementations will be lossy. I think the real problem with the Sharepoint specs and other documentation Microsoft is releasing is that it isn't in a standard where a technical committee could say yea or nay on whether it is suffiiciently specific and where the specs can be made vendor-neutral. In other words, that Micrsooft is in control of the specifiation rather than a standards body. Microsoft got away so far with creating a de facto standard for the line of business functional
  • Paul Merrell on 22 May 08
     
    "This is a screen shot of a pre-release copy of SP2 (Service Pack 2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, showing the new document format standards that we'll be supporting starting with SP2."
  • Jesper Lund Stocholm on 23 May 08
     
    "This is a screen shot of a pre-release copy of SP2 (Service Pack 2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, showing the new document format standards that we'll be supporting starting with SP2."
Graham Perrin

Doug Mahugh : Guiding principles for Office's ODF implementation - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...fice-s-odf-implementation.aspx

shared by Graham Perrin on 13 May 09 - Cached
Graham Perrin

Doug Mahugh : 1 + 2 = 1? - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...1-2-1.aspx

shared by Graham Perrin on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • five prioritized guiding principles for Office’s ODF implementation
  • When Will Office Support OpenFormula?
  • nobody knows yet when ODF 1.2 will be published as an OASIS or ISO standard
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • risk that the results might not be the same
  • Open XML / ODF Translator Add-Ins for Office can be used with Office 2007 SP2
  • Sun ODF Plugin
  • apparently works with SP2
Graham Perrin

Doug Mahugh : Working with ODF in Word 2007 SP2 - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...with-odf-in-word-2007-sp2.aspx

shared by Graham Perrin on 12 May 09 - Cached
  • ODF in Word 2007 SP2
  • Service Pack 2 for Office 2007
  • You can make ODF the default
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • ODF can’t represent 100% of the things we can do in Word
  • differences between the default line-spacing
  • fixed-layout format for published documents
  • and a flow-oriented layout
  • work well for dynamic editing
  • flow-oriented format during document authoring and editing
  • ODF or Open XML
  • differences in Word and OpenOffice’s default styling for hyperlinks
  • longer in OpenOffice
  • text-wrap margins around the inserted image also differ
  • decided to not implement tracked changes
  • indents were incorrect
  • Office SP2 .docx to .odt is the best
  • OOo developers
  • further improvements planned/started for 3.2
  • version 3.1 will solve several problems
  • Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability
  • spreadsheets that can be manipulated with MS Office ONLY
Jesper Lund Stocholm

Doug Mahugh : Standards-Based Interoperability - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...ds-based-interoperability.aspx

shared by Jesper Lund Stocholm on 06 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Whether this is something that Microsoft is supposed to fix, as in Jomar Silva's view, is not that obvious to me.
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 06 Jun 09
       
      My point exactly ...
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