OpenDocument

What Bruce doesn't explain in this highlighted clip is that Sun decided to limit the "extra metadata" developer might need to just a handful of elements Sun and IBM needed to use in OpenOffice. The original OpenDocument Foundation metadata proposal was to open up the use of metadata to the extent that metadata could be used for all aspects of presentation (formatting AND layout!).

This vendor specific - application specific limiting ended the last hope we had for ODF interoperability and backwards compatibility with the billions of "in-process" MSOffice documents known to be populating business processes the world over. In fact, the problem ODF adoption faces is primarily that of MSOffice bound business processes, reflected in these billions of workgroup-workflow documents.

Proposal to have a standard packaging for combining application specific XML formats, Open HTML, and PDF. Great comments. This July 2007 article links to a January 2009 article: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/packaging-formats-of-famous-ap.html

IBM'sl Bob Sutor defines interop in terms of formats, protocols and interfaces: "To be clear, I'm talking about software interoperability. That technically boils down to the formats used to exchange information, the protocols by which the formatted information is exchanged, and the application programming interfaces (APIs) that software implements to allow the interchange to concretely take place. Collectively I'll call these interchange formats and methods".

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?"

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. That's how Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) killed Netscape many moons ago. Embrace this newfangled "Web browser" market with a new product. Extend the existing Web standards with proprietary technologies like ActiveX. Extinguish the competition by denying them access to those fancy new features. When it works, this is a great way to build and maintain wide, alligator-filled business moats. It seems to me that Mr. Softy is up to his old tricks again. The target this time is the OpenDocument standard, a free and open alternative to Microsoft's own Office formats for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.

Microsoft recently released their blueprint for implementing ISO 26300 (ODF 1.0 - dated May 1, 2005), and referenced this Web site. Appendix H is interesting in that it lists 13 of the 28 contributors sponsored by The OpenDocument Foundation. This contributor list contradicts the determined liars (er, editors) at Wikipedia who insist that The OpenDocument Foundation was two guys without a garage. The OpenDocument Foundation was founded in 2005 (shortly after OASIS approval of ODF 1.0) for the express purpose of balancing out the rapidly growing participation in the ODF technical committee of corporate contributors. IBM, Oracle, Novel, Intel and Adobe led a corporate wave joining the ODF TC following the May 2005 OASIS approval of ODF 1.0 and subsequent submission to ISO. The Foundation was set up to fund the participation of expert individuals representing both open source communities and groups interested in an Open Web future.

With the release of documentation Tuesday describing the company's implementation of the Open Document Format in Office 2007 Service Pack 2, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) continues to deliver tangible results of a set of interoperability principles it announced in February 2008. Microsoft unveiled a Web site that goes into great detail about how Microsoft will implement ODF in Office, describing things like how Word does text formatting, how it determines and sets margins in ODF documents, or what font weight gradations describe bold and normal text. Though Microsoft doesn't have default ODF support in Office 2007, it will add support in Office 2007 SP2 (service pack 2).

POI 3.5 beta 3, and Office Open XML Support (2008-07-18) now supported by Microsoft through the Document Interoperability Initiative Project (DII) The Apache POI Project is currently working to support the new Office Open XML file formats, such as XLSX and PPTX, which were introduced in Office 2007. The POI project consists of APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format, and Office OpenXML format, using pure Java. In short, you can read and write MS Excel files using Java. In addition, you can read and write MS Word and MS PowerPoint files using Java. POI is your Java Excel solution (for Excel 97-2007). However, we have a complete API for porting other OLE 2 Compound Document formats and welcome others to participate. OLE 2 Compound Document Format based files include most Microsoft Office files such as XLS and DOC as well as MFC serialization API based file formats. Office OpenXML Format based files include the new (2007+) xml based file formats, including Microsoft office files such as XLSX, DOCX and PPTX.

Vendor - developer group sponsored by Microsoft ... "What's seriously lacking is a conversion or locking of scripts, macros, OLE, data - media bindings, and security settings .... the logic parts so important to any business process or productivity environment setting embedded in the original MSOffice document."

Technology Considerations The Microsoft OpenXml Viewer is a cross browser cross OS plugin. The core of the application has to be OS independent. Therefore, the application is developed using C++. Future possibilities The generated html from the docx file can be rendered using silverlight and similar rich platforms. The same can be used in a server scenario to render docx files as html.

Interesting project based on an XSLT "one-way" conversion from OOXML to HTML. The conversion process will break any kind of business or application specific logic embedded in the document. There is a conversion of VML to SVG that i think will be important to watch.

What's seriously lacking is a conversion or locking of scripts, macros, OLE, data - media bindings, and security settings .... the logic parts so important to any business process or productivity environment setting embedded in the original MSOffice document.

Through the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) global forums, technology leaders have been working together to promote interoperability between different document format implementations to provide greater value and choice to customers, and the events - including one held in Belgium this week - are yielding practical results. Interoperability solutions announced today translate Open XML documents to a Web page (HTML) allowing readability on Web-friendly browsers such as Firefox, improve translations between different formats through optimized templates, and enable features that provide greater choice for customers and opportunities for independent software developers as they create and use business applications built on Java that manipulate business documents. At the DII events, discussions were also held about developing document test libraries and schema validators, and vendors had the opportunity to test their implementations of document formats in a lab environment to identify potential issues to be addressed.

On Dec 3, Microsoft officially announced the availability of its Open XML Document Viewer, Open XML/ODF Translators Version 2.5 and the Apache POI Java SDKfor OpenXML.

"November 5, 2008 IBM and Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the launch of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project organized to make document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business."

This is the official community gathering place and information resource for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300). Suitable for text, spreadsheets, charts, graphs, presentations, and databases, ODF frees documents from their applications-of-origin, enabling them to be exchanged, retrieved, and edited with any OpenDocument-compliant software or tool. This is a community-driven site, and the public is encouraged to contribute content.

The ODF Toolkit provides a home for libraries that ease the development of applications that support ODF , the unique vendor neutral open standard for office documents. The ODF Toolkit further provides a home for tools that process ODF or check ODF conformance.

Microsoft will offer browser-based Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in two ways. For consumers, they will be offered via Microsoft's Office Live Web site, while businesses will be able to offer browser-based Office capabilities through Microsoft's SharePoint Server product. The company has been pushed into this arena by Google, which has been offering its free Google Apps programs for some time. In competing with Google, Microsoft is touting the ability to use Microsoft's familiar user interface, as well as the fact that all of the document's characteristics are preserved. "If you go into some competitive products right now and take a Word document in and then spit it out afterword, it's unrecognizable," Elop said. "You lose a lot of fidelity.

Another relatively old (May 2008) article for me to read…

Interesting reading.

While the workgroup failed to decide between "choice" (Microsoft's mantra) and "openness" (the ODF mantra), predictably punting this question to a new Electronic Records Committee, it did issue a number of interesting findings, the most important of which reads as follows: In the office suite format debate, there currently is no compelling solution for the State's openness needs. The State needs open standards and formats. Simultaneously, the State needs electronic records to be preserved in their original formats whenever possible. Many Request for Public Comments commenters, particularly in response to the e-discovery questions, stated preserving a record in the same format as it was created results in a more faithful record and diminishes the possibility of expensive e-discovery disputes. This is important to ensure future generations of New Yorkers can access the permanently valuable electronic records being created today. Moreover, State Archives emphasizes creating records in open formats makes it easier to preserve their essential characteristics and demonstrates they are authentic (i.e., they were created in the course of State government business and have not been altered without proper authorization). I imagine that the workgroup must have found some level of solace in arriving at the one conclusion that all the experts seem to agree on: that electronic documents should be published using the same format in which they are created. If this principle held true for state documents, it would reduce the job of the new Electronic Records Committee to deciding between three alternatives: (1) require all state agencies to create and publish their documents in OOXML, (2) require all state agencies to create and publish their documents in ODF, or (3) allow each agency to decide which of these formats, OOXML or ODF, they will use in creating and publishing their documents. Unfortunately, this central assumption is incorrect, and adopting it as a basi

Jon Bosak on the recent New York State decision to support both ODF and OOXML. Jon makes an important distinction between application editable formats such as ODF and OOXML, and, publishing formats like PDF. He does not cover HTML-CSS as either an editing or publishing format even though it is clearly used as both to the tune of over 4 billion documents. Goog arguments from a world reknown expert.