Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ OpenDocument
Gary Edwards

Next version of Office heads to the browser | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNE... - 0 views

  •  
    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.
Bernard (ben) Tremblay

The ODF Toolkit Project - 0 views

  •  
    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.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft OOXML viewers, translators, SDK to help interop with Firefox and OpenOffice? - 0 views

  •  
    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.
Gary Edwards

Document Interoperability Initiative Demonstrates Momentum and Results: Industry collab... - 0 views

  •  
    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.
Gary Edwards

The Document Interoperability Initiative: "DII" - 0 views

  •  
    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."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Details Open Document Format Support For Office -- Microsoft Office -- Inform... - 0 views

  •  
    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).
Gary Edwards

Document Interoperability Initiative: Appendix H - 0 views

  •  
    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.
Gary Edwards

MIcrosot's latest kiss of death: ODF - 0 views

  •  
    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.
Gary Edwards

Report: Companies Use Word Out of Habit, Not Necessity > Comments by ge - 0 views

  •  
    I doubt that MSOffice ODF will make a difference. ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice, and conversion from native binary to ODF will result in a serious loss of fidelity and business process markup. If the many ODF pilots are an indication, the real killer is that application specific processing logic will be lost on conversion even if it is Microsoft doing the conversion to ODF. This logic is expressed as scripts, macros, OLE, data binding, media binding, add-on specifics, and security settings. These components are vital to existing business processes. Besides, Microsoft will support ISO 26300, which is not compatible with the many aspects of ODF 1.2 currently implemented by most ODF applications. The most difficult barrier to entry is that of MSOffice bound business processes so vital to workgroups and day-to-day business systems. Maybe the report is right in saying that day-to-day business routines become habit, but not understanding the true nature of these barriers is certain to cloud our way forward. We need to dig deeper, as demonstrated by the many ODF pilot studies.
Gary Edwards

An Interop Nightmare: The Northwest Progressive Institute Advocate Review of OpenOffice... - 0 views

  •  
    Marbux at his best! Let's hope the OASIS ODF and OpenOffice.org groups get to work on real interop, and stop with the phony baloney. It can be done, bu tnothing is going to happen until people face up to the harsh reality that today there is zero interop between ODF compliant applications. This must change .... unless of course the world decides to move to the most interoperable but high performance format ever invented: HTML-CSS. And maybe from there the world can move onto the WebKit sugarplum document model, and truly set the future of the Open Web. One thing obviously missing for the Open Web is an office suite of high performance editors capable of natively producing high end WebKit documents (or basic HTML-CSS for that matter!!!!!!!) Good on marbux. Now, can you persuade OASIS and OpenOffice to change their application specific ways? Take on the desktop as well as the future of the Open Web?
Graham Perrin

Orcmid's Lair: Microsoft ODF Interoperability Workshop - 0 views

  • 2008-08
  • Microsoft's first built-in support
  • approach to adding Open Document Format support directly into Office 2007
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • the balancing act that Office-ODF interoperability requires
  • absence of non-disclosure agreements
  • I saw no down side
  • all ODF TC members who desired to come had a place
  • interaction with the ODF community
  • priorities that apply in making trade-offs
  • five guiding principles that govern ODF support in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
  • balancing of different interests: standards groups, corporations, institutions, government agencies, regulatory bodies, and general users
  • an application being quite friendly with its own ODF but not with that of other significant implementations
  • Balancing of competing considerations is not trivial
  • current OpenOffice.org implementations fail to check whether a formula conforms to its own extension
  • the central feature of typical document processing software is the internal, in-memory representation of the software's document model
  • features may be lost on output
  • features may be lost on input
  • rely on features that succeed with the internal representation
  • degraded or lost entirely in the chosen external representation
  • losing some of them when saving
  • Florian Reuter argued an interesting gracefully-failing extension technique that, on reflection, I believe could avoid breaking changes against earlier ODF specifications of namespaces, their elements and their attributes too
    • Graham Perrin
       
      I'd like to learn more about this.
  • a serious, open conversation is beginning
  • discussions did not arrive at conclusions
  •  
    I read this more than a year after the event but still, it's interesting.
Gary Edwards

Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? - O'Reilly Broad... - 0 views

  • Unless governments and other stakeholders can get beyond the narrow view of documents and interoperability as merely being exchanging data from one similar application to another, and move towards the view that documents and web resources need to be end points on the same interoperable spectrum, we are selling ourselves short. It is here that standards bodies should be more help: but I don't know that they can be unless there is a stronger commitment to supporting each others' visions better. W3C's mission statement is concerned with bringing the web to its full potential, and W3C have traditionally used this to justify shying away from old-fashioned compound file-based issues: the lack of standards for the *SP (JSP, ASP, PHP) class of documents is a symptom of this, and it is notable that much of XML's uptake came because it did take care of practical production issues (i.e. issues pertaining to the document as it existed before being made available as a resource —PIs and entities—and after it had been retrieved—character encodings.) The industry consortia such as ECMA and OASIS are organized around interest groups on particular standards, which makes it easy to fob off discussion of interoperability. And even ISO, where the availability are topic-based working groups with very broad interests should provide a more workable home for this kind of effort, have a strong disinclination to seek out work that involves liaison with other standards groups: satisfying two sets of procedures and fitting in with two sets of deadlines and timetables can be impractical and disenfranchising for volunteers and small-business/academic experts.
  •  
    Jon Bosak, who founded the XML and ODF efforts among many other achievements, recently wrote an article concerning the position of ODF, Open XML and PDF Jon's public writings are rare, well-considered and always of interest. As with other Sun-affiliated people in recent times, Jon has been exemplary in that even though he has a side, he does not take sides. I think I can agree with much of what he says, though I would note Don't forget about HTML.
Graham Perrin

FAQ: Office 14 and Microsoft's support for ODF - 0 views

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

ODF/OOXML technical white paper - 0 views

  •  
    Interesting reading.
Gary Edwards

Interoperability, more and less | Bob Sutor's Website and Blog - 0 views

  •  
    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".
Paul Merrell

EU Will Probe Microsoft Support For Open Source File Format - 0 views

  •  
    BRUSSELS -(Dow Jones)- The European Commission said late Wednesday it would investigate whether a new plan by Microsoft that will allow users to save and edit files in formats developed by rivals leads to greater consumer choice. Microsoft's announcement Wednesday it would support Open Document Format, used in open source programs, for its suite of Office programs is a concession to European regulators and others, who have complained that Microsoft's refusal to adopt the format has prevented competition in desktop software. "The commission will investigate whether the announced support of Open Document Format in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice," the commission said in a statement.
Paul Merrell

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats : More on yesterday's ODF announcement - 0 views

  •  
    "Even though ODF 1.0 is the official ISO version of the format, the decision was made to use version 1.1 which had some accessibility improvements. Hopefully future versions of ODF will be brought back to ISO so that we have a more current ISO version soon. You also may have noticed that we as Microsoft plan to start participating in the ODF standardization efforts, whether that happens in OASIS or ISO. ... I've heard different opinions though on what to do if the standard says one thing and Open Office does something else. I think the right thing to do is to follow the standard, but I'd be curious to hear what other folks have to say." Note that this Jones post includes several links to commentary on the ODF support announcement written by other Softies
« First ‹ Previous 381 - 400 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page