OpenDocument

Reading this I suddenly thought of the phrase "Internet tidal wave" from Bill Gates in the late 90's . I know the rest of the world don't give a damn about the document format war (as much as we do), but the move from Microsoft here is actually quite substantial.

There was a certain inevitability that Microsoft would be forced to bow to market pressures and announce its acceptance of ODF. However, Microsoft's traditional approach to standards has been characterised as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - i.e. attempt to claim ownership and take control of a standard through abuse of its near monopoly position. Proponents of ODF need to defend against this by setting up independent testing for software conformance with the standard. The testing needs to be accessible not just to the Suns and IBMs of this world - but also the KOffices. While proponents of ODF are celebrating that a victory has been won, it is more likely that the real battle is only just beginning.

The European Commission has taken note of Microsoft's announcement on 21st May concerning supporting ODF in Office. The Commission would welcome any step that Microsoft took towards genuine interoperability, more consumer choice and less vendor lock-in. In its ongoing antitrust investigation concerning interoperability with Microsoft Office (see MEMO/08/19), the Commission will investigate whether the announced support of ODF (OpenDocument format) in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.

I wonder if the EU is aware that there is no such thing as ODF Interoperability? After more than five years of working side by side with Sun on the OASIS ODF TC, there is zero interop between KOffice ODF and OpenOffice ODF! How is it that Microsoft's joining the ODF TC somehow results in a level of application interop that has eluded and defied the efforts of two supposedly open source applications? The truth is that OpenOffice-ODF and MSOffice-OOXMl are both based on an XML encoding of the application specific binary dump. The content layers are easily exchanged with other applications, but presentation continues to defy any kind of interop. Especially what the EU expects. Check out the quotes: " The commission said that as part of its antitrust investigation into interoperability with Microsoft Office it will investigate whether the announced support of ODF in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice. "Kroes said on Tuesday that the commission keeps a close eye on interoperability and said the market should have the right balance of non-propriety and propriety standards. 'Standards are the foundation of interoperability'. 'Standards may, of course, be proprietary or non-proprietary. Much excellent technical development has been driven by non-proprietary standards - the internet is awash with acronyms for non-proprietary standards: HTTP, HTML and XML'.

EndNote installations and uninstallations are too often a PITA. 

So I think users need to understand, very clearly, that an ODF document/app of *either* conformance class has an EXTREMELY WEAK CLAIM TO INTEROPERABILITY. The "pure ODF conformance" sticker would be at best valueless and at worst positively misleading. So what I'd like to see is some real effort from the TC going into resolving this problem ... Alex Brown What Alex fails to mention is that the "foreign elements and alien attributes" components in the ODF Section 1.5 "Compliance and Conformance" clause was originally put there in early 2003 to provide a compatibility layer for MSOffice binary documents. Without this clause, it would be impossible to convert the billions of legacy MSOffice binary documents to ODF without breaking the fidelity. Now th OASIS ODF TC wants to limit the use of the compatiblity clause. An action that would seriously cripple Microsoft's efforts to implement ODF in MSOffice 14. No surprises here. It was only a matter of time until IBM and Sun ganged up on the newest TC member, Microsoft.

So I think users need to understand, very clearly, that an ODF document/app of *either* conformance class has an EXTREMELY WEAK CLAIM TO INTEROPERABILITY. The "pure ODF conformance" sticker would be at best valueless and at worst positively misleading. So what I'd like to see is some real effort from the TC going into resolving this problem ... Alex Brown What Alex fails to mention is that the "foreign elements and alien attributes" components in the ODF Section 1.5 "Compliance and Conformance" clause was originally put there in early 2003 to provide a compatibility layer for MSOffice binary documents. Without this clause, it would be impossible to convert the billions of legacy MSOffice binary documents to ODF without breaking the fidelity. Now th OASIS ODF TC wants to limit the use of the compatiblity clause. An action that would seriously cripple Microsoft's efforts to implement ODF in MSOffice 14. No surprises here. It was only a matter of time until IBM and Sun ganged up on the newest TC member, Microsoft.

The InformationWeek series of articles outlining the challenges Microsoft faces does not cover the recent anti-trust actions by the EU - DG Competition group. Even so, the series does paint a pretty gloomy scenario. Especially if you're a Microsoft shareholder. No doubt the IW guys are shorting Microsoft. All in all, this series is an accurate assessment except for one thing; they don't credit the strength of Microsoft's monopoly position and their ability to leverage the desktop monopoly into a full fledged "business" Web monopoly. MOSS (Microsoft Office - SharePoint Server) system is kicking ass, and the world is worried that browsers like Opera are not getting a fair shake on the desktop. Microsoft is a platform player, and you can't fight that at the application level. Connecting the desktop platform to backend relational and transaction servers defines the 1995 monopoly. Connecting the desktop platform to the Web platform will define the next big monopoly play. The EU has got to get off the application layer and out of the open standards vendor consortia if they are to stop this juggernaut. The reason they need to get out of the standards consortia and write/demand their own "advanced recommendations" - like WebKit, is the cleverness of Microsoft's "duality" approach. The target has to be that of restoring competition at the high end of collaborative Web computing, where Microsoft's proprietary WPF-.NET technologies rule. Any format, protocol, or interface used to connect platforms, applications or services must be open and available to all - including the reverse engineering rights. So far the EU has left me less than hopeful. I do however believe that WebKit can get the job done. It would be nice if the EU could at the least slow the beast of Redmond down. ~ge~

Response to the InformationWeek article "Remaking Microsoft: Get Out of Web Search!". Covers "The Myth of Google Enterprise Search", and the refusal of Google to implement or recognize W3C Semantic Web technologies. This refusal protects Google's proprietary search and categorization algorithms, but it opens the door wide for Microsoft Office editors to totally exploit the end-user semantic interface opportunities. If Microsoft can pull this off, they will take "search" to the Enterprise and beyond into every high end discipline using MSOffice to edit Web ready documents (private and public use). Also a bit about WebKit as the most disruptive technology Microsoft has faced since the advent of the Web.

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?"

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.

"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."

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.