The group behind the OpenDocument standard has submitted the document format to a key standards organization, a move that could make open-source desktop applications more attractive to governments. OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, said it has submitted the standard to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
As long as major government agencies use WORD and PDF for everything then MSFT will keep business as usual. I think the man has to start requiring open standards for common formats to pressure MSFT into compliance.
As long as major government agencies use WORD and PDF for everything then MSFT will keep business as usual. I think the man has to start requiring open standards for common formats to pressure MSFT into compliance.
Massachusetts’ ‘the man’ is requiring open standards. That’s part of what the article is about.
I don’t think you will find many govenrments using Opendocument. But that is not that strange the first product that actually supported the format have been out just a couple of weeks. Of course we have been able to test the format for several months in OpenOffice.org 2.0 betas and prereleases but most governments will not rely on beta software.
Switching office suits is something that takes years to do in large organizations. Besides there may not be any need for switching Microsoft will most likely implement the standard. Their customers will demand it, and if Microsoft doesn’t give it to them they will know where to turn.
This is of course bad news for Microsoft as they will get less control over their customers, but less control over them is significantly better than not having them as customers at all.
On the other hand, the customers of Microsoft isn’t exactly eager to get new software versions. Today, around four years after the release of windows XP, the most common OS in business is win2k, and the office suites used is of similar age or even older. People seam to have the features they currently need in their business covered by existing products. So why upgrade. There need to be some reason that make such an upgrade a sound investment.
Better interoperability could be such a reason. By conforming to the Opendocument standard Microsoft could convince old office 97 users and such to upgrade, so adopting to the standard may have its benefits as well as its risks to Microsoft.
I suppose this misses the point that several goverments are already requiring OpenDocument… Massachusetts, Peru, Denmark (in education), and others like Brazil looking to follow suit.
Moreover, it’s a little misleading to say that OpenOffice is the sole word-processor or office suite that supports OpenDocument. There are at least 8 that currently support it — and WordPerfect should have their support for it soon too (like Microsoft and Sun, Corel contributed to the OASIS OpenDocument spec).
Sure, it’s hard to switch from propreitary to an open-standard, but there’s value. Heck, the company I currently work for has all sorts of documnets in older versions of Word that are no longer accessible because newer versions of Word simply choke on them.
Strangely enough, OpenOffice can convert them just fine.
When OpenDoc becomes ISO, then MS will want to say it supports ISO since corporations love being ISO compliant.
Big organisations like governments DO smile when they can prove to be ISO complaint. Governments often require their suppliers to conform to ISO.
And we all know how important it is that a few big organisations switch to OASIS to gain more acceptance.
Hopefully, MS will not support OASIS on short term – remember what they did to the HTML standard? Embrace, extend, kill off…
Sometime ago, Abiword guys (IIRC) complained about the lack of sample rendering for the documents. Like some documents and how they should look like (some kind of ACID2 Test page with it’s rendering sample but for OpenDocument)… Do we already have this kind of sample documents?
Besides that, I hope OpenDocument gets accepted as an ISO standard! Even if I don’t know that gigantic technical details about the format agianst the other ones, I believe that our lives will get a lot easier with one standard and Open document format.
Being submitted is a long shot from being adopted.
Most items submitted to ISO for consideration are rejected numerous times before being adopted.
Most items submitted are never adopted.
Odd things have been known to happen as a result of these applications. Request for competative opinions being among them.
Most items submitted are never adopted.
OpenDocument is already being adopted. The hope here is that being accepted as an ISO standard will increase the rate of adoption.
You misunderstood what the grand-parent wrote: most items submitted are never adopted as a standard by the ISO itself.
Ie submitting a proposal for a standard to the ISO doesn’t mean that it will be standardised by the ISO.
As for those who says that many people use already the “Open document” format, I don’t think so: OpenOffice 1.x doesn’t write documents to the ‘Open Document’ format.
And I remember reading about a bug (in OOo 2 beta) which gives bad paragraph number when you read it with KWord..
So while I hope that the “Open Document” format will be a success, let’s not forget that it is an extremely young format and that youth bugs and incompleteness (formulas in spreadsheet are not part of the standard for example) are expected..
“OpenDocument is already being adopted. The hope here is that being accepted as an ISO standard will increase the rate of adoption.”
You missed the point by miles……..
Being “submitted”, and being “adopted”, are far flung from one another.
If I had to bet on this one……
It will never be adopted.
You missed the point by miles……..
Being “submitted”, and being “adopted”, are far flung from one another.
Yeah, apparently I was operating under a different meaning of the word “adoption”, which, looking back, was wrong on my part.
I was referring to adoption out in the world, people actually picking up and using it. That is happening, and the hope here is that ISO will accept OpenDocument as a standard and real world adoption will increase.
I agree with everything you say, in the general case of ISO standardization.
That said, the process of ISO certification will likely lead to improvements to OpenDocument just as moving the OpenOffice 1.x/StarOffice 7.x format went through changes on the way to becoming an OASIS standard.
All of this is a good thing.
I have little doubt that either OpenDocument or a revised revision of OpenDocument will be an ISO standard. The only questions in my mind are;
* When?
* What are the places that need to be improved, if any?
* Will OD become an ISO standard as one unit or as seperate parts (say, ODT seperate from ODS)?
I would expect that the ODS (spreadsheet) format will be improved to include standard formula support or standardized formula types (if one is not good enough for whatever reason).
Is there a comparison of current document formats namely MS office vs. the OpenDocument “standard”. Is it truly technically superior to others or will we be compromising features for compatibility?
{{Is there a comparison of current document formats namely MS office vs. the OpenDocument “standard”. Is it truly technically superior to others or will we be compromising features for compatibility?}}
The current document format for MS Office is not documented anywhere.
The new MSXML format (due in Office 12) is not a part of any product that can be used today. No wonder you haven’t seen it.
Therefore, OpenDocument is clearly superior because of a lack of any comparable alternative.
You didn’t listen the last time. Your comments now are not improving discourse. Please go away.
I think adopting OpenDoc is definitely the way to go, but I feel there won’t be a significant shift from .doc in large companies until it is a supported, and configurable default, for MS Office.
When it comes to wider adoption, folks really need to look at compatibility. When someone needs access to a .doc file on a machine that doesn;t have a flavour of office installed, they can use the Word Viewer (similarly with PowerPoint). This is actually a good thing – you don’t need the full blown office suite / a license to view .doc/.ppt on Windows.
Compare that to the OpenDocument situation, you currently have to download and install OO.org to read a file on Windows – there is no (to my knowledge) standalone viewer for those files. I believe until this is a must have – not everyone has a DSL connection, not everyone wants to download and install OO.org/<insert other OpenDocument capable suite here>, and not everyone has the patience to find another solution (mail to friend, convert to pdf etc).
It is so important that either the F/OSS world come up with a standalone small viewer, or pressure is put on MS to incorporate the OpenDocument capablity into its standalone viewers.
Of course, all of this would be unnecessary if people could easily create .pdf’s (not everyone knows of the free solutions out there) and not litter the internet with .doc – acrobat / oss alternatives are a pretty standard install on most PCs I come across.
But I can’t use the ‘Word Viewer’ unless I an running Windows. This is more of a ‘free as in freedom’, not ‘free as in beer’ issue. You are certainly free to run Windows, but I should be free to run some other OS. And I should still be able to view government documents without being force to buy a particular brand of computer.
What is the point of a standalone viewer for OpenOffice.org? Unless diskspace is severely restricted, you can just install OpenOffice.org. Besides, I don’t even need to do that, because there are other office suites (KOffice) that read the OpenDocument standard. OpenOffice implements OpenDocument standards the same way that IE and Firefox implement HTML. HTML is not an ‘IE’ format, it is an open format.
Finally, there are lots of reasons to use office formats instead of PDFs. A shared spreadsheet can be much more valuable that a PDF of said spreadsheet.
My point was in Windows you can view .doc and .ppt as they were created in Word/PowerPoint without having a licensed version of office installed. The same feature needs to be available for OpenDocument on Windows so people don’t have to have an office suite installed.
I personally use Gnome so happy to use OO.org / AbiWord… but there needs to be a free & basic viewer for Windows capable of displaying OpenDocument files.
{{but there needs to be a free & basic viewer for Windows capable of displaying OpenDocument files}}.
Here it is:
http://www.openoffice.org
As a bonus, you also get the ability to edit, and to convert to .doc if you want.
A viewer should be easy – the load document and display document parts of KOffice or OpenOffice should suffice here.
However, the viewer part and the “easily create .pdf’s” part of your imagined problem are both solved by the OpenOffice.org Office package.
If governments want to adopt OpenDocument, all that is really necessary is to offer free install CD’s (that could easily hold an installation for Windows, for Mac and for Linux all on the one CD). Suggestion: distribute the CDs at post offices or similar places.
For companies it is far easier. Just roll out OpenOffice (perhaps in addition to MS Office) as you would any other tool.
Please write your over 700 page documents in LaTeX or your OpenDocument Format and export with actual linked tables of contents.
Having just downloaded the specification its freaking annoying that its not annotated, indexed, cross-referenced, so on and so forth.
Since the spec fully covers all the above, and LaTeX does as well, could we at least get a professional specification comparable to those of the W3C?
You want format independence? It already exists. Its freely available and caters to so many markets.
Can there be improvements concerning DTP areas? Yes. Would I rather write a book using LaTeX or OpenDocument that deals with a thousand pages?
Give me LaTeX. There are so many add-on packages within the TUG scene its rather mindboggling and choice is always welcome.
Another small question… is there any plans for really small viewers for OpenDocument formats out there?
Like Microsoft viewers for Word, Excel and Powerpoint Documents? Like PDF some viewers? (I won’t mention Adobe Viewer here these days as it doesn’t fit the “small” and simple part… it’s just a gigantic budle these days… compare it to FoxIT PDF Viewer on Windows and you’ll see the diference)
It’s not very smart to make someone download a entire office suite just to see a document you’ve sent… I know AbiWord now supports Open Document reading, but I’m talking about a really simple viewer, to see, search, and print a document, nothing else… The size (and performance/memory usage) is really important.
I hope these viewers are planned somehow (if they alread exist, I don’t know… Evidence was planning to support these documents IIRC, but we still need something cross plataform and easy to install (nothing like installing GTK for Windows, 5-6MBs, before installing the application and THEN seeing the document)