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NATO supports ODF open document format http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/NATO-supports-ODF-open-document-format--/111127 18 July 2008: NATO has included the International Standardization Organization's (ISO) certified Open Document Format (ODF) in its list of mandatory standards to promote interoperability. NATO's standards list includes Rich Text Format (RTF), extensible markup language (XML) and Office XP formats as requirements for the sharing of data. The list does not include Office Open XML (OOXML), Microsoft's direct competitor to ODF, which is currently undergoing a controversial ISO certification process. Observers say that the Dutch Defence Ministry threw its weight behind ODF. The public sector in the Netherlands expressly supports open standards and open source. Jan Wildeboer, open source evangelist at Red Hat in Europe, told heise online that NATO support for ODF is an "good sign" and a "further step towards a truly open market, where proprietary solutions and open source software compete on equal terms". Open standards are the only feasible way to provide interoperability and avoid dependence on individual vendors. Wildeboer welcomed the European Commission's new proposal for a European Interoperability Framework (EIF) to promote the use of open standards that are not subject to patent license fees in the public sector. - OpenDocument - Document Formats - Interoperability -

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Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html Joel Spolsky, February 19, 2008. Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not all there is to it! This document includes the following interesting comment: Each Excel workbook is stored in a compound file. You see, Excel 97-2003 files are OLE compound documents, which are, essentially, file systems inside a single file. These are sufficiently complicated that you have to read another 9 page spec to figure that out. And these “specs” look more like C data structures than what we traditionally think of as a spec. It's a whole hierarchical file system. - Document Formats -

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ODF vs. OOXML on the Eve of the BRM http://www.consortiuminfo.org/bulletins/jan08.php Consortiuminfo.org Consortium Standards Journal, December-January 2008. Vol VII No 1. Andy Updegrove. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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What's Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications http://www.burtongroup.com/Guest/Ccs/WhatsUpDoc.aspx Burton Group's Guy Creese and Peter O'Kelly: Industry debate about the relative merits of OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Ecma 376 Office Open XML (OOXML) highlights the significance of the productivity application market shift from binary and proprietary file formats to vendor- and product-independent Extensible Markup Language (XML) models. The competitive stakes are huge, and the related political posturing is sometimes perplexing. In this overview, Research Directors Guy Creese and Peter O'Kelly introduce ODF, OOXML, and related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, and project their implications for future productivity applications. - OpenDocument - Document Formats -

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No ISO for Microsoft Means Little http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2180634,00.asp Jason Brooks. eWeek. September 7, 2007. Opinion: ODF advocates are getting ahead of themselves by celebrating Microsoft's ISO failure. - OpenDocument - Document Formats -

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Game over for OpenDocument? http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/072307-opendocuments-grounded.html By Gary Edwards and Buck "Marbux" Martin, LinuxWorld.com, 23 July 2007. The quest for OpenDocument gets grounded by the hard realities of Microsoft Office-bound business processes. What's next for enterprise users who really want document interoperability? - OpenDocument - Document Formats -

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ODF Freely Available http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/03/odf-freely-available.html ODF is now available among ISOs Freely Available Standards. - OpenDocument - Document Formats -

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XML and the document format mind bender http://open.itworld.com/4934/nlsebiz070320/page_1.html Sean McGrath, ITworld.com. XML has been around now, in its final fully fledged form, for more years than I care to remember. Having played a small part in its original creation, thinking back that far makes me feel old. Explaining the whys and wherefores of XML to non-technologists and technologists alike has always been an interesting challenge. One could be forgiven for thinking that the value proposition has at this stage been fully trashed out. Either you believe in the value proposition or you do not. Either you are applying XML sensibly in your business or you are not. Surely such matters would be well and truly baked at this point? Not so. Not by a long shot unfortunately. Here is the problem in a nutshell: it is real hard to explain to non-technical folk why it is that keeping your information in XML is not - in itself - a guarantee that any sizable benefits will accrue. - Document Formats - XML -

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Beyond the basics http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/02/20/beyond-the-basics.aspx Brian Jones of Microsoft blogs about level of documentation in ODF and OOXML. Must read. - Document Formats -

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Adobe to Release PDF for Industry Standardization http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200701/012907OpenPDFAIIM.html Adobe Press release, Jan. 29, 2007: Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that it intends to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). - Document Formats - Open Standards -

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What Is OpenDocument http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/07/27/what-is-opendocument.html The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an emerging file format standard for electronic office documents. Representing a triumph of common sense over the methods conceived before the rise of the Internet, ODF's goals are both exciting and controversial. Early adopters of the format include state and municipal governments in some near- and far-flung places, and this makes the format's progress a thing to watch. Yet innovation theory tells us there are some hurdles we all must overcome before ODF becomes a regular topic of conversation at the ballpark. Those in the know, however, recognize that we're in about the second inning of a barn-burner. So, grab a hot dog and a beer, and settle in for a classic. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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Add-in finitum http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/07/add-in-finitum.html In this post, I will take another look at the Microsoft ODF Add-in debate, suggest some criteria for use in evaluating file format integration, and use those criteria to evaluate both Office 2007's support for the ODF formats, and OpenOffice's support for Microsoft's formats. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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Cum mortuis in lingua mortua http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/07/cum-mortuis-in-lingua-mortua.html In this post, I will look at the history of Vector Markup Language (VML), how it lost out to the W3C's SVG back in the 1990's, but has come back from the dead, showing up in the draft Ecma Office Open XML (OOXML) specification. I offer some opinions on why this is a bad thing. - XML - Document Formats -

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ODF: Path to greater interoperability http://computerworld.com.my/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=3989&pubid=4&issueid=97 Malaysia became one of the member countries which ratified the Open Document Format. Computerworld talks to Rosalyn Docktor, IBM worldwide governmental programs executive for open standards, on what ODF is, and why organisations should be concerned with its emergence. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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OpenFormula http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2006/07/openformula.html There has been a lot of interest in the Open Document Format (ODF) and the 'problem' of formulas not being included in the standardisation process. Here is what I have learnt from this issue, and hope that it clarifies the issues surrounding this topic. The ODF does define simple formulas within its specification, e.g. the SUM() function, but it does not proceed to define ALL the other mathematical functions nor syntax on how to use them. It did not want to limit nor constrain how an application implements specific formulas. The committee decided this implementation detail was out of the scope of the ODF standard. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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ODF proposed to become Malaysian Standard by year-end 2006 http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2006/07/odf_proposed_to.html "I remember meeting Yoon Kit for the first time at the 21 April 2006 meeting of the SIRIM TC4 (Technical Committee on E-Commerce) when the vote by the committee members was unanimously YES to approve the then ISO/IEC JTC1 DIS 26300, i.e. the OpenDocument Format (ODF), and in turn for Malaysia to vote YES to ISO for it to become an ISO/IEC international standard. Since then, Yoon Kit became a fellow blogger here! Today, Yoon Kit and I, together with another fellow blogger here, Ditesh, each of us representing different organizations, were part of another historic SIRIM TC4 meeting, because the meeting now unanimously voted YES to proceed with the "project" for ODF (now ISO/IEC 26300) to be made a Malaysian Standard (acronym "MS")." - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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OpenDocument/Web-based app pressure mounts on Microsoft http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3334 Last week, while Mashup Camp was taking place, a reader from Israel responded to my blog regarding Microsoft's support (actually, the lack thereof) of the OpenDocument Format. Microsoft recently got a lot of mileage in the press when it announced that it would be backing the development of an open source project designed to bridge the compatibility gap between Microsoft Office and OpenDocument Format — an alternative to Microsoft's file formats (including the forthcoming Office Open XML format due to ship with Office 2007) for saving and retrieving documents created with word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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XML office debate moves to look-and-feel http://www.gcn.com/blogs/tech/41370.html "Late last year, when we interviewed and VisiCalc co-creator and general IT statesman Dan Bricklin about the controversy over Massachusetts specifying the Open Document Format in its technical reference model, he expressed puzzlement over all the attention surrounding ODF. It was, he pointed out, just one small item in what seemed like a pretty radical proposal for the state. Odd it should be the focus of debate. And yet the debate continues. This Wednesday, the federal Extensible Markup Language Community of Practice will hold its monthly meeting at the federal headquarters of Microsoft Corp. There, Microsoft technical specialist Philo Janus will present an overview of Microsoft’s own competing XML format for office documents, Open XML. Perhaps Janus will also answer some of question brought up about Open XML at the last XML CoP meeting. In that gathering, speakers from IBM and Sun Microsystems talked up the benefits of ODF, especially in comparison to Open XML. One of the major topics of discussion was preserving the look-and-feel of documents. Will citizens of the future be able to recreate documents—as they looked to their creators—without the software that created them?" - Document Formats -

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Plug-in will help archiving data sharing http://www.gcn.com/print/25_20/41340-1.html “Government records should be free of any proprietary software dependencies,” said Owen Ambur, chairman of the Federal CIO Council’s Extensible Markup Language Community of Practice. “We cannot defer to commercial vendors the prerogative for determining the formatting and structure of records that are inherently governmental in nature.” - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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Lost in Translation http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/07/lost-in-translation.html "In the last installment I looked at the way the ODF Add-in for Word 2007 integrates into the Word UI. Now let's drill down into an actual conversion and see what fidelity we get." - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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Documents, documents everywhere... http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/comment/2160137/documents-documents-everywhere The release of Microsoft’s latest Office 2007 beta highlights the looming standards battle between Microsoft’s Open XML format and the Open Document Format. ODF is supported by a number of vendors but the dominance of Microsoft may mean that Open XML succeeds as the de facto standard. Unless enough public bodies insist on ODF. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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Microsoft Shrewdly Funds Open XML Translator Project http://gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=141973 Gartner: Microsoft's strategy for attaining interoperability is shrewd. By using third parties to do the work and opening the project to the open-source community, Microsoft will minimize potential criticism from those who claim that Microsoft aims to undermine the ODF standard. The "open and save to ODF" function will be integrated into Office 2007, but will be a separate menu item and so less seamless than the open and save functions for other file formats (which occur from the standard open and save dialogue boxes). Gartner believes that the project should add a 'compatibility checker' function for ODF documents to provide guidance regarding which functions will not translate. Gartner expects uncertainty regarding which document format will become the de facto standard to continue through at least 2008. Through 2009, the majority of documents will still be exchanged in Microsoft binary formats (0.7 probability). - Document Formats - OpenDocument - Open Standards -

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More details on the Microsoft Office ODF translator http://www.gcn.com/blogs/tech/41294.html Last week, Microsoft Corp., of Redmond, Wash., announced the Open XML Translator project, an effort to build a series of plug-ins to convert Microsoft Office documents to the Open Document Format. And, as with any debate as spirited as the one between Microsoft and the ODF community, the story was distorted in all sorts of ways by an overeager press. Jason Matusow, director of standards affairs for Microsoft, answers questions. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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TextMaker Viewer http://www.officeviewers.com/ Here you can download the free TextMaker Viewer from SoftMaker that lets you open, view, and print documents from Microsoft Word, TextMaker, OpenOffice.org, OpenDocument as well as other common office file formats. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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Microsoft Shifts ODF Stance http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=government&articleId=112343&taxonomyId=13 In a tacit acknowledgment of the OpenDocument format's increased momentum, Microsoft Corp. said last week that it will back an open-source project to create software that will allow Microsoft Office users to open and save files in ODF. - Document Formats - OpenDocument -

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