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ODF Plugins and a Microsoft Promise of Cooperation
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sun May 07, 2006 02:25 AM
from the playing-nice-or-moth-to-the-candle-flame dept.
from the playing-nice-or-moth-to-the-candle-flame dept.
Andy Updegrove writes "Last week, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) issued a Request for Information (RFI) on any plugins that might be under development to assist it in migrating from a MS Office environment to one based upon software that supports ODF. The RFI acknowledges the fact that it may be necessary or advantageous to see some of the code in Office in order to enable the types of features that the ITD is looking for. Conveniently, Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs, had this to say on the occasion of ODF's approval by the members of ISO and the IEC: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today. Yet we will support interoperability with ODF documents as they start to appear and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization. The richness of competitive choices in the market is good for our customers and for the industry as a whole." Presumably such support will include helping the plug-in developers that will assist Massachusetts migrate from a MS Office environment to one based upon ODF-compliant office productivity software."
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ODF Plugins and a Microsoft Promise of Cooperation
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let me be the 1st to say ... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Saturday May 29 2004, @03:16PM)
embrace and extend!!
Re:let me be the 1st to say ... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://joe-baldwin.net/ | Last Journal: Saturday September 02 2006, @11:58AM)
They can't win, can they?
Re:let me be the 1st to say ... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.realistic-dragon.co.uk/)
Based on what they did to Java, HTML and everything else they have ever touched it'll be a almost compliant version, to an out of date standard, that is a massive pain in the ass to use with non-MS products. (Ref IIS/IE/Frontpage etc etc.)
KOffice also supports the ODF format (Score:5, Informative)
(http://usefree.org/)
Micro$soft is lying through their nose. They know very well that KOffice [koffice.org], the Free & Open Source office suite that comes with the KDE [kde.org] desktop environment also supports the ODF format. In fact, they were publically informed [slashdot.org] about KOffice's capabilities last year in a open letter [kde.org] sent by the KOffice developers.
Yet they continue to spread the outright lie that only OpenOffice and its derivatives support the Oasis Open Document Format (ODF) [oasis-open.org].
KOffice has a much cleaner architecture and a leaner codebase than OpenOffice, making its startup faster and facilitating the addition of new features [koffice.org]. Because improving KOffice to meet the usability needs of governments, businesses and disabled individuals can be done with much less effort, KOffice is an even greater threat to Micro$oft.
Re:KOffice also supports the ODF format (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.a4fs.net/blog/)
I'd love to rewrite that dialog so that it says something like
"you are about to save in a text-only format. are you sure? if you do this, you will be able to access this information for the rest of your life, even if you don't continue to buy our software. Think about it very carefully, then press continue...
Re:let me be the 1st to say ... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:let me be the 1st to say ... (Score:5, Insightful)
So uh... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ablabla.org/)
Gosh, not that I'd like to insult the integrity of a company with such a spectacular record of interoperability and standards compliance as Microsoft, but I really just can't think of anything obvious that their closed document format offers beyond lack of compatibility with anything but their own products.
Re:So uh... (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, open up a Word document that you've worked on and modified several times. Select the whole document, copy it, paste it into a new document, and save it. The documents should largely be identical (you might've missed headers and footers or page margins). Now compare the fize sizes. The old document might be several megabytes. The new one is probably a few hundred K.
What's missing? Gobs and gobs of metadata about every keystroke, ever action, every cursor positioning.
Ever open up a Word document, scroll arounda nd read but make no changes, close it, and have Word ask to save changes? Metadata.
Re:So uh... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.weintraubworld.net/)
Oh, there are lots of features only found in MS Word that aren't in OpenOffice. These are things like their document wizard, VBA scripting, object insertion, watermarking, cross-referencing, index marking, and our favorite, Clippy the paperclip.
Ever used these features? No? That's probably why they're not in OpenOffice.
There are several reasons for all of these features: You've got one application that's trying to make sure that anyone who uses it can find the features they need. Because MS has hundreds of developers working full time on MS office, and they got to do something to justify their jobs. It looks good in ad copy (millions of features!). And, it is an important element of FUD. (If you switch to OpenOffice, there might be some feature not in OpenOffice that you will need.)
Re:So uh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, although rarely.
VBA scripting
Yes.
object insertion
Yes.
cross-referencing
Yes.
Ever used these features? No? That's probably why they're not in OpenOffice.
Just because *you* don't use a feature, or know anyone else that does, doesn't mean that no-one uses it.
Decent performance; extended XML (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 03 2002, @01:00AM)
Beyond that, I can't say there's too much I've run into that I can do in Office but not OO.o . A lot of things are much smoother in Office, though
I think MS's argument is a lot weaker with regards to the file format, though I'm certainly no expert. I do expect that they'll be able to implement their own formats with better performance in Office than the ODF formats, but that's hardly surprising given that they designed them with that as one of their key goals.
More interestingly, the Office XML formats require implementing programs to preserve unrecognised valid markup from other namespaces. This lets you do things like embed (eg) an order record in an Office document, embed a JDF specification (when Publisher gets around to going XML as well), and so on. It's not exciting for the end user, but for developers and larger businesses it's a really nice thing to see. One could argue that Microsoft are getting XML "right" in a way that few have so far. Most interestingly by far, you can link the foreign markup in to your Office documents, so that (eg) a user can fill in a form in a document that's actually an XForm with your own structured data. Alternately, a newspaper could insert some custom metadata when exporting stories from a database, so it can tell what's been done with it, keep the DB up to date when the story is imported again, and so on. It's quite interesting stuff. Check out Brian Jones' weblog for some interesting use cases and discussion (and some persistent questions about the licensing issues from me).
The ODF spec only briefly refers to this issue at all. IIRC it permits apps to do this perservation, but does not require it or provide any facilities to support it. If apps aren't required to preserve your markup, then in my view it's not much darn good - it's somewhat like saying that apps may preserve your document text and structure. OpenOffice doesn't preserve foreign markup at all. If it's not directly in the ODF spec, you can't use it. This really loses one of the great advantages that XML has, and is very disappointing.
If we had a standard office document format that I could rely on having these features, there are some very interesting things I could do with it, especially at work. This fragementation and the ODF limitations are extremely frustrating, especially given that the ODF folks are always banging on the XML gong while missing one of the key abilities of XML entirely.
I think MS screwed up very badly at the start by attacking ODF with rhetoric and poorly thought out garbage, not a solid arguement over capabilities and other real issues. Insufficient audiovisual support indeed...
Personally I don't care much whether ODF or MS Office XML wins, so long as the resulting standard:
Re:So uh... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://billposer.org/)
Another alternative is R [r-project.org], which is much more powerful than anything MS Office has to offer, is Free, and runs on most platforms.
The OpenDocument Foundation already has a plugin (Score:4, Informative)
slashdot covered the plugin too... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://xtifr.w.googlepages.com/home)
Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)
This is extremely significant news. What this means is that, after years and years of MSO having no competition, years after they basically wiped out wordperfect etc... There is now significant competition to Microsoft Office, and they are being forced to acknowledge it.
Hopefully this will mean that Microsoft will start developing some new revolutionary stuff in Microsoft Office instead of just resting on their laurels (sorry but I don't think any version since 6.0 has been that huge of an upgrade compared to going to 6.0). This is good news. We are all going to get better products instead of everyone just copying each other's minor features.
Open Office is here to stay. They have succesfully gotten a multi-billion dollar company to acknowledge them as a serious competitor just like Linux forced them to acknowledge that windows has competition. Microsoft no longer has the monopoly they did a few years ago.
Genuinely interested (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.alioth.net/ | Last Journal: Friday November 09, @03:53PM)
Nearly all the users in our office are doing standard officey things in MS Office. None of them use features that aren't present in OpenOffice - in fact, hardly any of them use MS Office as anything more than a glorified typewriter with a handy spell checker.
People don't need most features (Score:5, Informative)
No. About ten years ago I read an interview by a top executive from Microsoft (Nathan Myrwold, iirc) that most features do not come from customer requests, but from magazine comparisons. When someone wrote an article comparing different office suites they would include a table with tickmarks showing which features were included in each software. It became an obvious competitive advantage to have more tickmarks than the competition.
In that interview, Myrwold mentioned that MS-Word had over a thousand different commands, and that was a problem because most of those commands would never be used by the majority of users and it had a big impact on usability. That's how Clippy was born, it was an attempt to concilate the wants of marketing who insist on putting useless features with the needs of users who want to perform simple tasks most of the time.
Re:Genuinely interested (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://people.xiph.org/~jm/)
Re:Genuinely interested (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://web.lemuria.org/)
Can I get some of what you're smoking? The commenting is one hell of a mess. Oh yeah, it looks all shiney and look! colours! on the surface, but have you ever tried to really _work_ with it? The only use is within small workgroups where a little bit of improved communication would make it superfluous anyways.
I've tried working with both commenting and versioning in a non-trivial environment where several different - and at times hostile - parties are involved. You can forget about it. We're currently using
In
And let's not even speak about versioning. 20 year old CVS beats it with one arm tied behind its back.
Almost all of Words advanced features are half-assed at best. I'll celebrate the day its market share plummets to insignificance.
Buy stock (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Thursday October 02 2003, @03:46PM)
Time for the obligatory Admiral Ackbar quote (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.myspace.com/stripeymiata)
Jonathan
http://www.justgofaster.com/ [justgofaster.com]
good enough (Score:1, Interesting)
OpenOffice has enough features and performance to satisfy my parents for their document needs at home, and that is primarily for work. I bet most people use their Microsoft Office for similar purposes. OpenOffice is good enough and the price is write, thus satisfying most of the Microsoft Office customers today.
Slowly (Score:2)
(http://www.tjerkstra.org/)
delusions about ms office (Score:5, Insightful)
I am constantly amazed by the sort of mass-delusion people seem to have about MS office, intentionally perpetuated by ms - the idea that ms office is a framework of acceptably workable office productivity applications. Wrong wrong wrong.
Each and every office application is buggy, has gaping holes in terms of usability (for example the Access report designer makes adding columns to data a nightmare - you have to align line elements to the pixels manually, or use the severely clunky grid system), and makes any use beyond bare minimum severely frustrating (my job is to work with Microsoft Office and I'm at expert level with it so I know those only too well).
Microsoft dominate the market, and they have abused it as most public companies in a monopoly would do. The software is incomplete and as far as I'm concerned unacceptably faulty but it's the best out there given that they have had virtually no competition. Now that's changing, they act as if their so-far monopolised customer base would find other software unacceptably bad. It's ridiculous.
Thank God for open source giving people a more usable, workable solution not only for portability's sake but to finally give us an alternative so we can all show ms what is and isn't acceptable. In my opinion it isn't there yet - but it's only a matter of time before Openoffice exceeds MS in terms of functionality I'm convinced of it.
I know I'm probably gonna be modded down for trolling/off-topic/etc. but I feel so strongly about this - please can we all stop acting as if their software is acceptable. In any other industry a company producing such faulty goods would have gone out of business, and rightly so from the customer's point of view. We're only encouraging Microsoft to not bother fixing anything time and time again if we stay complacent, and yet again us customers' will be cheated out of decent software. They could do it. They have very talented people working for them. But they only understand the language of commerce - so let's make the competition strong and force them to change their ways. It's time for change.
/rant
Disruptive Technologies (Score:2)
(http://www.cogito.org.uk)
So it seems to be with office productivity. Microsoft says that ODF lacks the features of its higher end product, and "the majority" of its users would not find this acceptable. Even if this is true (a big "if") there is still a substantial minority of users who do not want to pay hundreds of dollars for all the bells and whistles. These people will rapidly migrate to ODF, especially once they can be certain of sending it to an Office user and have it look the same. From there ODF will rapidly migrate up-market.
OpenOffice 2.0 all the way for me now :) (Score:1)
Say what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Acronyms Madness!! (Score:1, Funny)
(http://wilhelmrahn.googlepages.com/home)
Embrace & Destroy (Score:4, Insightful)
Transparent as it is, the strategy is remarkably effective. The masses blame the standards-compliant software for "not working", not Microsoft for having poisoned the standard. The courts will sit on their hands and a couple of billion-dollar buyouts will silence the commercial opposition.
Let's see now ... (Score:4, Funny)
lost me at ITD RFI ODF RFI ITD ODF ISO IEC ODF ODF (Score:1)
(http://www.mrmsoft.com/)
while () {
if (@acronyms = $_ =~
print "@acronyms\n";
}
}
I dumped Word 8 years ago (Score:1, Interesting)
When I have to send someone a document I give them PDF.
My company uses OpenOffice and I advise my clients to do the same, but just telling them that their illegal copy of office can get them in to problems. I even hint that someone might just tell the police, and either they buy an Office License which costs a ridicolus amount or they install OpenOffice for free. I help them install, migrate and support the OpenOffice in their business, and I make real money out of it. You can do it too! This market is huge! Sure there are always those that prefer to continue being pirates, but you can always do that anoymous call and force them to license everything.
How obvious would it be to suggest that.... (Score:1)
incredible will power (Score:2)
Oh the bullshit does flow... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually most people I talk to that use Microsoft Office only use Word and only a small subset of its features. Most could get by fine just using Word pad.
The Creation of myths... (Score:2)
(http://www.javaguy.org/)
From the article:
This is just plain wrong, and is an example of the marketing machine creating a myth that most people will believe without challenging it. From my personal experience with dozens of people, you can put OpenOffice in front of them and they won't even be able to even tell the difference between OpenOffice and Word for most things they use it for.
Most people want to type a letter, do a little formatting, choose a few text styles, spellcheck it, and print it out. Most people get confused when they step outside this use case with the most trivial things, like headers and footers. Most people are not writing 150 page documents with 2 columns on a page, alternating between landscape and portrait pages, etc. Even if they are, they are struggling with Word to make it happen; I'd rather struggle with it, keep $495 per license in my IT budget, and know that the data is in a format I can DO something with outside of the tool that created it
Re:Kooks. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is more like Microsoft must provide ODF compatibility or the state government as well as local governments will not be buying Office. Notice that this promise came after they tried to bribe and threaten the state government to back down on its ODF requirement.
Failure to reverse the ODF decision means that no matter what decision Microsoft makes they will lose the Office monopoly. Bill Gates can choose to keep a piece of the action or lose everything.
Re:Before we get the usual FUD and Tinfoil Respons (Score:3, Insightful)
The two examples that you provide are probably used by 0.01% of Microsoft Word documents. I would not call them "real world" examples.
Re:Before we get the usual FUD and Tinfoil Respons (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.edgeio.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 09 2005, @10:42AM)
If Microsofts wants to support ODF, and needs more features, all they'd have to do is propose extensions and present a well founded argument for why they should be allowed. They haven't.
In essence, Microsoft likes to whine about this, because it serves their purpose to keep ODF adoption rates down, but they show no interest in doing anything about it.
Re:Before we get the usual FUD and Tinfoil Respons (Score:2)
What would be the point in us emailing them? Microsoft has its own representatives on the committees responsible for this standard, at least with respect to the OSI. I'm sure they would be welcome to participate elsewhere too. If they want to contribute their suggestions then there's nothing stopping them. How would me emailing them help? This is silly.
That's fine (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.synthesizer.org/)
The idea is that the constituents of the Commonwealth should be able to read the digital documents produced by their government. It is FUD in the most classic sense that the idea was to mandate some ODF-only office suite that allowed people to work only in ODF. This is not the case. The point is accessibility for the final product.
Think of a magazine. Magazines are commonly laid out in Quark XPress (as a common example). Quark has features like revision control, graphics control, text kerning and leading and flow-control. Myriad tweakable parameters that allow the people who work on the magazine to make it look and read the way they feel is best. We as magazine readers do not need this functionality at all in order to read the magazine. We just want to be able to pick up the publication and flip through the pages and read stories, look at pictures, and so on. These are two completely different modes of interacting with the document that are not mutually exclusive, but that intersect in the act of publication. ODF is this simplified translation for uses that do not require things like XAML.
This is where Microsoft sought to sow seeds of doubt that the sky of document creation and workflow was falling. This is not the case, and what we read here is that what ODF proponents predicted has come true: Microsoft would not stand in the way of their users choosing to "Save As..." in the ODF format. It's just bad business for them to do so and I for one see this story as Microsoft acknowledging a big, fat "I told you so."
I don't even want to touch the accessibility/ADA aspects of embedded media, which is entirely uneccessary for the purposes that Massachussetts wants to use ODF for, but that Microsoft purported to be 110% necessary for anybody to create documents in the future. They were trying to embrace and extend their reach into the very act of creating a document. Is any government document dependent on the creator being able to publish their Inkitudes in a native format? I don't think so! The fact remains, however, that government employees can use whatever techniques they like to create a document, but if it's going to wind up being a public document then people need to be able to access it forevermore. I certainly didn't see them promising THAT in the runup to MA's decision to use ODF.
ODF is just another output format and there's no reason that the laws and other byproducts of governmental communication can't be published in a format that people can be confident can be incorporated into future products - it being an open and documented format - and won't be aged out in favor of Microsoft's decision that maybe Ink should be the lingua franca of Office formats (downsampled into Palatino if desired). Microsoft did not want to cede control of one iota of their Office franchise and they preferred to be able to hold the reins on just what software would be able to read a Microsoft Office document.
Couldn't agree more (Score:1, Troll)
(http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 03 2002, @01:00AM)
The ODF spec gives almost no consideration to the perservation and manipulation of third party markup. OO.o currently just discards it silently when loading a document, and the saved copy omits any unrecognised markup.
The MS Office formats do offer all these features, and for that reason alone I'm starting to hope MS wins this one. Both formats seem like uninspring choices for different reasons, but at least the MS one won't artificially limit features and give the "universal" format the reputation of being limited, unreliable for more than basic uses, and crap.
I'm actually really interested in the new Office features for embedded third party markup and interaction with it via forms, etc. It has some interesting possibilities for use at work and with some other tools I'm involved with, and it's something I'd very much like to expore. If OO.o could support the same capabilities I'd be a very happy man, but I just don't see it happening.
Re:Before we get the usual FUD and Tinfoil Respons (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 24, @03:50AM)
"Ink" information can be stored in an ODF document using the Gif format as a metatdata container. This can be specified by using the Gif parameter of the Ink.Save Method.
From MSDN;
Gif
2
Re:OO = Basic (Score:2)
(http://peter-b.co.uk/)
Please wait while I wet myself laughing at your ignorance.
From your post I have extracted the following metadata:
Believe me, describing the ODF format as a "basic TEXT GOES HERE system" is like describing an immersive visualisation facility as a "computer display".
</flame>
Re:Before we get the usual FUD and Tinfoil Respons (Score:2, Insightful)
Fix the huge problem first and then aim for new features. I'm a little doubtful that a significant amount of the population will start using much of what is added at this point to the very mature product that is an office suite but even if some do, they'll still have the option of using a document format that only Word can read for it and using ODF when they don't need those features.
Re:"Microsoft promise" (Score:1)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080745/quotes [imdb.com]
Princess Aura: But my father has never kept a vow in his life!
Dale Arden: I can't help that, Aura. Keeping our word is one of the things that make us... better than you.