Reports start to appear in the press about the ODF support quality enabled by the Service Pack 2 inside Microsoft Office 2007. I could say that I’m not surprised,
but I somewhat had also expected the contrary. Unfortunately it seems we have here a poor implementation of ODF. If further reports confirm it (and I have no serious doubt they will),
we will have the case of a monopolistic vendor messing up its own implementation of an open standard and have no viable excuse for doing so…..

Loe edasi…

Amsterdam, April 29 2009

OpenDoc Society congratulates Microsoft Corporation Inc. with the
release yesterday of Microsoft’s Service Pack 2 for Office 2007,
Microsoft Office is the latest of the major Office suites to offer
native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF). OpenDoc Society is
happy to see Microsoft finally join vendors and open source communities
like IBM, Google, Sun Microsystems, Novell, KOffice, Corel and Adobe -
which already made the switch to ODF in recent years.

“In a way it is the end of an era,” says Bert Bakker, chair of OpenDoc
Society. “Vendor based formats have dominated the last twenty five
years of IT to the extreme point where billions of investments in
software – even in entirely unrelated areas – were steered not by
technical and security considerations but by what was used on the
desktop productivity suites.”

The new released SP2 finally brings native ODF 1.1 support to Microsoft
Office 2007 (meaning it can fully replace the deprecated .doc, .docx,
xls, .xslx, ppt and pptx formats) after two years of ‘unofficial’
support through an add-in which was initiated and paid for (but not
formally supported) by Microsoft. It is especially important for any
Microsoft customers which adopted the deprecated Office 2007-specific
formats docx, xlsx and pptx – which were introduced as default formats
when Office 2007 appeared. Since these have meanwhile been superceded,
use of those formats is not to be recommended.

Many governments have actively been adopting an open standards policy,
with ODF being one of the prime drivers. Governments and customers have
grown increasingly vocal in making it clear to vendors that they would
take their business elsewhere if they did not move to support open
standards. ‘Moving to ODF even if you stay with the same vendor an even
the same product is plainly good IT governance, as it provides better
security, compliance mechanisms and usability while at the same time
diminishing the depencies on any single vendor”, says Michiel Leenaars,
vice-chair of OpenDoc Society. “We recommend companies, governments,
and users at large to just make the switch and set the new format as
their default as soon as possible – let’s put a halt to the creation of
‘new’ legacy documents as soon as possible. We’ll thank ourselves for
doing it later”.

With the last of the major vendors moving to ODF, OpenDoc Society notes
that this clears the way for a lot of innovation in both offline and
online office tools that were made possible by the Open Document
Format. Most notably the Society expects to see the rise of smart
documents that merge online ‘web of data’-like features with more
traditional desktop use. OpenDoc Society intends to actively help
these new products and services to converge and interoperate better on
behalf of users and consumers.

With all major office solutions now being able to use ODF, the focus of
software producers and customers should be on getting products that
generate or process documents – like electronic mail filters, content
management systems, document repositories and BI tools – to take
advantage of the many opportunities ODF brings.

OpenDoc Society strongly urges large document users like governments
and companies, as well as individuals, to look at the currently
proposed ODF 1.2 specification as well as the call for input for the
next major version of ODF that will follow the pending release of 1.2.
The OASIS Technical Committee currently welcomes any comments on its
committee draft [2].

[1] http://www.officeshots.org
[2] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=office