Open Document Format Approved

An anonymous reader writes "The OASIS Group announces that the third Committee Draft [PDF] of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification has been approved as an OASIS Standard. The submission of the approved standard can be found at here.
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable."

Comments

patent trouble

[moz25]

Is the any indication if their proposed format is entirely free of patent issues? Given the office format patents that MS has applied for recently, that could be an issue.

I'm not convinced this will work

[Gilesx]

It's all very well having an open document system, but let's look at this in detail:

For this system to work, every office app needs to adopt this file format. That way, companies can theoretically switch between vendors. Why would Microsoft, who already have the lion's share of the office market include this format? That would surely be shooting themselves in the feet.

If there were, say, three competing office suites each with 33% of the market share, then you could understand them wanting to include support for this format - companies would demand that the app supported them or switch to an alternative. However, when one office suite controls anything in the region of up to 96% of the market share, it'll take a lot more than a common open file format to persuade the average business to move away from a program that is pretty much the standard, whether we like it or not.

Nice but

[Mr_Silver]

As much as it pains me to say this, Microsoft has such a strangle-hold over the most common document formats that this attempt will be largely useless unless they come on board.

Which they, most obviously, won't.

However, I applaud this group for at least trying. However the realistic cynic in me says that we're not going to see many gains. Hell, the average user in a company doesn't know of and has never been exposed to anything else but Word, Powerpoint and Excel.

If that's the sort of minimal marketshare the competition occupies, it's going to be a tough battle.

Re:Nice but

[ssj_195]

The EU has been coming down particularly hard on Microsoft recently over the closed-ness of its protocols. I have absolutely no idea what this means in the long run (is it an enlightened attempt to prevent getting themselves locked in, or just a means to extort money/ discounts?), but I take heart from the fact that some government somewhere is actually taking a stand against Microsoft over closed formats, rather than simply bending over as has always been the case in the past.

As always, I end with my favourite link that I like to post in situations such as these. If you are cheered by the spectacle of a politician thoroughly demolishing Microsoft FUD, read on!

http://www.opensource.org/docs/peru_and_ms.php

Re:Probably doomed

[famebait]

Depends on how many governments pass laws requiring public records to be in open well-specify formats so it will be possible to reaqd them in the future (as the bloody well should)

Integration

[mwvdlee]

Office suites aren't the only players in this market.

Since this format is Open, there are no limitations to integrating it into other products such as CMS system, reports (which is more common than you'd expect) and all sorts of other tools which a business uses.

If this integration reaches a certain critical mass where it becomes too much of an advantage for businesses to ignore, MS will have no choice but to adopt it.

A glimpse into the future

[Gilesx]

CONSUMER: We demand this new open file format - it allows us more choice and prevents us from being locked down to one Word Processor exclusively.

OPENOFFICE: Okay, we've included it. Now you can read and write to this new open format!

MICROSOFT: We've just added support for the new format too. You can read all open format Word Processor documents in Word. We didn't include a function to write to an open document - our users don't want that kind of complication.

OPENOFFICE: Let's sit back and wait for this open file format to kick start the OpenOffice adoption!

CONSUMER: Microsoft just offered us Office free for 5 years when they found out we were considering an open source alternative to our operating system. Word can even read all these open format files we have created in OpenOffice - let the migration begin!

OPENOFFICE: Oh dear.

Will this make a difference?

[el_womble]

Everybody (/. readers not included) uses MS Office. Why? Because it is a 'standard'. OK, its a lousy standard. In fact, its more of a moving target than a standard, but the trick is that nobody knows this.

Sure they know that sometimes when they put their file on a floppy disk and put that in the post to send to their collegue half way across the office that sometimes it looks a bit different to how it looked on their computer, but then thats how computers are!?!

People don't know what word processor is unless its Word. They are taught it in school. They are taught in college and they are taught it in night classes. Its what employers want to see on CVs. People freek when they see PDFs. People freak when they see RTFs! Why? Because on windows they don't have a blue 'W' on them that lets them know its a word processing docuement.

The .doc is here for the long haul. It has survived every attempt by microsoft to improve it. It has survived some glaring security holes and it will continue to do this because consumers are not offered an alternative that they understand and that remains word compatible.

Yup, and you know what?

[mcc]

It won't do any good at all. It will be like esperanto; what's the point of creating an open document format if you won't be able to communicate with anyone with it? Because unfortunately, if you can't communicate with the stock install of Microsoft Word, you basically can't communicate with anyone.

Okay, yeah, I'm sure there's probably some tiny niche somewhere this fills. But the rest of us are going to have to ignore this new thingy and just continue shipping around .docs for the same reason we use .doc to transfer files now: For the benefit of people too lazy or dumb to open files in anything but Microsoft Word.

There was a period some years ago, when I first started looking for work, that I didn't have a copy of Microsoft Word, so I would send out my resume as an HTML file, or a PDF, or if it seemed appropriate both. Over this period, most of the time when I sent my resume out, the response-- even when the sent file was just an HTML file, that you double click and it opens in MSIE-- was "I can't figure out how to open your resume, do you have a .doc?" And these were mostly tech jobs I was applying for. It was kind of scary. Now I have a copy of Microsoft Word which I own seemingly solely so that I can create my resume in it, and my resume is sent out as .doc, always.

This might have some uses

[archeopterix]

However, I applaud this group for at least trying. However the realistic cynic in me says that we're not going to see many gains. Hell, the average user in a company doesn't know of and has never been exposed to anything else but Word, Powerpoint and Excel.

There might be some gains in other areas, far from the average user's desktop. The point of not adhering to the standard can be raised the next time a government decides what software to buy. It can also have some meaning in anti-monopoly trials.

This of course depends on whether the standard gains some credibility. Perhaps IBM could have a stab at Microsoft by declaring their wholehearded support for the standard.

Re:Probably doomed

[Technician]

I doubt M$ will ever support this format, or else their main revenue stream would be endangered.


I expect them to embrace it in their usual way. They will provide an input filter so their software is compatible with it. (it can open it).
Expect a few roadblocks on exporting to it.

Clippy, "I see you are trying to export a document. You will loose your macro's and formatting if you do. Do you wish to continue?"

If you select yes, expect everything from font selection, to headers and footers, to paragraphs, photo layout, etc., will need re-done in the other simplistic software. In short, it'll import, but editing and saving in a non-MS format will have problems. Expect MS to treat it like ANSI text.

Re:Ironic

[Taladar]

That might be related to many people seeing the PDF-Browser-Plugin as an annoyance instead of a feature.

Microsoft and format compatibility

[jesterzog]

They can just keep .doc as the default option for saving files. Most users never change the defaults, that's why I still get forwarded messages as attatchmets from outlook users.

I suspect that one of the (admittedly several) reasons that Word managed to knock out Wordperfect so many years ago was that Wordperfect didn't make a huge effort to be compatible with the competition. WordPerfect Corporation took its users for granted, and it was very slow off the blocks in a lot of ways.

Microsoft went to a lot of effort to make Word as compatible as possible with Wordperfect files, just as OpenOffice and several others are doing now, but Wordperfect Corporation didn't go to as much effort in returning the favour for Microsoft Word. My understanding is that it was more like 95% compatibility for a long time. The end result was that Word could cleanly deal with two formats, but Wordperfect could only reliably deal with its own.

The consequence? Once Word documents had reached a critical mass due to certain "other" reasons, people tended to go for the application that would allow them to easily deal with both types of documents rather than only Wordperfect files. This, of course, turned out to be Microsoft Word, and adoption of it was accelerated.

OpenDocument may not be quite the same situation, because with the OpenDocument format being... well... open, it wouldn't necessarily be too difficult for Microsoft to add support if everyone suddenly decided that they wanted it. This would be a victory in itself for other office applications, though, because it would immediately give Word-using businesses and governments the opportunity of distributing files that more people than just Word users can reliably access.

If there's a critical mass of non-Word users (which could even be a combination of Openoffice, Koffice, and whatever else), it's enough reason for many organisations to seriously consider what their standard document formats should be.