MS Office 12 To Utilize ODF?

J. Random Luser writes "Groklaw is carrying a story about Microsoft quietly engaging a French company to develop Open Document filters for Office 12, due out mid-2006. The SourceForge project claims to be an import filter for MS Office, and that is how the developer describes it. But ZDNet quotes Ray Ozzie as talking about an export filter from MS Office, and this french blog takes Ozzie at his word. Ostensibly the tarball unpacks as OpenOfficePlugin, and SourceForge has the WindowsInstaller.msi listed as 'platform independent'." From the ZDNet article: "Ozzie told me that supporting ODF in Office isn't a matter of principle. Microsoft isn't opposed to supporting other formats. The company just announced support for PDF, and he added that the Open Office XML format has an 'extremely liberal' license."

Comments

Re:How to get the State of MA to upgrade

[ThogScully]

This doesn't mean that MA can't switch to OpenOffice if they think it's the better solution for them. This does mean that they can use ODF files and *expect* everyone else to be able to open them. If someone can't because they're running Office, then they can just upgrade. This puts the expense of using Office and upgrading Office on the people who are forcing it down everyone else's throats. I don't use Office, but I do recognize a problem with exchanging documents with those who do. I generally save as Doc files for them and try to verify on another person's machine that it will open correctly. It's good to know that I may be able to just send them ODF files from now on.
-Neil

Looks Like Conversion Is One Way

[canfirman]

By looking at the SourceForge project description it says, "This project aims at providing a plugin for Microsoft Word 2003 XML to open OpenOffice XML documents." It doesn't say that it converts Word XML format to OpenOffice XML format. So it's really not a true converter, because it won't allow you to save back into OpenOffice format.

I find it interesting that Microsoft will support other document formats (such as WordPerfect - is anybody using that anymore?) but not OpenDocument.

Not "Open Office XML format"

[John Hasler]

It isn't the "Open Office XML format". It's the OASIS Open Document Format. Microsoft is attempting to confuse the issue by deliberately confounding "Open Office" and Open Document".

Denial

[debilo]

Apparently, Microsoft has already denied this.
I got that on OSNews.com yesterday.

It's not a filter

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the source code, you'll see that it's a plugin that adds a "Import OpenOffice Document..." command to the File menu. It uses an XSLT transformation to convert the document into a a file Microsoft's patented/proprietary WordML document which is only supported in Office 2003 and then directs Word to open this file. Subsequent saves to the document would simply update the "temporary" WordML document (without prompting).

A real filter would add an SWX option to the normal Open dialog (and allow you to associate SWX with Word) and load the document directly into Word's document model. If the filter has write support, saves would automatically save back to the SWX. If the filter was import-only, saving would prompt the user to choose a document format to save into (where the user could select RTF or HTML or something that's portable). I haven't been able to find the docs on Words import filter API; however, it would make sense that MS would keep those proprietary.

There is no there there

[shis-ka-bob]

Look at the code in the tarball. To be polite, it is a bunch of empty stubs that 'implement' enough methods so that the code will compile. There is a dtd that has a single line (the XML document declaration

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

)

Re:Have you opened ODF in a text editor?

[shis-ka-bob]

Unzip the odf. (rename it filename.zip and doubleclick). Now, look at the XML file named content.xml

Re:Utilize isn't the same as support

[Tinidril]

OpenDocument has next to 0% market share

Maybe this is true in your backyard, but globally that is not the case. For one thing, you can count the state of Massachusetts as one big customer, and open office is rapidly becoming popular in may overseas circles. I know I read that the open-office format is actually the most used format in the world when you consider that users of MSO are fairly equally divided among the various versions. I'm to lazy to look it up now, but it certainly seems plausible. And if its not the case now I expect it soon will be. Every office sweet that is not MSO is, or soon will be, supporting ODF as the default. It is also a given that the ODF formats have a much larger market share than Microsoft's XML format that hasn't even been released yet.

OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field.

Microsoft had to pay Sun $2B because they intentionally created a broken implementation of Java in order to break the "Write Once Run Everywhere" nature of the platform. As a condition of calling their product JAVA Microsoft was required to support the standard properly, and they _chose_ not to. If there had been incidental compatibility issues that MS had shown an interest in resolving that would have been an entirely different matter. Instead they chose to ignore their obligations because they believed the legal bills would be less than the cost of allowing platform competition.

I find the suggestion that ODF is a subset of the MSO formats to be either ignorant or misleading. Many of the most demanding office users were heavily involved in the creation of the OD formats. For instance, Boing was very involved because they have unusually complex needs that they need addressed. They have to manage some of the most complicated documents in existence, and they have to be able to access those documents properly 30 years down the line.

If Microsoft was so concerned that there are important features missing from ODF then they had ample opportunity to bring that up in the standards process, but they chose instead to be uninvolved because they saw it as unimportant. ( That is their claim, but more likely they saw it as enabling open competition which they hate. )

Any features that MS sees as missing from ODF formats are most likely there because MS has a history of creating the data formats to serve the needs of the code instead of the needs of the data. In an inter-operable world the data must come first, but MS is not interested in an inter-operable world. Letting your data be defined by your code is a much faster way to write software, but it is one of the main factors that keeps one version of MSO from being able to properly read data from other formats. Its also the reason that MSO has had such a hard time converting to other formats like HTML.

OpenDocument is a version 1.0 Spec

I hope your not saying here that MS doesn't want to support a document format unless it knows that the format will never change. First of all, the MS track record for backward compatibility with their own older formats is well known to be piss poor. Second, in the history of computers I don't think there has ever been a document format more complex than ascii text that hasn't changed. But open formats like HTML have a much better track-record with backwards compatibility than proprietary formats ever have.

Microsoft doesn't want ODF to succeed, because they don't want to have to compete on an open playing field. That is the driving reason behind everything they are doing in this arena. Their first choice would be to not support the format at all, but if that is not an option then they want to support it in a way that makes it appear broken or inferior. Given that goal, it seems that supporting the standard through a third party set of tools with only import/export instead of native support is the way to go.

Well that's MS's own damn fault

[BobPaul]

* OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field. As stated previously OpenDocument is a subset of MsOffice format,

Microsoft is ALSO an Open Document committee member (and has been for many years). They've had ample opportunity to ensure that the OpenDocument format supports everything that they need it to.

Since OpenDocument has been painstakenly crafted as Extensionable XML, there should be no problem with Microsoft Extending the standard to add support for anything that is not currently included, provided they do so using Pure XML without any of the binary nuggets they've included in their own XML format. If they extend the format properly through the OpenDocument committee, then their updates can become part of the standard rather than being a fork (which definately would give Microsoft a lot of flak.)

Licensing on the ODF is actually very liberal and Sun, the only IP owner for anything related to the ODF, has already released an IP claims relating to the use of ODF. This is something they can't sue Microsoft over anymore.

--
Bob/Paul