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IBM To Support OpenDocument Next Year
An anonymous reader writes "IBM announced this weekend that early next year it will begin supporting the OpenDocument standard in its WorkPlace line of products. They're planning on pushing this widely accessible format and their products in developing nations." From the article: "Rather than create an analog to Microsoft Office, IBM is offering editors for creating documents, spreadsheets or presentations within a Web browser. Documents are delivered via a Web portal and stored in shared directories. Access control and document management tools allow people to share and edit documents with others. Until now, Workplace supported the formats from open-source product OpenOffice, from which the OpenDocument was derived. Workplace Managed Client software also can read, write and edit documents created with Microsoft Office."
First post. IBM IS STUPID. So are Linux.
It's time somwe heavy weights actuallt DID something in that regards.
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
Sun support, Novell support, Google and many many less-known software vendors supports. Now you can add IBM support and see that Open Document can become a huge success.
You can read OpenOffice.org developpers' blog to see many simillar stories of companies or organizations adopting opendocument standard.
Let's hope a spell-checker is included
...it won't mean a whole lot in the long run.
Massachussets is already arguing over whether or not to adopt ODF, but it's beginning to hit resistance. If it fails to do accept ODF now, it may never do it.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Well, it can be called one of the first serious implementations of Web 2.0 frameworks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0, so we can hope times of "web as service" are soon. Cheers to IBM!
bifacial [bifeishel] - n., Lat. 1) Having two faces...
GP should check his spelling. Ahhh the famous first-post race :)
"The governments of India, China and other emerging markets are very interested in this," Fontaine said. "They don't have the legacy of having everything saved in Microsoft Office to transition from...This is an opportunity to start out right."
What does this statement mean? Did China and India use pen and paper when doing their spreadsheets up until this year?
Article on MS in China: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5197528/site/newsweek
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Governments around the world have built on the M$ Word platform without an serious look at this defacto standard impacts the competitive environment and the choices of consumers. While there are formats available, the percieved lack of technical support and business model behind Open Office has slowed the adoption of alternatives. Support by IBM is crucial for the wide spread success of the Open Document movement and will go a long way to increasing market share.
Any help with backups, with data conservation, with access reliability, with machine portability.
Any help requiring private individuals and businesses to use fewer resources is good.
The individual network nodes may be less reliable but the network itself is not.
Where you don't have reliable wiring, wireless can take over. This is especially true in places in the develloping world where the last mile might take years to be built over.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
OSS fans are always bitching about Microsoft, but they don't seem to have a good strategy for competing them. Microsoft did a lot of fairly simple but very strategic things to get their dominance, OSS developers need to do the same. Here are my ideas for increasing the use of open formats:
1) Make Firefox display OpenDocument formats by default. I know that everyone complains about keeping bloat down, but if the OpenDocument format is going to get widespread use them people are going to have to be able to read it. Besides which, Firefox must already have 95% of the code required to do this.
2) Make a standalone MS Office to OpenDocument translator from the OpenOffice code. I want a tool so that I can drag a Word Document onto an icon on my desktop and it automatically translates it to OpenDocument format. And it should be able to do batch converting too, and to output a log of what it's done and any problems.
3) Take out the MS Office compatibility from OpenOffice. Concentrate on making OpenOffice a great tool for creating OpenDocument format files.
I think many people approach this the wrong way, they say things like - "OpenOffice must be able to write MS Office files so that I can send them to people that only have MS Office." However, what we really should be aiming for is to get in a position so that anyone can happily say "Please send us the document in OpenOffice format" and so that if someone says "Can you send it in Word" you can say "Download Firefox - it reads all OpenOffice files."
People are going to criticise this as unrealistic, but these are exactly the type of strategies that Microsoft used to get their desktop dominance.
Another IBM product you never heard of is going to use open document. Anyone who uses these obscure IBM products has been drinking so deep from IBM's koolaid well, that they will never use a non-IBM product anyway. Thus the adoption of open standards will have zero impact on those customers.
Granted, this is good news for the linux community, as much as it is good news for people who use lots of other operating systems which do not run certain proprietary programs. Most of all, it is good news for anybody interested in using an open format instead of a proprietary format, regardless of the platform which may or may not be proprietary.
Lemon curry???
I mean, throw the word Open in front of any technology or concept, and suddenly it becomes the buzz word of the year.
Open Document, Open Source, OpenGl, etc, etc, etc.
Open is associated with a kind of grassroots mentality that it is supposed to be good, beneficial, and highly desireably. In the business community, Wall Street suddenly throws money at any company that uses Open along with their technology.
While I agree that better interactivity with operating systems and software is beneficial, when it comes to document formats, I think people are being deluded into thinking that open documents are better.
WHY?
I mean, out of the dozen or so different word processors I have used over the years I have never had a problem openning up documents from one version to another. Most ALWAYS come with convertors of some sort, either converting old formats of the same application, or converting between different applications. It never seemed to me that there was a big problem converting different formats of documents between different applications, except back in the days when Apple documents had to be dramatically different then the PC equivalents for the same application.
I also didn't think it was that difficult to reverse engineer a Word or WordPerfect document to support it in your software. I mean, these docs are simply binary and un-encrypted in a highly structured format, it would take any average programmer a few days to figure out the document structure and come up with a convertor. There will ALWAYS be little incompatibilites between software, you can't include a feature of a document in your software from another application if you don't support the same feature set. Even Open documents will not resolve these issues.
I think the real issue is that those "open" office products no longer want to hassle with having to reverse engineer the next Word document version, or any other proprietary document format. I mean, companies really don't make money off of "open" products (they get their money for those Wall Street dolts deluded into thinking free software is the next big step in the software industry). So, why would someone developing an Open office want to waste time and money they will never recouperate programming support for proprietary formats?
Anyways, with MS going to an XML document base, it is moot to believe their is a need for an open document format. XML IS OPEN, I mean, its a text document in a highly structured standardized format. The tags might mean something different from document to document, but XML is inherently an even easier document format to reverse engineer. By MS going with XML, they are almost implicating that they don't care about proprietary documents anymore.
In any regard, I think we will see TWO Open document standards emerging, one from MS and one from the rest. So has anything really changed? No. Ten years from now, word processors will still happily and easily convert documents from one format to another with a minimum of hassle. It may not be a nice and ubiquitous why-can't-we-all-just-get-along document format, but then, 10 years from now I think the whole "Open" software initiative will be a fad that has either morphed into some new buzz word all encompassing concept, or is killed off once Wall Street realizes Open != profits.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
This misconception is not helped by the presence of Tux at the top of this report. /. should know better.
ODF is a format for saving documents. It is platform independent and there is no reason why it should not be used by any application that creates documents, whether open or closed source.
Exactly! I've just googled for "Open Document Format" with results in Polish only and one of the first hits is a document from the Polish goverment describing "minimal requirements for IT systems in public institutions" in Poland (text in Polish). If you scroll down to the section called "File formats" and a paragraph about text documents you will find 5 different formats: txt, rtf, pdf, doc and odf. Further details are even more interesting: requirement is that IT systems in institutions must be able to read doc documents - default format for read and write exchange of documents is either txt, rtf or odf.
Wow. I am mighty impressed: there is so much fuss about different countries/cities/states which are about to introduce some kind of such regulations while in my native Poland it is already done and it is not even news.
Cheers
Raf
P.S. And PNG and SVG are listed among graphics formats!
This is just another crack in the MSOffice dike.
Several national governments are now mandating Open formats for thier documents, spreadsheets, etc. The more they are adopted, the more Bill and Company will have to compete on quality, features and price, not "Only we are 100% compatible with our proprietary format".
Now, if we can only convince the the Feds, or at least several more states, to make OD format the standard, we can make real progress. After all, most of Bill's bucks come from the US, and if we don't get the changes made here, we have so much less impact.
My 2 cents.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
One error in the report is that it's a Web-based implementation. It's actually an Eclipse-based implementation. The container for the ODF-compliant editors is IBM Workplace Managed Client. The container itself is a very interesting thing because it lets you build applications of just about any type, which are then deployed with the client over the network (or added to existing deployed clients as the case may be.) It also runs unmodified across Windows and Linux, because the Eclipse/Workplace layer does all the interaction with the OS windows, file system etc.
The point about the ODF support is that, like all standards, it takes interoperability out of the equation and lets vendors compete on the implementations. OpenOffice is essentially a MS Office competitor, using the same desktop-centric deployment and support model, except with open source and cross-OS capabilities. This is good for folks who like the MS Office "way" but want choice. IBM is approaching the problem of desktop productivity tools a little differently, as a locally installed but network managed app. Again, innovating in the implementation because the standard lets you do that.
I'm looking over the wall, and they're looking at me!
next year? I've heard HURD is comming next year too!
What ever happened to SmartSuite, anyway? I used to have a roommate that swore up and down that it was the best office suite in the industry. Do they still make that?
--saint
Open is associated with a kind of grassroots mentality that it is supposed to be good, beneficial, and highly desireably.
You see it that way? I see it as a plain and practical term meaning anyone can see and use the item or standard without restiction. That may or may not be good etc according to circumstances.
I mean, out of the dozen or so different word processors I have used over the years I have never had a problem openning up documents from one version to another.
The documents you deal with are simple text, right? Perhaps you only write fairy stories! I work for a large engineering company with public safety a major concern. If something went wrong we could be World news headlines. Two years ago we went from WordPerfect to Word. Yet now, when we open a older WP document Word, apart from the fact that the original Times Roman font is rendered in a wacky "Impact" font in Word, the Greek micro symbol (sorry, I won't try to reproduce it here), as used in microvolts, is rendered as "3". So 3 microvolts is rendered as "3 3volts". Read that as "33 volts" and you are seven orders of magnitude out : you have no problem with that?
This and other problems were pointed out to management, but they seemed to regard being wedded to MS as their priority.
Oh, wow! I almost get the feeling that OpenDocument just appeared in final form and IBM is an early adopter -- NOT!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
1) Make Firefox display OpenDocument formats by default.
...these are exactly the type of strategies that Microsoft used to get their desktop dominance.
2) Make a standalone MS Office to OpenDocument translator from the OpenOffice code.
3) Take out the MS Office compatibility from OpenOffice.
No it's not. Internet Explorer doesn't display Office formats by default and never has. There is no standlone other-to-Office translator and there never has been. And Microsoft initially had strong support for just about all of the competing formats so that people had upgrade options.
People are going to criticise this as unrealistic
No, I'm going to criticise you as desperately uninformed and woefully undeserving of the +4 Interesting you currently have.
Hard to decide whether to moderate you as a troll or to reply, but I figure it is best to reply.
Your main argument here is just patently false. Most word processors does not interoperate just fine. No wp program can read MS office documents right. Openoffice 1.x does not convert documents too good, and even though it is better with 2.0, it is still not perfect. This is exactly why people buy MS office. MS office has no way of reading Openoffice documents. So both ways the conversion is just not there. It is definitely not easy to reverse engineer binary formats. This is why there are no SW that does this perfectly with MS office formats.
And no, there will not always be incompatibilities between software. There will be when not using standards, but the whole point of the open standards is to eliminate this. Look at how the web works (even though there are some incompatibilities with IE on purpose). The whole web is built on open standards.
Aside from your false claims, there are no reason to have closed formats except to limit competition and cooperation. The possibilities that become available when you work in open formats are endless, from making information sorting software that access documents, to extracting numbers from spreadsheet formats. Just because we have not had open document formats does not mean they have no use.
I think that IBM is smart to try this in developing countries first. For one thing, when you do not have a well established standard, it is much easier to try something else - and maybe even make that "something else" a standard in those countries. There have been well documented cases concerning the resistance to change in the U.S., even though there are now quite a few viable alternative desktop environments.
I have been using alternative desktop environments for the past twenty years. For many years, I used a development environment containing the proprietary VAX/VMS and OpenVMS environments, Then I used several different UNIX environments. These days, I use Windows XP, connected to UNIX and Linux environments in the workplace using Tarantella's terminal server software, which provides a desktop graphical user environment into remote systems (of various UNIX and Linux varieties). At home, I use predominantly Linux desktop software, but I also test BSD and Windows software. To me, there is no functional difference in which of them I use because my tools are predominantly Web and Internet based.
Brian Masinick, masinick at yahoo dot com Linux
clear she couldn'T be in a scene and Will recall that it states that there fucking market Started 3ork on 800 mhz machine All major surveys
There is in fact a web interface to WorkPlace too, so while you're right there is an eclipse based rich client, the article is also correct in that it can be a fully web based solution too, should you wish.
I'm not sure which things you are referring to:
Ethernet - Not invented by IBM (NIBIBM)
Mouse - NIBIBM
GUI - NIBIBM
C/C++,Java and just about every computer language in use today - NIBIBM
Unix - NIBIBM
Laser Printers - NIBIBM
.
.
IBM was a symbol of the computing age. Just not in the last 20 years.