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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."
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
"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
What about the rest of the world? Just because the American government will continue to support the convicted monopoly doesn't mean the rest of the world will. IBM is marketting this mostly to developing nations (I'm assuming developing nations who have computers with internet access). To them, saving the money from paying for Microsoft licenses is more then reason enough to swap over. Throwing in support from a large corporation is merely gravy.
But what I'm a bit confused about, is the usefulness of having it work as a web portal. "Good" nations do have trouble with internet connections, I can only assume it's as bad if not worse in developing nations. So why create an online solution, instead of a scaled down simple offline solution? Wouldn't that fit their needs better?
Here's a hint: throwing around buzzwords doesn't indicate you actually said anything.
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.
ODF is being adopted in many public institutions in Poland. I don't know what's the fuss about Massachussets, there are hundreds of places that already switched and you don't read about them on Slashdot everyday.
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.
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???
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!
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!