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ODF Alliance Continues to Grow and Build Out
Andy Updegrove writes "As you may recall, a new organization called the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3 of this year to support the uptake of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by governments. Yesterday, the ODF Alliance issued a press release announcing that it has more than tripled its membership to 138, has appointed a Managing Director with strong European experience (Marino Marcich), and is lobbying countries globally to vote for ODF in ISO. Overall, the picture is one of a growing organization that plans to be around for awhile, and particularly hopes to make its impact in Europe, from which a large number of its members have arrived, where governmental interest in ODF is highest, and risks to government CIOS therefore lowest."
Full list of members can be found here (and FAQ here)
I note that Apple is not a member - I suggest all slashdotters write to Apple to support ODF & join this alliance. After all, Apple is no longer relying on MS for a browser - why rely on MS for an office suite?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I think it's 138 organizations, not individual people.
shamelessly stolen from my website:
.odf) is ... doomed to failure, unless we make it useful.
Open Document Format (odf, or
As it stands right now, ODF is nothing more than a rallying cry. The geeks of the world are tired of being held a slave to business demands. They don't want to have to support Microsoft Word, they want more flexibility, more control, and more fun. As of right now, they don't have the tools to do any of it. The tools are easy enough to build, given the right motivation, but what tools need to be created? And more importantly, how will they interact with each other?
At the top of the list, I see the need for an enterprise-grade versioning and repository server. One that is connectable from anywhere in the enterprise, with flexible security and controls that integrates into the enterprise architecture. That might seem like a lot of buzzwords jammed into one little sentence, so I'll expand on that. Instead of saving your document to a file, it will save it into a server. The server will save the document, and save subsequent changes. It will have the ability to give you the old version if you've bunged up completely. It will allow you to take the file home, work on it, and bring it back to the enterprise. If Bob works on the file, it will branch that file, and keep track of the changes that happen. Finally it will allow you to merge the branches, so that you don't have a million disparate file revisions which have no resemblance to the original file. Support for this should be built into the program that you use to edit the file, without a need to call an external program.
Next, there should be more leveraging of XML translations. Using the aforementioned server as a data source, data should be able to be pulled and new documents created, using an XML translation. Think of the high level manager that wants a report summarizing all of the departments monthly financials. Instead of having someone make the report every month, the report is auto-generated. Any changes in any of the source files is automatically mirrored into the new report. Translations could be leveraged so that all the reports could be (more or less) viewed in any web browser or e-mail client. Statistics and graphs could be added to the company's website, and translations of translations would work the same.
After that, there needs to be a wizard to do all of this. Now, I know that this is going to sound very MS Access-ish, but a business would have a standard template for a great deal of its memos, spreadsheets, faxes, and everything inbetween. If there's one thing that a company is good at, it's creating bureaucracy, and this is a natural extension of that. The wizards would use that structure and create the needed transforms. The suits could point and click until their hearts content, generating millions upon millions of reports and feeling like God on the third day. Us geeks would have already purchased stock in toner companies, so things would be good for us, even though we already realize that the documents are, with the right transforms, completely portable, and we can read the latest financial data from our PDA's on the bog.
Lastly, there needs to be management tools, from server to desktop. Auditing software, role management, whatever we need. Those are the tools that the open source community excel at. These would all be built on an as-needed basis, and they would be quick in coming. Once adoption takes off, I'm certain that other software will leverage the power and flexibility of the system, and be able to use it as a data source as well, providing even more reason why opendocument would succeed, but only if we actually make it useful for what it is and what it's supposed to be: A data source as well as a presentation engine.
If we don't, however, it will fall by the wayside, used only by geeks and the technical elite.
The hard part will be keeping infighting to a minimum. Many times, organizations like this set out with great intentions and admirable goals, only to become very ineffective when infighting and internal empire-building take place.
Bawling.
This is not a government action...these are members of governmental organizations participating to come up with a standard. Governments become a problem when they mandate (they got da guns, doncha know) a standard without really working through an open process. In this case, there are enough other players, and there is no good way to mandate via force, so that this remains an open participatory exercise, at least in theory. (We can assume normal human hubris will reign supreme like in any committee and it will not go smoothly....but the fact that governmental groups are involved is irrelevant. It happens with most ANY committee.)
The organization with the gun, in this case, has been Microsoft, with their dominance of the desktop and the office suite. By making it difficult to impossible to pass documents easily to other programs, Microsoft has forced a monopoly of convenience. An ODF standard, with enough large organization participants, can make interactivity simpler, make translation seamless, and open the door for other players in the Office Suite game. And it will be because of concensus, not fiat. Now if only the United Nations could play so well.
My brain is overly lubricated
Is there a free, small and easy to install plug-in that provides ODF import in popular versions of MS Office?
I can't just send ODF files to people with attached note "Download 50MB of OpenOffice or switch to Linux and KOffice".
The problem is that the head of the bureau is chosen by a politician. While I can say from experience that our head was actively guided by his appointed party as to what software we were allowed to use, I can not comment on other bureau's machinations. So while the bureau grunts would have loved open document standards, the politicians who have the proprietary donors would probably stifle it.
I started to write an open source Sharepoint clone a few years ago to support ODF documents.
Unfortunately (or fortunately for my income), one of my consulting customers liked an early prototype and bought out the rights (unfortunately making it proprietary) and funded me for several months to improve it. They had me discard the OpenOffice.org backend and only support Microsoft Office documents, which was also too bad.
There are now some good open source projects like Daisy that support ODF.