A Set of RFI Responses for Sherlock Holmes

Andy Updegrove writes "In early May, Massachusetts issued a 'Request for Information' on plugins that could help ease the transition from a Microsoft Office based environment to one relying on ODF compliant software. Now the seven responses received have been posted by the ITD: six from vendors large and small — and one from Microsoft that purports to be informational, but in fact gives no information beyond what is already publicly available. Like everything else in the ODF saga, many of the responses are as much political as technical, with some delivering off-topic messages, one (from the ODF Foundation, strangely) refusing to disclose much at all, and several contradicting each other on the technical challenge of working with Office absent further code disclosures by Microsoft. All in all, they make for an intriguing read on multiple levels — offering more of an Easter egg hunt than informative offering. It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these offerings the Mass. ITD decides to utilize."

Comments

Some ODF info was on groklaw in May

[jdmonin]

Groklaw ran a story in early May about the ODF plugin - it was ready with screenshots back then, but wasn't available for download. Almost seems like there's more info there than in the RFI !

"The OpenDocument Foundation has notified the Massachusetts ITD that we have completed testing on an ODF Plugin for all versions of MS Office dating back to MS Office 97. The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the open, save, and save as sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF plugin renders ODF documents as if it were native to MS Office.

The testing has been extensive and thorough. As far as we can tell there isn't a problem, even with Accessibility add ons, which as you know is a major concern for Massachusetts."

Re:A VB Macro Converter

[WATYF]

Acutally, what gets embedded in Office apps is VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).

It's not the same as VBScript... actually, it's much closer to VB6 (and since it allows you to add references to COM objects, VBA can do many of the things that VB6 can do).

But yes... either way, VBA (and VB6 and VBScript) is much different than VB.NET and is not completely convertable (from old VB to .NET)... although a good bit of VB6 can be converted using existing tools, you'd still have to know the language in order to complete the conversion. Not to mention the fact that Office apps can't run .NET apps internally.

And then there's the fact that VBA is kinda being "replaced" with VSTO... ...so basically... there is no easy path to converting internal Office programming to an ODF platform. :o)

WATYF