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OpenDocument Now Published ISO Standard
bobibobi writes "After months of revisions, OpenDocument receives status of a full published standard. The various stages of a standard's "stage code are also online." The OpenDocument standard has been developed by a variety of organizations and is publicly accessible. This means it can be implemented into any system, be it free software/open source or a closed proprietary product, without royalties.
I've worked with some OASIS spec'd XML before, and while it's not usually the most elegant solution, having *any* XML-based document markup become standard is good news. I would love to start doing text-extraction directly from Excel, Word and so forth without having to cut out text, drop it into another MS product, flatten it by hand, etc.
Quick example:
We do user requirements using Word. I wanted to extract them into a database so I can relate them
to functional specs, use cases, code, etc (yes, we're just figuring this out now).
To extract the requirements, I had to cut out each section of tables (Lord help you if they're nested,
or misaligned, or misnumbered) and plop it into Excel, scrub it repeatedly (scrub those nubs!), and
only then insert it into a database.
With XML-based documents, I just pull out all of the matching tags, form an INSERT around it, and off it goes into the db.
-BA
From the ISO website's FAQ:
1.4 What does "international standardization" mean? When the large majority of products or services in a particular business or industry sector conform to International Standards, a state of industry-wide standardization can be said to exist. This is achieved through consensus agreements between national delegations representing all the economic stakeholders concerned - suppliers, users and, often, governments. They agree on specifications and criteria to be applied consistently in the classification of materials, the manufacture of products and the provision of services. In this way, International Standards provide a reference framework, or a common technological language, between suppliers and their customers - which facilitates trade and the transfer of technology.
1.5 What benefits does international standardization bring to businesses? For businesses, the widespread adoption of International Standards means that suppliers can base the development of their products and services on reference documents which have broad market relevance. This, in turn, means that they are increasingly free to compete on many more markets around the world.
1.6 What benefits does international standardization bring to customers? For customers, the worldwide compatibility of technology which is achieved when products and services are based on International Standards brings them an increasingly wide choice of offers, and they also benefit from the effects of competition among suppliers.
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/faqs/faq-general.html
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
The simple answer is that OpenDocument is not a Microsoft core asset. It's not even from Microsoft. It was originally created by OpenOffice, a competitor to MS Office.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
You can like totally like use templates and such. Like for sure. TeX also supports includes...
... hard ...
\input{preamble.tex}
Dear Mary,
~
Sup?
~
Sincerely,
Tom St Denis
\input{postamble.tex}
Wow
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Actually you two are both wrong. The current (2007) version of the office file formats are fully documented on the ECMA site, not MSDN (though MSDN does also have some docs on the file formats as well). In fact, it is actually the file formats and not just API documentation that you will find at ECMA.
h tm
9 .aspx
Office 2007 File Format Specs:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45-M.
Listing of MSDN Articles on working with the Office 2K7 Formats:
http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2006/08/31/59
--
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Why do all of you seem to have a distinct ISO hatred?
/. that the internet has been a powerful force in business) .
/. are CIO's or CTO's (information and technical officers) or people who have the ability to advocate ISO standardization for file types, do it. It can only benefit the mobility of your company. One can choose to make switches in direction rather quickly when all the data you store is in a known format. You could hire some coders to do internal tasks for you. There are NO disadvantages to ISO standardization for the customer. One can choose to purchase drop-in-solutions.
From engineering I have learned that ISO standards are completely voluntary. They provide a means for Company A to say, "I need 1,000,000 bolts adhering to ISO XXXXXX". They can then find companies which adhere to these standards and purchase based on best price. If a company wants to be ISO certified for a process they must pay for an inspector to come and check out the process (quality, ensuring, stuff is done properly, etc). I have heard other people bitch about how much it costs to do this, however, it is not your company being forced into the standardization, rather YOUR CUSTOMER is demanding a specified level of quality. These people who are complaining are really voicing a view that they would prefer to deliver a LOWER QUALITY good to a customer for the price of the higher quality good and leave the customer none the wiser. This is a bad business decision.
The example I give above is for screw production, however treat software as a commodity. Then software which read and write files which adhere to the standard are best. Software packages can be built to support these standards and greater emergent networks can be formed (I give the internet and it's effect on business. I hope we can all agree on
To further my example, look into the history of screws or fasteners, there were many competing designs, and the 2-3 best remain today enshrined in some ISO standard along with all their derivative designs.
With the introduction of this ISO standard, business can more easily data mine, update, import/export, modify, and track changes. If any of you who read
Simple questions like "We have ODT files and require support according to ISO XXXXX, can you provide this with your product." replace long drawn out negotiations about who owns what file format or whatever.
In conclusion ISO is important for customers.
If I am misinformed on any of these topics, please respond.