Novell Releases OO–OOXML Translator

Tookis writes in with news that Novell has released an Office Open XML (OOXML) translator for OpenOffice.org. The article argues that, though this move may represent a nail in the coffin of the franchise known as Microsoft Office, and therefore a Good Thing, what is truly needed is a fully supported Evolution on Windows.

Comments

hmm

[heyyou_overhere]

I think the article is confusing larger memory usage with greater efficiency.

Evolution for Windows?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

what is truly needed is a fully supported Evolution on Windows.

How about an (ABI compatable) Exchange-equivilant for linux?

Re:Evolution for Windows?

[julesh]

Isn't that what SuSE OpenExchange is?

Re:Evolution for Windows?

[bubulubugoth]

There is no "SuSE OpenExchange", OpenExchange is a separate product, and it uses the binary connector to allow outlook clienten access calendar, taks and appointments at the openExchange.

15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the yearly revenue for Microsoft Office is about 15 billion which is about one third of the total revenue Microsoft makes every year. Correct me if I'm off. Over the past five years or so Microsoft's stock has been essentially stagnant. And Microsoft has had to make huge cuts over many of the preceding quarters to hit their street expectations and keep the stock from tanking.

Even a modest hit to the Microsoft Office revenue due to the upgrade treadmill from the format lock-in would have a massive effect on the company. Over the years Microsoft used their rapidly growing stock to keep salaries down and attract people with the lure of huge gains from their option grants. If office software revenue starts falling and Microsoft exec options start turning worthless I think you will start to see dramatic cuts at the company - the multi-billion dollar Xbox fiasco, the Zune mess, and many of the other let's throw money at new markets to try to get the stock moving attempts that Ballmer and others have tried since the stock peaked back around 2000.

I have to imagine that Microsoft will fight this move to open office formats with a fury never seen before. This isn't just extra billions that Microsoft won't miss, it is the multi-million dollar retirement money for a whole lot of execs up in Redmond under direct assault by a bunch of dirty hippies.

Re:15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake

[killjoe]

So why doesn't office support OO documents then?

Re:15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake

[SnprBoB86]

There is plenty of good information on motivation, etc. here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/default.aspx

A great summary of arguments can be in this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/09/ 21/interoperability-of-the-office-open-xml-formats .aspx

Reguarding your particular question, that post states:

"If you look at my blog, I probably spend less than 5% of my time discussing ODF. The only reason I talk about it is that people have asked me why we didn't use it as our default format. A simple "it wouldn't work" answer obviously isn't good enough, so I had to show specific examples to help explain my view."

In this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/07/ 27/679703.aspx
Brian lists a whole bunch of examples of why it "wouldn't work" with references to previous posts with more details:

"
The OASIS ODF technical committee claims it's still over a year away from defining spreadsheet functions and tables in presentations, and no mention of solutions to the international numbering issues or even simple things like character highlighting.
"

Re:15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake

[killjoe]

You think anybody buys that "it wouldn't work" argument?

OO can save as doc but not one person at MS is smart enough to make word save a document as OO xml.

Re:15 Billion Dollars A Year At Stake

[ajs318]

Oh, come on. If Microsoft had clamped down on illegal copies of MS Office, then alternative office suites costing one tenth of the price of MS Office would have taken over already by now. Microsoft Office has become the industry standard because, to all intents and purposes, it's free. So people learn word processing (using spaces for formatting) and spreadsheets (using a calculator to add up figures) in their own time using a pirated copy of Office, then businesses have to pay for Office because that's what all their staff know. And people who work in businesses where Office is used get a pirate copy to use at home, because that's what they know from work. It's a vicious circle.

Imagine a small company, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. They manufacture someting called Cheap Office. It can't boast all the features of MS Office, but it has most of the ones people actually use. (It also defaults to A4 paper, so your printer won't insist for you to press the "paper" button after printing each page.) So it's ideal for writing everyday letters, doing accounts and keeping track of your CD collection, and it retails at £50. Now, our hypothetical customer John Thomas (who has letters to write, accounts to do and a CD collection to keep track of) sees Cheap Office and figures he could save £450 by buying it instead of MS Office. But then he figures he could pirate MS Office and save £500. If enough people do that, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. go out of business, due to piracy -- even though nobody has ever pirated a Mom + Pop product!

This is how Microsoft have traditionally killed off the competition. But unfortunately, Open Source software isn't susceptible to the same technique. If people aren't making heavy use of OpenOffice.org, nobody has lost anything. In fact it could give the developers time to move on and produce something different. (Watch that dark horse KOffice, too. It isn't even pretending to be like MS Office -- which could well turn out to be its salvation.) I'm sort of reminded of an episode of King of the Hill, in which the kid starts kicking people in the bollocks and grows to think he's unstoppable ..... till he finds himself up against his own mother!

Visionaries

[Deadbolt]

It's really comforting to know that there are such men as this -- such utter, bigbrained geniuses who deign to drop us mortals a few crumbs of the great bread of awesome.

Sarcasm aside: I am sick to death of people going, "I want this for my computer, therefore everybody else wants it too, and therefore the only rational course is what I say." Have you considered asking the users what they wanted? Instead of assuming that "the users" want "full-featured desktop apps", do you think it might be worthwhile to check with them if that's true? Maybe they're already using gmail and love it. Maybe they don't even know about Google Calendar. Maybe they haven't ever heard of Zimbra.

Why should I, as J. Random Developer, bust my hump porting Evolution to Windows (which I couldn't do anyway as I know zip about Windows programming) just because this clown says what's good for him is good for everyone else?

Re:Visionaries

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

If we ever were really in a war,

WTF? That (MS) blogger is on crack.

Not only was it a war, it's a dirty war that's not over yet.

We've had accusations of corruption for State official's daring to consider ODF, Microsoft paying people for favorable wikipedia edits, Alleged attempts by IBM to influence OOXML standardisation process, etc etc etc.

It's not over yet folks. There's billions of dollars at stake. Of course its a war, of course its a dirty war.

Evolution for Windows

[Coryoth]

So what is needed is Evolution for Windows eh? Kind of like this? I don't have Windows around anywhere to try it out, but it looks like it runs fine. I expect it still has a few kinks to be worked out, but it is certainly up and running, so not only is a port in progress, it looks like it is even usable already.

Re:Evolution for Windows

[Pikoro]

I've been using Evolution on windows for a few months now and it works fine. Slow, but fully functional...

Re:Evolution for Windows

[julesh]

but it is certainly up and running, so not only is a port in progress, it looks like it is even usable already.

Having recently tried to use it, I'd say no. There are several major issues:

* Redraws are nightmarishly slow (admittedly this could be because I'm using an old PC, but I haven't seen any application redraw this slowly before).
* Initial configuration doesn't seem to work entirely correctly: if you need to change between SSL modes for an IMAP connection, you have to restart the program, but nothing tells you this. This may or may not be a Windows-only issue, I don't know.
* It stores its files in a subdirectory called ".evolution" of your user profile directory, not your application data or local settings directory. If you're using roaming profiles, this just plain won't work.

Re:Evolution for Windows

[julesh]

Roaming profiles can (and by default do) copy your ENTIRE user profile, so it does work

Yes, OK, it works. Barely. The problem is that it stores temporary cache information in this directory, which should be stored in the 'Local Settings' directory so that it *isn't* copied. This resulted in login times on my network of in excess of five minutes after I'd been using it for a few weeks.

(many other F/OSS apps do the same & they work with our roaming profiles).

I've had exactly the same problem with GIMP before now; it stores its tile cache outside of the local directory, causing it to be copied across the network during login. Not exactly sensible behaviour.

Nail in the coffin?

[280Z28]

Nail in the coffin? Pretty bold thing to say about Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is a great, free product, but IMO it's no replacement for Office in a never-look-back sense. Yes, they should keep putting pressure on MS regarding open formats, but I'm not about to switch from Office 2007 after my [wonderful] experience with it so far.

Techies love to complain about things like the ribbon, but everyone I see actually use it loves it.

MS Office isn't going anywhere. Neither is OpenOffice. And apparently neither is the Drama Llama.

Re:Nail in the coffin?

[jkrise]

Techies love to complain about things like the ribbon, but everyone I see actually use it loves it.

I'm not so sure. Using ribbons to tie up the hair is so 18th century. Nice-looking girls have switched to prettier things like hair-bands ....

Besides, do female techies exist? And if so, do they read Slashdot???

Re:Who didn't know this?

[Anonymous Coward]

//Microsoft made a new format (instead of using ODF) because they thought they could do it better, not because they wanted to lock people into using Office 2007.//

That is not correct. Microsoft's supposedly "open" format in fact avoids "open" as much as it can. For example, where OpenDocument uses SVG for graphics, which is itself a W3C open format that any vendor may use, in the Microsoft format Office Open XML (OOXML) they could have used SVG, but no, they could have used CGM, but no, what did they use? WMF. That is right, a buggy Microsoft proprietary graphics format, the one with the security hole, WMF. WMF relies on the Microsoft GUI API to render properly, as WMF has embedded metadata meant for calls to the Microsoft GUI API.

That is not the only thing in OOXML like that. If there is an open format for anything, Microsoft avoids it. Microsoft's OOXML is as packed as can be on dependencies that the underlying platform on which any application runs is a Windows platform.

Microsoft wanted to lock people in all right. It will be impossible to achieve perfect fidelity with OOXML on any platform other than a Windows platform.

If you have documents saved in OOXML format, you will be locked in to Windows platforms.

a nail in the coffin

[chiasmus1]

I fail to see how this can be considered "a nail in the coffin"? Not even the article really talked about what Novell releasing this would do, and why. Am I missing something?

What you need is a calendaring system that works

[cheros]

The stranglehold is in the calendaring AFAIK.

Nail in the coffin huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you remember the classic IE vs netscape battles back in the 90's?

Microsoft came out with a fast release and quick delivery iterations.
Yes, they had an advantage by forcing it upon every windows 9X user, but their original release was pitiful, and netscape had an opportunity to deliver a superior product and win the browser majority.

What did they do?

Netscape spent their time working in multiple directions without releasing a core product.

In the end, the mozilla project came out with the superior browser, but since it took so long to deliver, it fights with opera and safari for 10% of the browser market.

Do I see history repeating itself here in the desktop office app battles?

Re:Nail in the coffin huh?

[mgiuca]

If you're comparing MS Office to IE, and OpenOffice.org to Firefox, well history is starting to look quite good on the open side...

Re:Nail in the coffin huh?

[Brunellus]

Tell that to the great unwashed mass of users that don't use Firefox because it's not their default browser. But be sure to speak slowly, because they won't understand that the blue E isn't all of the Internet

Who didn't know what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised that Novell wants to kill Microsoft.

You'd be even more surprised then to lear that Microsoft wants to kill Microsoft. This project is sponsored by them.

Thunderbird

[iamacat]

Evolution may be trying to clone Outlook, but it's not great as a standalone e-mail program. There is nothing really wrong with Thunderbird. For a calendar, try Palm Desktop. There is a little program to sync it to iPod.

Nail in the coffin, my foot - MS wanted this

[SnprBoB86]

This will do squat for putting any nails in anything.

Microsoft wanted this. Infact, Microsoft helped Novel do this: http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/?p=43
And the Microsoft Open XML developers were more than helpful to advertise this: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/03/ 02/openoffice-support-for-the-openxml-formats.aspx

This is a GOOD THING for everyone. OpenOffice.org users get interopability with MS Office. MS Office meets many government required interopability and open XML format requirements. Win-win.

Let's keep the absurd commentary out of the summary and in the modded down comments, please?

Re:Who didn't know this?

[jonwil]

The reason why OOXML uses WMF and relies on quirks of old versions of Word (and of WordPerfect etc) and all this other stuff is because OOXML has to be able to store every piece of data that the word *.doc file format stores. Because Word has used WMF ever since Microsoft invented WMF (which was long before SVG came along), Word will continue to use WMF.

Only Good For Novell OpenOffice

[Zatoichi007]

After reading the article and comments, it appears the compatibility is only good for Novell's version of Open Office. It is not available for the "standard" Open Office.

Re:Who didn't know this?

[XanC]

OOXML has to be able to store every piece of data that the word *.doc file format stores

Not true; Office 2007 could have a WMF -> SVG converter in it. Storing graphics as SVG would then just be part of saving into an XML format.

The worrying thing is Novell's reputation

[jkrise]

Throughout it's existence, Novell has never been a credible threat to Microsoft over a reasonable lenth of time. Their agreement with Microsoft further reinforces the suspicion that Novell might not be realy competing, rather they might be collaborating with Microsoft to further extend the monopoly situation and exclude genuine choice, and freedom of software. Some concerns:

1. Does Novell's translator work well with OO.org, or Novell's version of Open Office only?
2. Like Mono's port of VB, is the usage of the translator covered by the patent deal between MS and Novell?
3. Why did Novell abandon the Netware range of products?

This does not appear to be a nail in the coffin of Office, it seems to be an extended lease of life for a dying format and bloatware from the 800lb gorilla.

-

Re:The worrying thing is Novell's reputation

[lennier]

3. Why did Novell abandon the Netware range of products?

What an odd question. They didn't. They ported it to Linux. That's what Open Enterprise Server is. SuSE + Netware. And at the same time they built a whole lot more web-service type services off to the side of the 'Netware' box.

By 'Netware' I mean the bundle of core file-and-print technologies that date back to the old-school Netware 4.x/5.x/6.x days: Novell Storage Services file system, Novell Core Protocol for file access, Novell Distributed Printer Services, the Novell Client for Windows, ConsoleOne for administration. They're all still there. As is Groupwise, only now it runs on OES.

There's also a bunch of 'Novell' rather than 'Netware'-branded services such as eDirectory (the directory formerly known as Novell Directory Services), ZEN Desktop Management, ZEN Imaging, ZEN Asset Management, exteNd Composer/Director portal/webservices platform, and Identity Manager, which from the start were not written with dependencies on Netware but in Java or .NET/Mono or as crossplatform binaries (eDirectory for example runs on Linux, Solaris, Windows and Netware).

Netware itself was basically just a low level kernel/OS with a fair few limitations (though it was simple... NLMs were like a hybrid of EXEs and DLLs), and was showing its age, so replacing Netware with SuSE was a huge step forward.

Granted, Novell is really bad for constantly changing the names of its products just for the sake of trendiness (Identity Manager, formerly Novell Account Manager, formerly DirXML...), so I suppose it's not surprising people constantly get confused - but it's not like Novell has stopped shipping Netware any more than Microsoft has stopped shipping, say, Win32 or SMB.

Re:Microsoft lawyers are licking their chops

[kripkenstein]

3. Novell does patent deal with Microsoft
[...]
5. Microsoft starts raising legitimate lawsuits against [...] Novel (mono)

So, you are saying that Novell entered into a patent deal with Microsoft, so that they could get sued by Microsoft for infringing patents? I don't think that makes any sense. Novell's lawyers did read the contract, after all.

Your argument that other parties could get sued, however, is plausible in theory.

Translators are fine but

[obarthelemy]

1- How well does it work ? In my experience, translators and export filters are never that great. So even a translator is not enough, it has to be a GOOD translator.

2- More generally, how well does OpenDoc travel from one program to another, and from one platform to another ? We all know .doc is not very good at maintaining layout across platforms / versions / even PCs... is OpenDoc any better ?

Evolution

[dotpl]

We don't need Evolution for windows, we need something other than the pile of crap that Evolution is.

Disclaimer: I use Evolution.

Re:Who didn't know this?

[modeless]

If only it was that easy. The real problem is that Word must without fail remain 100.0% compatible with every previous version, down to the pixel. The feature sets of WMF and SVG are not identical, and a converter with true 100% compatibility is not something anyone is going to whip up in a few days. It may not even be feasible. And after conversion, even if the document looks the same, the structure will be different. The way you edit it will change. The saved undo history will probably have to be thrown away. The interaction with other Word features like Track Changes might be different. etc etc...

People expect their documents to always look and work *exactly* the same, even though they do incredibly boneheaded things that end up relying on every feature and bug Word has ever had. For just one example, a relative of mine who will remain nameless typed out all his Word documents using tabs in place of carriage returns. That's right: between every paragraph, instead of pressing enter, he pressed tab to fill up lines until he got far enough down the page to start another paragraph. He centered text using this method too. Not a single carriage return in the entire document. What do you think that document will look like after *any* conversion at all? The precise to-the-pixel word-wrap decisions made by Word define everything about how that document looks. But if this person upgrades their Word and their documents are messed up, are they going to say "Boy I'm a dumbass, thanks Microsoft for showing me the error of my ways, I'll just retype all my documents now"? I think you know the answer.

This is why the OOXML spec is 6000 pages of hacks like 'autoSpaceLikeWord95' or 'lineWrapLikeWord6'. Not just to be obtuse; not as a grand conspiracy to hinder interoperability and shut out Open Office; not because Microsoft is incompetent. Because people demand uncompromising perfect backwards compatibility, and that's the only way to truly deliver it.

Re:Who didn't know this?

[slashbart]

People expect their documents to always look and work *exactly* the same, even though they do incredibly boneheaded things that end up relying on every feature and bug Word has ever had

Dude, there has never been this pixel perfect rendition between different Word versions, not even on Windows, let alone if you also include the Mac versions. I absolutely don't buy your argument as a valid reason for all the renderAsWord1OnMacintosh1984 attributes

Re:Microsoft lawyers are licking their chops

[kripkenstein]

If I recall correctly, the deal with Microsoft is only for five years. If in five years Microsoft thinks that Linux is a serious threat, they simply won't renew the patent deal.

That is true, it is for a limited period of time. It may also have clauses to cancel it beforehand (we simply don't know). Yet, this isn't a useful angle to use against Novell, I don't think. After all, Microsoft are paying Novell more for Novell's patents than vice versa. So patent litigation against Novell wouldn't be wise; Novell have more to gain.

Microsoft Office isn't going anywhere.

[Caspian]

...a nail in the coffin of the franchise known as Microsoft Office...

Please. Office isn't going anywhere. As long as there are Microsoft-loving managers, MS Office will be overwhelmingly dominant. Frankly-- and bear in mind that I hate MS-- Office is a far sight better than OpenOffice.org, which I've always found to be bloated and amateurish.

This whole "OOH OFFICE IS GOIN' DOOOOOOOOWN" mentality strikes me as wishful thinking.

What I need more..

[rockypg]

..is an evolution plugin that connects to Microsoft Exchange server Outlook Web Access through a proxy.

My job requires me to program on Linux, and I also prefer using Linux full time as ITservices here has draconian policies here for Windows users (Everyone is a restricted user and they cannot even change their own wallpaper). On my linux box, I have root access, my own wallpaper and mp3 player. There are so few linux boxen here that ITS let me have root access. They aren't well versed enough, and they don't want the extra hassles.

I don't get to choose what Mail server my employer uses. I can choose my client though. IT services refuses to support POP or SMTP as they have had to deal with Viruses before.I work on a Dual Boot FC6/WinXp box, and am forced to forced to boot into WinXp just to manage my email. Outlook Web Access does not work that great with Firefox, and does not provide for a way to pull email off the server and store them locally. Our web access is through an authenticated Proxy and the evolution plugin cannot deal with that (yet). What do the other folks out there with linux boxen and M$ mail servers deal with this?

Re:Who didn't know this?

[johnw]

The real problem is that Word must without fail remain 100.0% compatible with every previous version, down to the pixel. Pure drivel - the incompatibilities between one version of Word and the next are too numerous to count. People might expect this level of functionality, but they've never received it from Word.

That's not flamebait

[Reality Master 201]

That's a good point. Some dudes at sun with a bunch of schlubs in their underwear at home can
figure out the various office formats and save their docs to them. Why can't MS work that out

Re:That's not flamebait

[jank1887]

Why can't MS work that out.

They can. They don't need to. Next question.

Missed something basic

[g2devi]

> OpenOffice.org users get interopability with MS Office.

The problem is, this translator is "lossy", meaning that any translation will lose information *both ways*:
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/features.html

Also, being a translator instead of an exporter means that a double save will have to happen which has it's own set of issues.

> Win-win.

Actually, it's win-lose since it's the appearance of openness without actual openness, so MS Office devotes will be able to claim that no change in status quo is required (after all competition exists so there's no vendor lockin) but no-one will trust ODF translations into OOXML since they will look bad. Another side effect is that people will move away from DOC which has better support universally (through years of reverse engineering) in favour of OOXML (which has poorer universal support) since "XML is the future". Not good.

But if you're going to support OOXML in OpenOffice despite this last comment, a better approach would be an OOXML *exporter*. The key difference between an exporter and a translator is that an exporter has access to a lot more information about the document (the internal application representation of document) and so the exporter can be more accurate than the translator (which could in theory rebuild those data structures, but in practice won't unless OpenOffice and MS Office are refactored so that the creation of the internal data structures from the file system is available through a library) and an exporter will be faster (no double-save, no external tool, no recreation of even minimal internal data structures).

Real-world test - Fails with OO.o

[AYeomans]

It's fascinating how slashdot still prefers opinions to facts.

I downloaded the odfconverter-1.0.0-2.oxt file and tried to install into OpenOffice.org 2.1.0 for Windows (as downloaded from openoffice.org web site, not the Novell version).

I had to use Tools -> Extension manager (not Package manager), and when installing, had several pop-ups stating "This media-type is not supported: application/octet-stream". OKing these showed the odfconverter installed into "My extensions". And "Microsoft Word 2007 Document (.docx)" was added to the list of files in File -> Open.

But trying to open a .docx file (the Windows Vista Product Guide failed, with nothing happening or displayed.

Anyone want to try the other options of Linux, OO.o 2.0.4, Novel OO.o 2.0.4 and report back?

Schlubs

[Savage-Rabbit]

That's a good point. Some dudes at sun with a bunch of schlubs in their underwear at home can
figure out the various office formats and save their docs to them. Why can't MS work that out What kind of an animal is a 'schlub'? And why is it's preferred habitat the underwear of dudes@Sun.com? Perhaps the whole problem could be solved by breeding some more shlubs and setting them free in the underwear of dudes@Microsoft.com?

...the article is just confused

[listening to triplej]

Apart from the good news of an OOXML translator for OpenOffice.org, that was a terrible article!

It seems the author is a noob who is only just putting his toe in the water with a first install of OOo. After anouncing the news of the translator, he then starts rambling on about Evolution on windows, whatever.

Who said it was the goal of the open-source community to crush Microsoft??! While it may be true that many in open-source folk don't like Microsoft, I think it would be more accurate to say that the goal of open-source is to produce good free software that is based on open standards that anyone can use, improve and learn from. It's about freedom, not Microsoft bashing.

Sure, Evolution on Windows might be great for some people - but that's another story, can't we just be happy with the good news (about the translator) for the moment?

Re:Microsoft lawyers are licking their chops

[Macthorpe]

Step 5: ???
Step 6: Profit!

I'm willing to take the hit for this one. Everyone should do this once in their posting life.