ODF Toolkit Announced

Sweetshark writes "IBM and Sun joined at the 2008 OpenOffice.org conference in Beijing to announce the ODF Toolkit Union. The ODF Toolkit project will be independent of the development at OpenOffice.org, and will operate under the liberal Apache license. It goes from small tools that simplify using ODF in the software development process to large ODF Java and .NET libraries that can be used within other projects. 'The future of accessing and distributing software is here today,' said Michael Bemmer, senior director of Collaboration Engineering at Sun. 'It is no longer an acceptable business practice to have silos of office document data stored in proprietary formats. The industry has moved forward and is replacing the silos with business content, such as on-premise business applications, software solutions offered over the Internet and applications supported by mobile devices that are critical in Service Oriented Architectures.' Will this help ODF to make inroads in the business world after the successes on the desktops of users at home?"

Comments

Will this help ODF to make inroads?

[verbalcontract]

Will this help ODF to make inroads in the business world after the successes on the desktops of users at home?"

Short answer: no.

Long answer: As long as there are PHBs who think "writing = Microsoft Word," good luck getting rid of DOC.

Re:Will this help ODF to make inroads?

[trjonescp]

Long answer: As long as there are PHBs who think "writing = Microsoft Word," good luck getting rid of DOC.

That answer is useless. The question, essentially, is, "Will this help people realize that Writing does not necessarily equal Microsoft Word?"

Beating Word will be hard

[thetoadwarrior]

I've struggled to get people to convert people at work and they won't. It's not because ODF is inferior it's because they know Word and it's safe for them. Forget that OOo does docs...Word as well is safe too and god forbid they learn something that's nearly the same GUI-wise, imo.

Re:Beating Word will be hard

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In an ideal world, beating Word won't be necessary. Word itself isn't the enemy here. The enemy here is the notion that document format X must imply program Y(read .doc and word respectively). I don't care what word processor people feel like using. I do care what format the documents they send me are in.

In this case, the ODF Toolkit mentioned isn't a word processor at all, it's just a layer that makes it easy(er) for any sort of program to interact with ODF documents. Whether that means server side programs that parse information out of ODF formatted resumes that get uploaded, programs that generate ODF documents for various purposes based on database input, somebody's eccentric hobby word processor that needs to speak a standard format, whatever.

I'm not a huge fan of word, personally, and I'm very glad indeed that there are Free alternatives; but word isn't a big issue. Undocumented, badly documented, or deliberately obfuscated formats, that force us to all use a particular program just to communicate are the issue.

Re:Beating Word will be hard

[DragonWriter]

In this case, the ODF Toolkit mentioned isn't a word processor at all, it's just a layer that makes it easy(er) for any sort of program to interact with ODF documents.

Exactly. Where this really seems likely to help is in integrating ODF as a message format within the SOA/Messaging/Web Services world.

Re:QOTD!

[thetoadwarrior]

Well yeah except you don't need Sun to open your jar. You can use Winrar to extract the info so it's not like it's a closed format.

Re:QOTD!

[girlintraining]

Just that it's "proprietary". I don't get how people think that because something's proprietary that automatically makes it bad. All proprietary means is that it's owned by someone. JAR is a specification, owned by Sun, and as such it is proprietary -- however well-understood and documented it is. Shouldn't the discussion be on how well the format performs relative to business cost, since that is the target use?

A good strategy

[krisher]

Sun and IBM are opening a community that will help propel adoption of the ODF standard by making the format more useful. By providing free libraries to access the data inside the documents, they encourage applications that consider the importance of the content, and minimize lock-in for a single presentation tool.

Re:what the heck are you talking about

[thetoadwarrior]

Well yeah except for the fact that everyone knows that the doc format is synonymous with Word so you know wtf I'm talking about and if I want Word's doc format and ODF then I'll use OOo rather than a plug-in for Word.