ODF Alliance Warns Governments About Office 2007 ODF Support

omz writes "The ODF Alliance has prepared a Fact Sheet for governments and others interested in how Microsoft's SP2 for Office 2007 handles ODF. The report revealed 'serious shortcomings that, left unaddressed, would break the open standards based interoperability that the marketplace, especially governments, is demanding.'"

Comments

Re:It's already been stated...

[Todd Knarr]

Already done, spreadsheet formulas are being specifically addressed in ODF 1.2. But in 1.1 there was already a set of conventions for handling formulas, and Microsoft were the only ones out of all the ODF 1.1-using applications that couldn't follow those conventions. In fact their implementation even specifically violated one of the bits that was in the ODF 1.1 spec: the spec calls for cell names to be enclosed in square brackets, while Microsoft's implementation omits the brackets. Then you have just plain malicious stuff like actively removing formula information that's present. Even if you can't parse the formulas, XML makes it easy to preserve what was there. Every other implementation behaves that way: if they can't understand the formulas at least they leave them intact for applications that do understand them. Microsoft's is the only implementation that deliberately removes formulas from the spreadsheet.

What annoys me most about Microsoft's pseudo-support is that it had to be deliberate. They had to actually expend additional effort to be this incompatible. If they'd simply been lazy and taken the easiest way out, they would've been far more compatible with everybody else than they ended up being.

Mod parent up

[KlaymenDK]

That's a very insightful, proactive suggestion. Why bitch about the usual MS attitudes if you can provide a constructive path ahead, right?

Actually, it shouldn't be all that hard (but, it may well be tedious work) to put together a document that includes samples of *all* features of the spreadsheet / text editor / drawing / presentation document.

Providing verification is probably a bigger challenge. I wonder if it could be done as macros in any of the ODF-supporting suites, or if that's akin to an SOD violation?

Re:Wahwahwah

[malevolentjelly]

If anyone is interested in specifically what is "broken"(read: incompatible with OpenOffice.org 3.0)... which I doubt... here is some very good information detailing which decisions were made in implementing ODF and why they were made:

http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/default.aspx

The last couple blog posts should be what everyone is looking for.

Beyond this, Microsoft is simply implementing ODF 1.1 because ODF 1.2 is not done yet. If Microsoft is going to support a standard, they will support the standard not the most popular implementation's interpretation of the standard.

Re:So, which is it?

[Omniscient Lurker]

Governments buy software, ergo are part of the customers (aka marketplace)

no, they'll do more than that

[je ne sais quoi]

They don't warn people about it, but they do consider anyone running or develping for openoffice eligible to be sued. Here's a news article from 2004 about the settlement between Sun and MS over staroffice that states:

In the document, it is stated that Microsoft agrees not to sue Sun for commercial distribution of StarOffice, which is based on OpenOffice.org, but that Microsoft can still seek damages from OpenOffice users or distributors for any copy installed after April 1, 2004.

Watch what happens if openoffice makes any kind of real dent in office's market share. It'll be just like the RIAA going after downloaders...