[Ecommerce] Clint Boulton on tech rallies around ODF

[Manon Ress]

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3588971

March 3, 2006
Tech Rallies Around Open Document Format
By Clint Boulton

Several high profile and groups have banded together to show
solidarity for the OpenDocument Format (ODF), a collection of office
document formats to help organizations share digital information.

The Software & Information Industry Association, IBM, Sun
Microsystems and a host of other vendors and groups today announced
the creation of the OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance).

The group's goal is to push the creation of software in the ODF
format, which is based on XML (define).

ODF allows text, spreadsheet and presentation files to work with one
another even if they were created with different vendors' applications.

For example, word processing suites, including Microsoft Office, use
proprietary data formats which greatly increase the difficulty in
switching to competing products.

ODF, used in Sun's StarOffice product, is an open standard format
which breaks the so-called "lock and key" connection between office
document applications and their data formats.

The concern is that, as documents and services are migrated from
paper to electronic form, governments and other public agencies may
not be able to read important documents if they are not all using a
common file format.

The lack of an open, standard document format system threatens to
cripple digital communication, which is quickly becoming the glue for
businesses in the modern world.

ODF is a solution to the proprietary file formats, the alliance said
in a statement.

Moreover, organizations that store data in ODF won't be locked into a
single software vendor, which means they can switch if they are
dissatisfied with their current software.

With ODF, for example, a contract created with one type of software
and e-mailed to a computer system across the ocean will be able to be
read by the document's recipient, regardless of what file format it
was created in.

The alliance comes at a controversial time in the high-tech industry
as tension about ODF support continues to mount.

In recent months, Massachusetts and other jurisdictions around the
world have embraced ODF despite the glaring lack of support from
desktop software leader Microsoft.

Microsoft has said it will not natively support ODF in its
forthcoming Office 12. This would seem to freeze Microsoft software
in Massachusetts, which plans to begin saving documents in ODF in
January 2007.

Microsoft last year had an answer for ODF, submitting its Microsoft
Office Open XML file format to Ecma International as an open-standard
submission with the hope it will one day become an International
Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard.

The file format is the underlying document standard to be used in the
next edition of Office.


************************************************
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

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