Donnerstag Mai 22, 2008
Huge Success for the ODF Community
First, I warmly welcome Microsoft to the community of ODF supporters. As most of you will have noticed by now, Microsoft just announced that they will start supporting ODF out of the box with Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. My favorite statement from the Microsoft announcement is the following promise: "It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007." Thus, very soon it should be very easy for organizations to standardize their document workflows on ODF, because the "average employee" does not need any special skills for saving to ODF anymore. Very cool!
Initially, Microsoft will support ODF 1.1 which is the most current OASIS standard. Since Microsoft is "committed to providing Office users with greater choice among document formats and enhanced interoperability" I also hope that Microsoft will soon start adding support for the upcoming ODF 1.2 because ODF 1.2 was designed to improve and extend interoperability between different ODF implementations. For example, ODF 1.2 adds a formula language and a W3C standards based metadata model. Thus, ODF 1.2 should also make mapping Excel formulas to ODF easier. Anyway, "Microsoft will join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee working on the next version of ODF". Thus, Microsoft's participation at OASIS should eliminate the worries and the inertia of people who were afraid of standardizing their document workflows on ODF in the past. With Microsoft's genuine participation in the ODF TC, ODF should evolve into a truly cross-plattform, cross-application and cross-vendor document format standard.
Second, I have to congratulate all the early supporters and adopters of ODF, i.e. the larger ODF Community. The work, and in some cases the courage, of many many individuals has led to a "market" which can't be ignored by vendors any longer. According to Google searches for various file types, ODF is still the most popular XML document file format, at least based on the number of document files posted to the Web. OpenOffice.org, which is just one implementation of ODF, is currently being downloaded more than 1.2M times per week and being distributed by popular hardware products like the Asus Eee PC. Government organizations around the world are adopting OpenOffice.org and/or ODF and have started to help each other with their adoption challenges. Thus, ODF has become a "market force" that can't be ignored anymore. Thus, again, congratulations and thank you to all the people who have contributed to the success of OpenOffice.org and ODF so far! Well done!
( Mai 22 2008, 06:44:27 AM CEST )
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hi
that's really a good news, but a little sad, that you did no mentioned a word about how kde has supported odf format from the beginning.
Gesendet von mimoune djouallah am Mai 22, 2008 at 12:04 PM CEST #
Gesendet von Boycott Novell am Mai 28, 2008 at 05:30 AM CEST #