The Standards Blog

It's been a week now since Microsoft announced its ODF/Office open source converter project — time enough for at least 183 on-line stories to be written, as well as hundreds of blog entries (one expects) and untold numbers of appended comments.  Lest all that virtual ink fade silently into obscurity, it seems like a good time to look back and try to figure out What it All Means. 

There are two ways to go about that task.  One is the "have it your way," news channel technique (simply pick the channel that serves up your daily news just the way you like it, whatever that may be — liberal, conservative or just plain snarky).  Nothing better than the Internet for that, where you can go shopping in the great marketplace of interpretation, and willful misinterpretation, that is the Web, and find more than you could imagine.  If you do, you won't be disappointed with myriad ways that people have examined the entrails of the converter story to divine (or dictate) wha's up. 

For example, there is metaphorical religious conversion theory, from Martin LaMonica:

Redmond has "road to Damascus" open source conversion

 And differences of opinion about whether ODF supporters are jumping for joy or expecting the worst:

OpenOffice developers rejoice at Microsoft's OpenDocument Support 

ODF guardedly welcomes Microsoft's Office XML move 

 And, of course, there are plenty of theories about what Microsoft may really be up to.  Here's a sampling:

In the latest in a series of concessions to the rising popularity of ODF, Microsoft announced yesterday that it has quietly been supporting the development of its own set of plugins to enable conversion of documents to and from Microsoft Office to software products that support ODF. The news is being treated in the press as "new news," but in fact Ray Ozzie let slip mention of the project last October, and an open source converter project was started by the same French company last September 26.  I'll more to say about this below, but first, let's briefly review what the press release has to say.

The new converter tools will be made available under the BSD open source license, and will be made "broadly available to the industry for use with other individual or commercial projects to accelerate document interoperability and expand customer choice between Open XML and other technologies."  The tools will also be available as free downloads for use with older versions of Office, and are being created in cooperation with several partners: French IT solution provider Clever Age, and "several independent software vendors, including Aztecsoft in India and Dialogika in Germany."  A prototype of the first converter (for MS Word) has already been contributed to an open source project at SourceForge.net. 

While Microsoft had previously stated that there was insufficient customer interest in ODF to justify supporting ODF in Office, it explains this partial concession in its press release as follows:

This work is in response to government requests for interoperability with ODF because they work with constituent groups that use that format…"By enabling this translator, we will make both choice and interoperability a more practical option for our customers," said Jean Paoli, general manager of interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft.

In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview Dr. Martin Sommer, SoftMaker Product Manager, of Germany's SoftMaker Software GmbH. Unlike some of the other products profiled so far, SoftMaker Office 2006 currently includes only word processor and spreadsheet functions and is still bringing its product up to full ODF compliance.

While SoftMaker Office is not as well known outside of Germany as KOfiice, another German ODF-compliant software suite, it has a number of interesting and useful unique features, as does each of the other suites that I have featured in this series of interviews. Perhaps most interesting is its availability on mobile devices, and the fact that it has been selected by AMD for bundling with its ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015.

And that, of course, is the point of this series of interviews: presenting each competing product in detail illustrates the rich environment of applications and tools that are evolving around the OpenDocument Format (ODF) specification developed by OASIS, and now adopted by ISO/IEC. (The prior interviews can be found as follows: with Inge Wallin of KOffice here, with Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreesh of OpenOffice.org here, and with Erwin Tenhumburg of StarOffice here.)

I'm a bit behind in reporting on current events, so this post is by way of a quick cut and paste to update the interview with Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreech of OpenOffice.org that I posted on May 13 as part of the continuing series on the Evolving ODF Environment.  Look for Part IV of that series on July 5, when I post the interview with German software developer SoftMaker on its own ODF-compliant office suite, called SoftMaker Office.  

With that as an uncharacteristically brief prelude, here is the text of the email sent out on Thursday (June 29) by OpenOffice.org, announcing their new release of OOo, and describing its new features, fixes, upgrading information and other details: 

All 

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is now ready for download, three months since the release of 2.0.2. This latest release contains a mixture of new features, bug fixes, and security patches, and demonstrates the  OpenOffice.org Community's determination to maintain its position as  the world's leading open-source office productivity suite.

[Updated:  10:30 ET to add quotes from Globe article]

Those that do not closely follow Massachusetts politics closely (a dismal pastime at best) may remember that State Senator Marc Pacheco, the Chair of the Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee, held a public hearing last October 31.  At that hearing, he called upon then State CIO Peter Quinn, and Linda Hamel, the General Counsel of  the State's Information Technology Division (ITD) to testify.  During and after their testimony, he was highly critical with respect to the adoption by the ITD of a new Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM), and in particular of the requirement under the ETRM that the Executive Agencies use only ODF-compliant office productivity software after January 1, 2007.  He also called a number of witnesses to address the Committee that were uniformly hostile to the new policy (rejecting the offers of supporters to testify), and announced that his committee would commence an investigation into the facts underlying his concerns.

Senator Pacheco's committee has now completed it's investigation of the situation, and has issued a 31 page, small type, single-spaced  written report that is… (again) highly critical of the State's Information Technology Division (ITD) with respect to its adoption of a new Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM), and in particular of the requirement under the ETRM that the Executive Agencies use only ODF-compliant office productivity software after January 1, 2007.  On an initial scan, it is difficult to find a part of the report that is not consistent with the allegations and conclusions expressed at the hearing eight months before.  The title also suggests both the tone and the conclusions of the effort: Open Standards, Closed Government.

The report was issued at a press conference held at the state house at 2:00 PM Thursday afternoon, and is not as yet available on line.  Only a limited number of print copies were made available (to the press), but I was able to obtain an imaged copy by email late this evening.  As of this moment in time, there is only one news article available on line, which can be found here  (the article was written by Martin LaMonica, who is local and I expect attended the press conference). [The report has now been posted, and can be found at the Mass.gov site.