According to a short "Tech Informer" article just posted at CIO.com, Ecma, the European IT standards organization on Monday may post "as early as Monday," the final approval draft of Open XML, the document format specification contributed to Ecma by Microsoft in an effort to counter the momentum behind the OASIS and ISO adopted ODF. Further details may be found in an informational Status Update posted at the Ecma Website, dated September 28, 2006, which reads in part as follows:
The [Open XML drafting] committee held its sixth face-to-face meeting on September 26-28, 2006, this time in Trondheim, Norway....During the meeting, the committee created the Final Draft of the Office Open XML v1.0 format. The committee, with representation from all Ecma member organizations actively participating in TC45 (Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress) unanimously approved the Final Draft standard and agreed to propose it to the General Assembly of Ecma International for publication as an Ecma standard. The Final Draft standard will be made publicly available on the Ecma web site in the coming days. The GA will vote on this proposal during the GA meeting December 7-8, 2006.
ODF was adopted by OASIS in May of 2005, and the voting window that resulted in ODF's approval by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, closed on May 1of 2006. Given that the ISO process, from first submission to closure of the voting window takes 6 to 9 months, this would mean that the earliest that OpenXML could achieve comparable status to ODF (assuming that both the Ecma and ISO memberships voted in favor of adoption) would be in May to August of 2007.
In (another) sad day in Massachusetts, State CIO Louis Gutierrez submitted his resignation today to the Romney administration. Like his predecessor, Peter Quinn, Louis is a man of principle. And, like Peter, he is taking the high road by using his resignation to inform the citizens of Massachusetts of a regrettable lapse on the part of their elected representatives. In his letter of resignation to State Secretary of Administration and Finance Thomas Trimarco, he states:
IT innovation in Massachusetts state government ran out of steam in August, when the legislature closed its formal session without action on the IT and facilities bond. I am presiding over the dismantling of an IT investment program - over a decade in the evolution - that the legislative leadership appears unwilling to salvage at this time. I am therefore asking leave to relinquish my posts.... I have no remaining expectation of timely legislative action, and no continued appetite to watch the IT investment program lapse.
In a message sent to staff, Gutierrez struck a more personal note, and also elaborated on his reasons for submitting his resignation at this time:
When I joined ITD this year, I anticipated many challenges. It was my intention to navigate them through the start of the next administration. One scenario I found it hard to imagine, though, was the lapse in the bond funding that sustains most state IT investment....
Because I have no remaining expectation of near-term action on the IT Bond, I have offered Secretary Trimarco my resignation, effective 30 days from now. It is my hope through this resignation to provide one additional window onto the situation, which I trust will someday be resolved, but which stands to set the state's IT investment program back many steps the longer the lapse persists.
OASIS announced yesterday in Lyons, France, that it has launched a public Website "designed to serve as the official community gathering place and information resource for the OpenDocument Format (ODF)" sponsored by IBM, Sun Microsystems and, interestingly, Intel as well. According to the brief press release, readers are encouraged to contribute content. Editorial Guidelines can be found here.
The site already contains quite a few features, including Wikis, white papers, links to external resources, and so on. It's nicely done and easy to navigate, and while it's hardly comprehensive at this point, each heading has at least a page of material. Hopefully, these categories will be filled out with much of the substantial amount of data that has accumulated over the last year in particular.
It will be interesting not only to see how well this site catches on, given how many sites exist that have their own resources and following, including the ODF Alliance site, serving the public sector, and ODF Fellowship site, serving a general audience, the sites of the open source projects that support ODF, such as OpenOffice.org and many other sites and blogs that follow ODF regularly.
It will also be interesting to see how activity at this site compares to what goes on at OpenXMLDeveloper.org, a somewhat similar site launched by Microsoft back in March. According to the home page of the site, registered members reached the 500 mark last week. Data on traffice is here.
The big idea is to give [knowledge] workers access to a roles-based environment where information, business process, workflow, and collaboration with fellow workers are all done “in context.”
- Ken Bisconti, IBM VP, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview IBM's Ken Bisconti, Vice President, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software. Unlike the prior interviews, however, this interview focuses not on a traditional office suite, but on a service within a series of products and technologies — the ODF-compliant editors included in IBM's innovative Workplace office collaboration environment.
IBM Workplace is an example of a type of next generation information environment that is being promoted by many major IT analysts, each of which has coined its own name for the new paradigm that it is promoting. For Forrester Research, that name is the "Information Workplace." For Gartner, it is the "High-Performance Workplace" . IDC calls it the "Enterprise Workplace," and also (rather grandly) "a long-awaited gift to the information worker from the IT community."
The same basic vision is shared by each of these analysts. Forrester describes its new paradigm in part as follows:
The information workplace (IW) will be much simpler, yet richer than today's tools by incorporating contextual, role-based information from business systems, applications and processes; delivering voice, documents, rich media, process models, business intelligence, and real-time analytics; integrating just-in-time eLearning; and fostering collaboration. Using a service-oriented architecture, the IW will be rich with presence awareness, information rights, and personalization, and it will provide offline and online support to a plethora of devices.
The law and simple justice require that people with disabilities have equal access to public sector information technology
- Louis Gutierrez, CIO, ITD
I now have a copy of the letter that Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez has sent to representatives of the community of people with disabilities, and there are a number of details that I was very pleased to see. My biggest question has now been answered: the Information Technology Division (ITD) has delayed its planned date for full ODF implementation by all Executive Agency users by only six months, to June of 2007. Early adopter implementations of plugin software (including at the Massachusetts Office on Disability) will begin in January of next year.
These dates are still dependent on the activities of a number of third parties, but are presumably based upon best available information at this time. These dependencies include:
…the adoption by the OASIS standard setting organization of ODF Version 1.1 (which will address minor accessibility issues related to the format itself), the timely delivery of completed translators by one or more of the multiple vendors that are currently developing this technology, and the validated accessibility of the translators themselves. In order to meet our implementation timetable, the Commonwealth requires delivery of a translator suitable for use by early adopters by November of this year. At each stage of this implementation, accessibility will be our first priority.
Well, I know that you're not supposed to check your email while on vacation, but among other things, I had learned last week that the Mass ITD would be issuing its mid-year statement on accessibility about now, and wanted to check in to see what it said. What I didn't expect was to find that someone at ZDNet had run a fantasy piece like this, which not only inaccurately reports that the ITD has been mandating open source implementations of ODF, but for some reason decides that I'm to blame for any delay in implementing ODF. I suppose I should be complimented if I can change the course of history with my virtual pen, but for better or worse, that's simply not the case.
Based on my own sources, here is what is right and wrong about what's been reported so far:
Right: Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez met with representatives of the community of the disabled last Friday to brief them on a letter that will be sent to community leaders today. It promises to use plugins in order to save documents in ODF form in order to alleviate accessibility concerns. The ITD has also now signed a long-awaited Memorandum of Understanding with the Massachusetts Office on Disability and the state's Department of Health and Human Service The ITD also signed a commitment with the Massachusetts Office on Disability and the state's Department of Health and Human Service to design, procure, certify and develop training for software that is accessible to people with disabilities, as well as to establish a unit devoted to accessible technology, expanding on its launch in May of an accessibility lab to a similar purpose.
I've learned that it's also true that use of ODF compliant applications will not be mandatory on January 1 by employees of the Executive Agencies.
The Massachusetts IT funding proposal that Peter Quinn resigned in part to protect died on Monday when the State Senate failed to approve it before the 2005-2006 legislative session ended. However, Massachusetts Governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is seeking to recall the legislature for the purpose of pushing the funding through.
The funding bill calls for a total of $400 million in new borrowings, $250 million of which would be allocated to IT projects. The remainder of the bond would have funded a variety of other projects. Unfortunately, while the bill cleared the Massachusetts House late Monday night, it failed to achieve approval by Senate. Had the bond been approved, the State's IT department would have been eligible to receive additional Federal matching funds.
According to an article by Catherine Williams at MHT
The Massachusetts Information Technology Division reported earlier it was relying on the money to fund existing IT projects such as an integrated criminal justice system and plugging network security gaps....The money was also planned to fund upgrades to the state's child support enforcement system and the construction of a second data center for electronically storing state records, according to the department. New projects slotted for 2007 include replacing the state's aging tax collection and unemployment insurance systems. The bond would also fund systems to streamline payment collection for state fees....The last state information technology bond was passed in July 2002 for $197 million.
The failure of the bill to pass is not only a severe setback for the state's IT departments, but poignant as well, in light of the resignation of State CIO Peter Quinn in early June of this year. In his Christmas eve memo to his staff announcing his intention to resign, Quinn wrote as follows:
I have become a lightning rod with regard to any IT initiative. Even the smallest initiatives are being mitigated or stopped by some of the most unlikely and often uninformed parties. The last thing I can let happen is my presence be the major contributing factor in marginalizing the good work of ITD and the entire IT community.
Quinn frequently mentioned the prospects for the bond then before the legislature when explaining his concerns. Unfortunately, his resignation appears not to have been sufficient to speed the passage of a bill that was delayed by a number of slow-moving bills that were ahead of it in the legislative queue, including the landmark universal health bill passed by Massachusetts earlier this year.
On July 27, the OASIS announced that the first draft update of ODF (version 1.1) has been posted for public comment. This draft is more than usually significant, since it seeks to make it easier for those that implement ODF to make their applications more accessible to those with disabilities.
If you are interested in accessibility issues or have been following ODF, then you probably already know that concerns over accessibility have factored strongly in the ODF story since last August, when the first public objections were made by the community of the disabled in the context of Massachusett's proposed adoption of ODF. ODF, it became clear at that time, did not offer the same degree of accessibility to those with disabilities as did Microsoft Office, when used in conjunction with a number of third party developer tools. This differential (not surprisingly) has been much commented on not only by those directly affected, by also by Microsoft and others who are not proponents of ODF.
Over the last year, however, there has been a great deal of effort expended, both within OASIS and elsewhere, on closing the gap between applications that support ODF and the composite Microsoft Office accessible desktop, further to a commitment by those involved to not only equal, but exceed that desktop in accessibility. Those efforts included formation of an accessibility subcommittee within the OASIS ODF Technical Committee charged with addressing accessibility needs within ODF.
The ODF Alliance issued a press release containing further good news yesterday, providing a good excuse to check in at their Website to see how that organization is doing. The answer appears to be rather nicely, thank you, with membership standing at "nealry 280," representing 43 countries according to the press release. A recent addition to the membership rolls is the City of Bristol, which earlier this year announced its adoption of Sun's ODF-compliant StarOffice for its c. 5,500 municipal employee desktops.
That's handsome progress since the last time that I checked in on April 19 (138 members then) , and even more impressive when it's remembered that the Alliance was launched on March 3, 2006 with just 36 members.
The other piece of news in the press release is confirmation of an earlier report at the Open Malaysia Website that Malaysia is on its way to approving and recommending ODF for use by public employees. According to the press release:
This past week, Malaysia's standards body voted to propose ODF as a country standard, following the recognition in May by the International Organization For Standardization (ISO) of ODF as an international standard. After a public comment period that ends in October, Malaysia's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation is expected to formally endorse ODF by year's end, recommending the format for use by the public sector.
That's obviously good news for ODF, adding Malaysia to a growing list of countries (France, Belgium and India) that are actively considering ODF or moving towards public endorsement of technology based on open standards (Denmark and Norway). Massachusetts, of course, remains on course for ODF adoption.
The press release also addresses a third topic: Microsoft's recent announcement that it is supporting an open source converter project at SourceForge. That news was greeted with varying degrees of praise and skepticism in the press and by interested parties. Here's what Alliance Executive Director Marino Marcich had to say on this topic in the press release:
Last fall, when things were moving quite rapidly in the ODF/OpenXML (then called "Microsoft XML reference schema") front, I did a c. weekly series of blog entries titled as above, pulling together most of what I thought was worth reading from all manner of sources on this topic. Today, there are a number of sites that are fulfilling that function (Bob Sutor's blog is one of the most thoroughly and reliably updated), so I have not felt that this to be as necessary a task as before.
Recently, however, the volume of news and commentary has risen to the point that perhaps there is a need for a new service for those interested in the ODF story: not a gathering, but a winnowing function, selecting those pieces of information, and those analyses, that are particularly worthwhile and shuffling them into some sort of coherently arranged bouquet of contrasting insights. That's what I'll try and do in this entry, and will continue to do on a periodic basis in the future if the chore seems to be worthwhile.
So here goes.